Bullet Penetration In-Game

[Jeff Duquette]

Originally posted by Flanker15:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6760530260633420235&q=firearms+training&hl=en

Bam there ya go.

Nice Video. Thanks for posting the link. I watched it through only once so I may have missed this detail, but were the small arms tests being conducted with ball or AP?

[stikkypixie]

Originally posted by Neepster:

No one is saying that spraying a building with fire will kill everyone in it, but if you methodically spray a small sun baked brick building (or wood or even block) with 50 cal fire for two or three minutes, most of the people in side will not be combat effective after that time.

Yes, things like you describe happen, but it isn't the norm, yes? Usually if you throw frag grenades in a 10x10 room, many if not most people in the room will be badly injured or killed unless there is a lot of cover.

With a 50 cal, that goes through almost every cover a Syrian irregular (or even regular) force could conceivably have in that room, it would be even worse. With a grenade, you can duck behind a desk or a bed or something and maybe only get concussed, but a .50 round is going right through that bed or desk and spray pieces of it all around you and through you.

Like I said, I can accept the argument that sometimes you just don't get hit, but spraying a smallish room with high caliber weapons for several minutes and having NO ONE or only one or two guys in a squad get hit seems very unlikely to me. And this happens a LOT in CMSF...

Keep in mind that in the video they were shooting from 19m away. I usually have my strykers open up at larger distances.

[Tarquelne]

Originally posted by Neepster:

[QB] No one is saying that spraying a building with fire will kill everyone in it, but if you methodically spray a small sun baked brick building (or wood or even block) with 50 cal fire for two or three minutes, most of the people in side will not be combat effective after that time.

Does the game have a mechanism to reflect a methodical, extended application of fire to a building? I mean as opposed to just hitting the building with a general area-fire more than once.

(The 50 cals are accurate enough to make the distinction significant, right?)

[Neepster]

Originally posted by stikkypixie:

Keep in mind that in the video they were shooting from 19m away. I usually have my strykers open up at larger distances.

Yes, but velocity of ballistic rounds like .50 cal doesn't bleed off THAT fast. If you are within 500m, 50 cal will likely go through almost any urban wall material with ease.

I've seen 50 cal tracer go through car engine blocks (SOLID STEEL) at 100m...

Heck that 30mm round in the video went through a concrete block wall at 1000m like a hot knife through butter.

In any case, I am often <100m when I am firing and still take forever to get kills.

[John Kettler]

Flanker15,

Good stuff, but someone flunked QC on the graphics by showing the M240G effectiveness placard for the M2HB. Thought it rather droll, too, that the weapons were all shown sans magazines. Even so, the video made its point in a telling manner. Would've preferred to see small arms also tested against reinforced concrete and stone, since both are common materials in many parts of the world. Am not terribly surprised the 30mm Chain Gun took all manner of targets apart. SMAW's nasty vs. bunkers!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Jeff Duquette]

Vdrop for 0.50-caliber M2 AP at standard conditions:

V0 ~2935-fps

V500yards ~2300-fps

Vdrop for M2 AP is about 1200-fps/1000-yards

Course AP will perforate a great deal more of the typical sorts of construction materials being portrayed in the video than common ball ammunition. Having watched the video again, the announcer does not seem to make it particularly clear what types of ammunition were being employed. Sort of a odd piece of information to leave out of the narrative.

[Bigduke6]

Also, sheetrock is a very uncommon building material for internal walls in most Middle Eastern countries. Brick or concrete slabs, sometimes reinforced, are far more common.

It would have been interesting to see how safe it an internal room would be, where the round has to bust through an external wall, fly several meters, and then punch through an internal wall of brick. I bet a lot more safer.

Heck, a reinforced concrete slab is pretty much the standard building block for an exterior wall in a whole lot of the Middle East. For even poorer people double-layer brick exterior is still preferred; it's cooler. Ditto for multiple layers of cinder block. After all, this is a place where construction materials and construction crews are cheap, and sheetrock isn't used very much. All of which makes the buildings in the region a bit tougher than the one in the video.

Factor that in with people on the inside of the buildings wanting really badly to stay alive (at least until they take some infidels with them) and I think you have a fair explaination why these days if you can't level the building for whatever reason, the standard tactical practice is supress the crud out of the building and then clear it room to room. Just hammering it with automatic fire won't do the job.

Of course, it seems pretty clear that hanging out by a window or standing up by an exterior wall is not healthy.

[Fly Pusher]

Originally posted by Lurker765:

Fly Pusher,

Did you watch that video posted earlier in this thread?

Sure... and the effect of heavy caliber rounds is impressive. However the experiments are carried out on a 'room' not typical of housing in much of the 'rest' (ie. non-US) world.

My house (for example) has double layer brick exterior walls and single layer brick internal walls. Each wall is faced with about an inch of cement render (externally) or solid plaster (internally).

As I said. Probably not 50 cal proof, but solid enough that the whole house doesnt shake when someone slams the front door...

[thewood]

I have traveled the world extensively and the majority of houses in the world that I have seen are brick, mud brick, or cinderblock. I don't mean mud brick in a demeaning way, but a pretty solid material. My guess is, having fired a lot of .30-06 rifles, they wouldn't stand up to that very well.

[Capt. Toleran]

I know numerous accounts from this war, with these same type of buildings, have said that 50 cal is overkill for cities, because it goes through everything (thus the quote in the clip "It went through the wall and everything after, leaving large holes..."). I think that this (maybe due to performance issues?) is still undermodeled in the game. It sounds like 50 cals can take walls and maybe buildings down, given enough shooting.