Ballistics observations

[Bioseed]

I didn’t have high hopes for TOW ballistics when I pre-ordered, but after watching a few hundred shots between tanks, I have found a lot of thing to look at. TOW not only gives us the things we knew from CMBB and CMAK such as ricochets, spalling and non-lethal penetrations, but brings in several new features that CM never had.

1. The real paths and absolute hit locations of shots are now visible, so there is no abstraction that sends the shot to ambiguous CM hit locations like “lower hull penetration”

2. The angle of impact for each hit location appears to be calculated by the vertex of the 3d model itself, avoiding the abstraction in CM that forced a vehicle’s “lower hull” or other area into one contiguous surface with one angle of slope. This makes a huge difference, because now tanks with irregular shapes can now have different levels of vulnerability across their surfaces. In a test I did with an empty Panzer II and a 45mm ATG at about 250m, I was able to get a 45mm shot to hit and bounce off of the Panzer II hull front by hitting the nearly horizontal plate that separates the “upper hull” and the “lower hull” The front hull armor normally couldn’t survive a 45mm hit at that distance but this extremely sloped surface can. In CM, this surface did not exist on the Panzer II due to abstraction; it was neither “upper” nor “lower”.

A long list of vehicles are affected by this phenomena and now have different levels of survivability than they did in CM because of angle alone. The IS-2 and T-34-85 turret fronts perform much differently now because much of their frontal areas are actually “side” seen from about 75 degrees that can bounce almost anything. Round turrets like those of the Shermans get a bit of a boost as well, and boxier things like the Stug IIIG do not gain much and are therefore much less dominant than in CM, which is probably a good thing for the sake of realism.

3. Both penetrating and non-penetrating hits have a chance of damaging whichever components are closest to the area of impact. We have probably all see the new damage effects on tracks, engine etc by now, but what I didn’t expect is that most (all?) Of these new damage effects can also be caused by non-penetrating hits.

Any others?

In spite of what some are saying of realism and comparing TOW to CM, I am impressed by this new contender.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I get a big kick of shells penetrating, exiting and hitting something behind. That's about as cool as you can get.

[Redwolf]

The angle of shot might be shown, but the armor penetration model is "flat", it does not tangle angle effects into consideration other than the line of flight path (aka the cosine of the angle).

[panzermartin]

Yes its impressive. Its the IL-2 incredible damage modelling put on tracks. There are no abstractions here. What you see is what you get. The game engine is state of the art. Its the game design that has some flaws.

I think people are used to Combat Mission's penetration hit% and hull down texts and ignore that TOW's calculations are perhaps even more sophisticated than CM's.

[Bloodstar44]

Bioseed well done.

I will just copy and paste this to Usenet so that those guys see for themselves that this is not Red Alert as almost they think it is.

Mario