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With a battleship shell, the definition of 'near miss' is surprisingly broad...

FacebookJunkie wrote:
Right now in Ukraine, HE shells from tanks and artillery are being used in indirect fire modes to knock out main battle tanks - and for larger shells, a near miss is enough to do the job

Given thee size of battleship shells, there is no doubt a git or near miss would be enough to disable a tank.

This isn't unique to Ukraine. Calling in the 155s goes back more than a half-century.


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 Vulcan wrote:
With a battleship shell, the definition of 'near miss' is surprisingly broad...

Horseshoes, hand grenades and nukes, right?

Actually, I was pretty decent with the hand grenade back in the day. Coulda been a contender...

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

 ScarletRose wrote:
The small entry hole is from a shaped charge - basically if you make a cone (or other complex shape) of explosives the explosion sort of pushes in from all sides and superheats a piece of copper or other material that melts through the hull.

Big shells don't use that method of action - they rely on a big explosion (usually 30-40 pounds of TNT or equivalent).

How do you get something hot enough to melt steel or whatever it is instantly? I thought you needed massive industrial blast furnaces to do that slowly? Plus a guy can just be standing next to molten metal perfectly fine so how would you stop the heat dissipating immediately? Also, couldn’t just put a piece of slate over the tank or would it be hot enough to melt rock?

How much bang is 30-40 pounds of TNT.

It doesn't melt it, it cuts through it.


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Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:


A kinetic round like an APFSDS round will make similar holes. They'll kinda look like they got melted, but that is because of the high friction and the way metal behaves under impact.

The best result with one of those is for them to go straight through. You don't want those things rattling around inside...

If it goes straight through you're getting sucked through the hole by the overpressure so...

Lol no you aren't getting sucked by overpressure. That is such a stupid idea that probably came from GW's poor understanding of physics.

That being said you are likely still dead as the half-liquidized remains of the penetrator and your own armor are fired into the interior of the tank like an oversized shotgun blast.

 Tyran wrote:
Lol no you aren't getting sucked by overpressure. That is such a stupid idea that probably came from GW's poor understanding of physics.

That being said you are likely still dead as the half-liquidized remains of the penetrator and your own armor are fired into the interior of the tank like an oversized shotgun blast.

If the armor is thin enough, the penetrator holds together and goes clean through, which was better than it bouncing around until it found something soft to lodge in.

All sorts of quirky results recorded in WW II.

The big thing was fire. As soon as someone smelled smoke, it was time to bail.

Yeah, overpressure is not a round sucking you with it. Overpressure is the shockwave of an explosive. In the context of a tank, when the pressure wave of an explosive on the outside of the tank hits the armor, it can cause the armor to deform and create a pressure wave inside the tank. This wave can shatter fragments of the armor off inside(spalling) or the wave itself can be enough to injure or kill.

The vacuum pressure of any type of shell passing through a tank is minimal. Its the fragmentation caused by the impact that is the killer. Think about it, it would be the dart moving air away from its path that would cause suction. A few cubic inches of low pressure would follow any shell no matter how fast. A few inches of even close to vacuum in otherwise open atmosphere is going to make a snapping sound and nothing more.

 Tyran wrote:
It makes me think of how unrealistic both versions of the rules have been with tank damage.

Most of the time if a shot penetrates the armor, the tank is dead. Tanks these days survive in a combination of not being hit and a lot of active defenses.

People didn't want one shot kills.

Whole armour save is pretty bad on realistism point. Either your armour stops it or doesn't. This "this weapon you can survive but your armour is slightly worse defending vs it" is bad from realism sense.


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Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:


Heck, if the battleship hits near the tank...

That's the real danger to tanks. Direct hits are going to be one-in-a-million. But being within the blast radius is quite possible in battlefield conditions.

I should add that by 1944, German tank crews were much less disciplined and would pull back once they started to hear rounds clang off the armor, even though they had little chance of penetration.

These days even binging airplane with radar can get same effect for pilot to eject No need to waste ammunition ;-)

tneva82 wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
It makes me think of how unrealistic both versions of the rules have been with tank damage.

Most of the time if a shot penetrates the armor, the tank is dead. Tanks these days survive in a combination of not being hit and a lot of active defenses.

People didn't want one shot kills.

Whole armour save is pretty bad on realistism point. Either your armour stops it or doesn't. This "this weapon you can survive but your armour is slightly worse defending vs it" is bad from realism sense.

The realism isn’t as bad as you think; there’s the infamous case of the Challenger 2 that got ambushed in Iraq and hammered with god knows how many RPG rounds and an older Milan anti tank missile. It (and the crew) survived, but pretty much all of its sensors and vision ports had been knocked out, so they just had to sit it out and wait for the cavalry to come rescue them. I don’t think its tracks got taken out, but I think that was more luck than anything, so the current degrading profile quite nicely represents a bunch of non-penetrating hits just battering the more vulnerable systems. The problem is GW are not very good at finding the line for the other half of reality, which is a modern anti-tank missile / round would probably have punched straight through and killed the tank; stuff like Tau rail guns, Vanquishers, etc. should be able to get one-shot kills, but there shouldn’t be too many of those systems for game balance.

Which is where the old armor value system was better IMO. Or possibly do a hybrid of the two. Then you can't have absurd things like lasguns dealing damage to Land Raiders.

Have armor values for determining damage, but have wounds(or structure points like the old Super Heavies) as the tank takes damage.

The old armor value was kinda silly in that the AP (aside of 1 and -) had no effect. Lol at armor piercing being an irrelevant stat when it came to armor vaues.

That's because the AP value represented the ability to pierce infantry sized armor. Vehicles are on another level of armor thickness entirely.

.50 BMG will go through any armor a human is capable of wearing at the moment. That ability to pierce an infantryman's armor is of little consequence if you're shooting an abrams.

That said, if you hybridized the two approaches you could make it relevant.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is where the old armor value system was better IMO. Or possibly do a hybrid of the two. Then you can't have absurd things like lasguns dealing damage to Land Raiders.

Have armor values for determining damage, but have wounds(or structure points like the old Super Heavies) as the tank takes damage.

I liked the detail of the 2nd ed. system. Given the sheer bloody-mindedness of the universe, having a gunner killed and shifting someone else into his seat isn't a reach. It also happened in combat.

It also reflects the truth that mobility kills are a lot easier than frontal penetrations, and the different ratings for facing promote realistic tactics.

Plus, having the turret blow off and land on an expensive character is damn funny.

tneva82 wrote:
Whole armour save is pretty bad on realistism point. Either your armour stops it or doesn't. This "this weapon you can survive but your armour is slightly worse defending vs it" is bad from realism sense.

Why is it bad? There are plenty of cases where a weapon is powerful enough that a given piece of armor can't stop it entirely but not so powerful that the armor can't reduce the damage and give a chance of survival. Remember that a passed armor save doesn't necessarily mean the shot bounces off without even scratching the paint, it could mean that the armor is partially penetrated but the shot only has enough energy left to inflict a painful but not incapacitating flesh wound.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is where the old armor value system was better IMO. Or possibly do a hybrid of the two. Then you can't have absurd things like lasguns dealing damage to Land Raiders.

Have armor values for determining damage, but have wounds(or structure points like the old Super Heavies) as the tank takes damage.

IMO both are fine. The old system works well as a modest abstraction, with the damage table being a proxy for hit location. The new system works fine for a heavily abstracted system operating under the assumption that good damage control and redundancy make one shot kills rare, the game just needs to go back to the old wound table and get rid of this 6s always wound nonsense.

The armor save abstracts both the thickness of the armor but also armor coverage, because no armor has 100% coverage.

The best example is flak armor vs carapace armor, in which the former only covers the chest and maybe the knees while the later covers most of the body.

Although one could make the argument that armor thickness and armor coverage should be separated in two different characteristics.

And the same also applies to tanks.

 Tyran wrote:
The armor save abstracts both the thickness of the armor but also armor coverage, because no armor has 100% coverage.

The best example is flak armor vs carapace armor, in which the former only covers the chest and maybe the knees while the later covers most of the body.

Although one could make the argument that armor thickness and armor coverage should be separated in two different characteristics.

And the same also applies to tanks.

Yes, and in more detailed rules, hit locations on the body will have varying amounts of armor. I know there are WW II games that use much more detailed templates to determine the thickness of any given part of the tank - and even modify that by the attitude of the vehicle towards the person firing on it.

The question for 40k players is what level of abstraction makes sense. Obviously, we're not going to track individual limb damage on each trooper, but there is value in differentiating between a tank that has a sponson weapon knocked out and one that is immobilized.

Simply using wounds and letting the thing run fine until it stops working doesn't feel right.

I do prefer Toughness and Save over Armour values for the sheer sake of having large models play mostly the same. Tanks, walkers and monsters tend to be equivalent across different factions, and monsters should also be vulnerable to damage like having guns destroyed or their legs/wings damaged.

 Tyran wrote:
I do prefer Toughness and Save over Armour values for the sheer sake of having large models play mostly the same. Tanks, walkers and monsters tend to be equivalent across different factions, and monsters should also be vulnerable to damage like having guns destroyed or their legs/wings damaged.

I think that's one of the big things that differentiate the various editions of 40k.

I'm fine with smaller, more detailed games but I know people who want to run company-level engagements.

The farther back you pull, the more abstraction you need, and the game mechanics start to focus on command and control rather than the detailed questions of what a penetrating hit did to a particular tank.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Simply using wounds and letting the thing run fine until it stops working doesn't feel right.

But it doesn't run fine, unless it's a light vehicle that is too small to care about representing in detail. Most vehicles have a degrading stat line as they take damage, and that works fine as an abstraction. In a game at 40k's scale we don't need to care about the difference between two guns firing at reduced accuracy and one firing at full accuracy while the other has been destroyed.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Which is where the old armor value system was better IMO. Or possibly do a hybrid of the two. Then you can't have absurd things like lasguns dealing damage to Land Raiders.

Old system was utterly crap. Tank armor isn't some magical homogenous plate, it has more diverse zones than any infantry armor. Let's take Abrams for example, side armor:


Rear has thin plate, easily pierced by autocannons. Mid can stop autocannons, but not much else. Front is the zone that was expected to stop AT missiles and glancing hits from bigger guns. In old editions, this all was uniform AV10 despite front section being 5.5x thicker than rear. How does it make any sense to you? Abstracting it to average T value representing typical hit works just fine, AV that failed at both realism and crunch is terrible. Look at Land Raider, it has exposed engine in the rear but for some insane, comically dumb reason it's still AV14, making said exposed engine sturdier than frontal armor of most tanks and even some titans

And I hate the usual nostalgia lasgun strawman, if you fire it at tracks, sensors, hatches, vision ports, suspension, weapons, communication gear, ventilation and cooling grills, etc, etc, etc, it will damage and even mission kill the tank just fine. See the areas marked 30-50 mm on the above chart? They can be penetrated by infantry guns. QED. That was good, not bad change

Yeah, Land Raiders were 14 all around. Most vehicles weren't. And that is fair, Land Raiders were expensive and powerful pieces of technology.

No, you're not going to mission kill an Abrams with an M4, AK, or any other infantry small arms. Get that BS out of here. Other than crack an optic maybe, and only if the tank is uncrewed and unsupported. IE: Its just sitting there and you're trying to kill it with a rifle. In any type of combat scenario, it is immune to your small arms. Better get a grenade or something.

Small arms are only threats to extremely lightly or unarmored vehicles.

Sadly, we can't have a fully immersive system where each part of a vehicle is modeled and you can chip away with small arms. We need simplification, but at least simplification that doesn't break immersion or suspension of disbelief.

AV vs Toughness. It is a no brainer for me that AV was more realistic. Lasguns or even bolters being able to damage Land Raiders, LRBTs, and Titans from the front, even if it is the smallest chance possible, is too much.

That said, the AV system could have stood to be improved. Weapon strengths beyond 10 and AV beyond 14 would have improved things. Templates to assist in determining the facing of vehicles would have been a good idea. Something like include a plastic template in each vehicle's box that shows its particular armor facings and how to determine them by holding it above the tank when its getting shot at. This could even have allowed for more than the simple front/left/right/rear facings.

Toughness is for squishy fleshy things. It doesn't belong with vehicles, who now don't even feel like vehicles. They're just the same as monsters now. Its boring.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah, Land Raiders were 14 all around. Most vehicles weren't. And that is fair, Land Raiders were expensive and powerful pieces of technology.

No, you're not going to mission kill an Abrams with an M4, AK, or any other infantry small arms. Get that BS out of here. Other than crack an optic maybe, and only if the tank is uncrewed and unsupported. IE: Its just sitting there and you're trying to kill it with a rifle. In any type of combat scenario, it is immune to your small arms. Better get a grenade or something.

That's why (for all its complexity) I think the 2nd ed. system worked best. You could issue your troops with krak grenades or (better yet) meltabombs and try to cripple a tank by getting it on the flank or rear. Urban terrain was particularly dangerous even for Leman Russ Demolishers or Land Raiders for that reason - tanks needed infantry support and special mods (frag defenders, electro-hulls) to stay alive.

Facing mattered as did hit locations and the results - disabling weapons, crew casualties - gave some flavor to the fighting. Plus, it's always fun when a turret flies off and kills someone important.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Toughness is for squishy fleshy things.

Funny, as many of the toughest units in the game had a Toughness value, they still do in HH.

Not a modern tank, but I thought this video is relevant to this conversation

If I truly hated Tiger tanks, that would be my favorite video.

I presume that's an HE shell, it's deforming much too much for an AP shell. Which I would expect to have detonated well before it made it through the rear of the tank turret; possibly before even making it through the gun mantlet.

An AP shell, yeah, that would go straight through a Tiger like that, but it wouldn't deform anywhere near that much on the way through. And it's unlikely that even the gun mantlet would be thick enough to initiate the fuse. The engine block, maybe, but nothing else in the tank would offer enough resistance.

Not that one would fire an AP shell at a single tank...

The listed shell type is an armour piercing shell, but I doubt that a lot of effort went into making the material properties of any of it particularly accurate. It’s just fun to see it go smoosh.

I think the deformation is mainly from the soft aluminium ballistic cap, but yes I doubt they have found the metallurgical properties of the authentic grades of material to feed into the program they are using.

Battleship AP rounds were AP capped but still explosive.

We are not talking about modern APFSDS rounds or shaped charges, but relatively primitive projectiles back when we were starting to figure out how projectile design affected armor penetration.

A tank getting hit by battleship shell, even an AP round, is getting unrecognizably deformed.

 Tyran wrote:
Battleship AP rounds were AP capped but still explosive.

We are not talking about modern APFSDS rounds or shaped charges, but relatively primitive projectiles back when we were starting to figure out how projectile design affected armor penetration.

A tank getting hit by battleship shell, even an AP round, is getting unrecognizably deformed.

I think they meant the round was too deformed, not the tank. The video points out the shell model used has a soft aluminium cap over the hard steel, so I'm not surprised it deforms.