Polish OOB2 corrections/suggestions (v.6)

[PvtJoker]

Originally Posted by DRG

I'll let that comment pass this time and put it down as a "language issue". Next time you're gone. I've been doing this too long to put up with crap like that more than once. Strange you remembered the answer but not the reason. Perhaps you need to pay more attention or maybe think things through better ?

Maybe it really was a language issue. I honestly didn't know saying that someone had a knee-jerk reaction to something is a major personal attack. I apologize if I hurt your feelings or sense of pride for this great product (no sarcasm intended). But I hope we can discuss the matter at hand rationally, even if I don't except you to actually make any changes based on my arguments.

Originally Posted by DRG

"Too much work"...... what a joke. You have NO IDEA how many hours we spend on these patches do you ?. Your welcome.

Here's the answer. It's SP101. The lowest number besides zero we could give for AP penetration for a round like that is 1. The game is a random number generator. That's what kept it fresh for so many years.......... that and us making improvements. Our job is to balance that randomness and if you give 1 AP pen to a round like that you make it far more potent than it was. You could conceivably get 2 pen at point blank range and it's absurd that a 7.92 round could penetrate 2 cm of armour. It would be lucky penetrate half that but we don't deal with fractions of centimeters but the way the AP routine is set up would allow up to 1 penetration out to it's maximum range with is also absurd so we don't give rounds like that AP pen...........and NO we are not going to screw around with the AP calc routine.
Don

What I meant that perhaps it is too much work on top of everything else you do for relatively little gain from a gameplay point of view, but I admit it didn't come out quite right.

Now, for the actual issue: like you said, the problem especially at the low end of penetration and armor are the relatively high randomness and low granularity of Pen/Armor values. A rifle caliber WW2 technology AP bullet wouldn't penetrate 20mm of armor, that is quite true. However, it might under optimal circumstances penetrate 15mm at point blank, since many of the test values at 50 or 100 meters are fairly close to that. Armor thickness of 15mm is nearly always rounded up to 2 it the OOBs. This is my minor point.

My major point is that basically anything with armor plating will get Armor Value 1 in SP, even if the historical plate thickness was just 5mm (occasionally even less). 5mm of armor plate does not reliably stop even a ball round fired at point blank, but the way it is now it gets to stop pretty much anything that doesn't penetrate at least 15mm. In essence that makes thin, less than 10mm armor plate "far more potent than it is" to quote your words.

As for the maximum penetration, which would be 1 up to max. range. If the WW2_APCalc_Help.TXT file is to be believed, the chance of getting the best AP penetration is less than 1%, and even if it happens, the actual effect on the vehicle will often be quite small due to the small warhead size. Do we really have to think that is somehow significant and would ruin the experience, or make the game less "realistic"?

In real life, armored vehicle protection levels have for a long time have separate categories for protection against rifle caliber ball (i.e. soft core FMJ) and AP ammunition, simply because the armor required to stop the latter is much thicker. 7mm is enough to protect against rifle caliber ball rounds, whereas AP requires about ½ inch / 13 mm of armor plate to stop reliably at point blank range. Admittedly, a reasonable protection at 100+ meters range can be achieved with "just" 10mm of armor. Of course the exact numbers depend on the armor plate quality and whether the AP bullet is steel or tungsten core.