Armour penetration ratings

[Weasel]

How accurate, or how much faith, should I put in the armour penetration ratings you see when you pull up the unit information screen? Reason I ask is I have seen many cases where the data states my gun has enough power to penetrate, yet the round bounces off.

My most notable was a valentine ambushing a tiger from the flank at 80m. Well first he missed with his first 3 shots and when he finally hit the shell bounced. According to data he can penetrate 104mm of armour at 100m and the side of the tiger is 80mm. And my firefly, at 106m bounced a round off the front of a tiger too, and the 17lbr should easily clobber that sucker at that range.

So are the numbers out to lunch? I am really getting frustrated with CM in this regards.

[junk2drive]

It's the dice rolls that they don't tell you about.

[Vartuoosi]

You have just been unlucky. Or shooting from a bad angle.
Even though the stats state that a gun can penetrate X amount of armour, the shell can occasionally be stopped by a lot less protection, depending on a number of things.
There are a lot of variables in play.
I've seen a T-34/76 bounce of a shot fired by Jagdtiger once but that was nearly 2km away of I remember correctly.
But I think the armour penetration stats are fairly reliably.
I've killed plenty of big cats with small guns.

[Uranium]

How accurate, or how much faith, should I put in the armour penetration ratings you see when you pull up the unit information screen? Reason I ask is I have seen many cases where the data states my gun has enough power to penetrate, yet the round bounces off.

My most notable was a valentine ambushing a tiger from the flank at 80m. Well first he missed with his first 3 shots and when he finally hit the shell bounced. According to data he can penetrate 104mm of armour at 100m and the side of the tiger is 80mm. And my firefly, at 106m bounced a round off the front of a tiger too, and the 17lbr should easily clobber that sucker at that range.

So are the numbers out to lunch? I am really getting frustrated with CM in this regards.

I had a situation once wherea I was at 200m of a Tiger and I was pumping Ap after AP with a a ISU-152 or IS-2 anyhow something that was well positive when doing the Math. I had posted on this forum as well since I was shocke after like 5 shots , the tiger blew me up in one. at the end of the game, I realized that it was a Ferdinand tank instead of a Tiger. Sometime even at very close range you wont get the proper info on your target. The other option I see is that even tough the tiger has 0 degree on the side, if you shoot his side for a position with your barrel facing somewhat parralel to his side hull you induce an angle in the longitudinal direction which may be considered in CM algorythm. I guess i should test that out.( success rate with a full perpadicular barrel Vs an angle one.) Then you also have the angle in the height direction to consider perhaps.

[Weasel]

I will stick to the UNLUCKY situation. I played against the CPU a stock scenario and my panthers bounced their rounds off a T34/85 repeatedly in a town (30m engagement range) while the T34 did 1 shot 1 kill. I lost all my panthers (4) to 1 T34 kill.

[Joonny]

I think this demonstrates how much the angle can matter.



Thanks to POS for the screenshot.

It looks like it should be a side shot on the PzIV, but the churchill aims too far to the left and skims the shell off the frontal armor, you can see it must have hit the frontal armor at an angle of 80-90 degrees, almost no gun could penetrate that green armor at that angle.