Russian Uber Weapon (Attn Pvt Bombadil)

[Narwan]

It's a difficult round to incorporate in the game. It does have some effect against AFV's (and their crew), as your links clearly showed, to the point of inflicting a 'kill' for game purposes. The original engine for the game never made room for ways to damage AFV's besides penetrating their armor. So that's what this round does too. It sometimes 'penetrates' the armor, by which I mean purely from a game mechanics perspective, in order to allow the game to assign damage to the vehicle, not meaning that the actual armor is breached. Think of it as being 'overcome' rather than 'penetrated'. It should happen at least some of the time.
Look at it from this angle, take the example you gave of the russian MBT being lit up with a FAE round so that the rpg's could see where to fire at. While it may well be that it was rpg's that did the actual physical destruction of the tank, what it does not say is whether the FAE round had some effect of it's own on the vehicle. For example, did the burning cause the engine to fail? Were the crew exposed with open hatches and if so what happened to them when the round hit? Was any internal equipment damaged by the round, maybe to the point of rendering the vehicle combat ineffective? If any of that happened the game would have to find some way to reflect those effects. If all the crew had open hatches for example (and remember that the game assumes unbuttoned vehicles to be the norm) the FAE round may well have caused enough injury to them to make the original FAE hit a unit 'kill' in the game.

Again, I'm not sure if the game currently has the right balance for these types of weapons. I suggest that people interested in this check the next version (and maybe the current one too) and see what they make of it. If you feel it's way off, let the CAMO crew know at the Shrapnel site (but be sure to be able to support your views with references and game data!).

Narwan