Taking out armor, do I have my bases covered?

[TheBigRedOne]

Yes, you are confused, but you definitely are in the vast majority when it comes to vehicle combat resolution! The simple answer to your question is that the lethality does indeed affect the outcome.

Vehicle combat resolution is surprisingly hard to understand, but isn't quite so bad once you finally get your head around it. In re-reading both the User Guide and JZ's page, it sounds to me like the combat resolution for vehicles is actually quite similar to the combat resolution for infantry.

For both, a "Fire Value" is calculated using the Lethality, Strength, and Effectiveness of the firing units (see the section called "Lethality and Fire Values" in the User Guide).

For both, a "Penetration Value" is also calculated (see the section called "Vehicle Penetration" in the User Guide). The Penetration Value is essentially the ratio of the firing unit compared to the target unit, but the Penetration Value has various limiting factors that limit it to between 0-1 against infantry and 0-1.5 against vehicles.

The Fire Value gets multiplied by the Penetration Value to yield an adjusted Fire Value. And finally, a combat results calculation is performed using the adjusted Fire Value (see the section called "Combat Results" in the User Guide). If a nonzero combat loss occurs for a vehicle, it results in a kill for the vehicle.

There are lots of other factors involved in all the above, but I've ignored them for to keep things simplified. But the bottom line is that lethality actually does play a significant role.

Another thing to note about this - especially with vehicles, is that no damage can be done if the Penetration Value equals zero, since the fire value (no matter what it is) multiplied by zero will equal zero.

Hth,
Bill

Interesting, and clearly showing JT's mathematics PhD.