A few armored car musings and misc. requests

[Kool Kat]

And, there are also vehicles that are "under" armored, having a defense that is TOO LOW considering the historically accurate armor value. The Marder series comes to mind; the Marder III in particular. It had about 50mm of armor on the front, yet it only has a defense of TWO in game?? I seem to recall I mentioned this to Jason a while back though - he seemed open to revisiting the defense factor of this family of vehicles for the next patch. (and Marder II's had about 35mm of armor).

John:

I understand your desire to have a consistent and uniform method of assigning defensive strength to units based primarily on armor thickness... but in reality it can't be done? :chin:

Let's look at your Marder III example. The Marder was a variant design based on the Czech-supplied 38(t) chassis. In EF, the Aufkl 38(t) has a 5 defense.

Historically, the Marder III had the following armor thickness:

Front: Superstructure = 10mm / Hull = 20mm / Gun shield = 6mm
Side: Superstructure = 10mm / Hull = 15mm / Gun shield = 10mm
Rear: Superstructure = 10mm / Hull = 10mm / Gun shield = 10mm

So... adding up the front armor, you get a value of 36mm (highest value possible)... not sure how you arrived at 50mm for the Marder III? But even that is an abstraction since a shell fired at the front end of a Marder would hit either the superstructure (10mm) or hull (20mm)... not "both" simultaneously? In most cases, because of the high silhouette of the vehicle, most shells would hit either the very thin armored superstructure (10mm) or gun shield (6mm) - very thin armor indeed.

Also, since the Marder III had weak side / rear armor + an open top and only a partially closed rear compartment... a shell striking either the side or rear armor (or for that matter... an air burst near the open crew compartment... would prove lethal for this AFV.

So, I see nothing "wrong" with assigning a defense value of 2 for this self-propelled anti-tank gun.

Again, there are numerous factors that go into generating an overall defense number for CS AFVs... some of these factors are armor thickness, but one must also understand both the vehicle characteristics and how it was deployed / utilized on the various battlefronts.