A few armored car musings and misc. requests

[John Given]

Thanks for the comments, kool Kat!

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.

Yes! You're basically saying that there are factors going beyond simple armor thickness that must be taken into account - I agree completely. Well, what are they? And how much of an effect do they have on defense? That's exactly what I was getting at before - the difference of opinion seems to be whether it is possible to use some kind of 'rating' system or some other method to determine how vehicle defense is shown for armored vehicles in the game. I think it can be done, in part because I'm an old veteran of tabletop wargames and roleplaying games - rules systems which can involve THOUSANDS of pages of data to fully explain the game rules (anyone here ever play Star Fleet Battles?), but again, I'm not advocating high complexity, just a generic system to help us figure out what a vehicle's defense should be.

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?

My apologies Kool Kat - I have checked several other sites regarding the armor thickness of the Marder Series, and it looks like I may have been looking at an entry that listed the thickness in inches (") for a few armor entries, and thought it was in millimeters - and knowing me, immediately thought "ah, that explains why its defense in Panzerblitz is a '5!' So you got me on that one - double checking is a good thing. And thanks again for catching that.

However, I'm having trouble believing that this machine is as fragile as a halftrack (but HT's are smaller and faster?). In Panzerblitz, the Panther tank had a defense of '13' and the Marder '5.' Yet in this game, the Panther retains its '13' rating, while the Marder defense was lowered to a '2' which, according to my home-grown system, (10mm of armor = 1 defense, + 1 if fully tracked & fully enclosed) the JTCS rating is actually more accurate. Interesting to think about and ponder Imo.

Perhaps this all comes down to a difference of opinion - it is just a game - but I suppose what I'm struggling with is, what are all the parameters used to determine the defense factor of our armored vehicles? I cannot believe we would just leave things up in the air, at the whim of some random designer, for want of an actual system used to determine such values.

Perhaps I should add to / modify my system a bit;

in addition to "10mm of armor = 1 defense, + 1 if fully tracked & fully enclosed"

a. -1 to defense if classified as 'high silhouette' (ex. Marder Series)
b. +1 if classified as a 'fast vehicle' (ex. M3 halftrack)
c. +2 if classified as a 'very fast' vehicle (ex. Psw 231 armored car)
d. +2 if vehicle has 'sloped' armor (ex. panther, t-34/76)
e. +3 if vehicle has 'extremely well sloped' armor (ex. Hetzer, JgpzV)

I'm just musing / thinking out loud at this point guys - the above is an example of how simplistic a formula for determining defensive values for our favorite game would look like, that's all.

This is giving me a headache though... :bang: