penetration and crew quality

[Weasel]

Speaking of sabot, is it true that a tank will only fire SABOT at ranges less then 500m, and regular AP over that? If so...HUH?, that doesn't make sense to me.

No it isn't. The game will determine the type of round most likely to do damage to the target at the given range and then runs a crew check to see if they figure it out themselves too. So better crews are more likely to take the right type of round. As sabot rounds usually have the highest penetration these will tend to get picked first, it's a case of the crew going for the 'sure' option.

Maybe the situation you describe stems from 'early' ww2 encounters where sabot rounds have much less range than AP rounds? In that situation the effective penetration of a abot round at ranges over 500m might indeed be lower than that of the AP round. Some german sabot round had an effective max range of only 20 hexes so 500m seems right as the range where they would stop to have more penetration than AP rounds.

Narwan

The game that raised the question was Dec 44, panthers and Su85s.

[Weasel]

With the Panther's 7.5cm L70 gun, at a range of 1700-2000 your going to get a penetration of about 11-10 with AP and 13-12 with sabots. The sabots will get better penetration than the AP out to about 2500m.

With the 500m max for sabots, you are probably thinking of of the German 5cm L42 where the sabot only had a range of 1000m, compared to 2500m for the AP round. Which meant that after about 500m the AP round penetrated better than the sabot. The 5cm L60 sabot was a little improved giving better penentration than the AP round out to about 600m.

Didn't you read my AP Penetration Calculator Weasel? ;)

Yes I did, but I use a simpler one that I found on shrapnel.

[Cross]

Didn't you read my AP Penetration Calculator Weasel? ;)

Yes I did, but I use a simpler one that I found on shrapnel.

Can you post it? I would love to see it.

[Weasel]

I cannot remember where or when I got this from Shrapnel, but here it is:


  SP range vs penetration chart.doc (Size: 24 KB / Downloads: 6)

[Cross]

I cannot remember where or when I got this from Shrapnel, but here it is:

Thanks for posting. I have seen this one at Shrapnel once or twice.

It's not bad for long range heavy guns, like the 88; but it doesn't take warhead size into account, and makes you do the calculations yourself. Which isn't good when you've just spotted an enemy tank at 500yds and it's turret is traversing towards you. ;)