Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like this.

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Iluvalar
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Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like this.

Post by Iluvalar »

Hello guys.

In real life, the inaccuracy is materialised by an angular variation from the intended angle. For different causes : Experience of the shooter and quality of the weapon mostly. It's because you have limited ammos that you have an "Effective range" beyond which it you can't try to shoot.

That would mean that your chance to hit would be strongly correlated to the size of the target. And that's how it work in real life. However there is another very important factor : Armour. And in real life, even if there is still engineering for an absorbing armor that slow down the projectile or use other approach to reduce the damage, most efforts are put into deflective armor. Which deviate the projectile or entirely stop them. That's what make the most plating of a tank. You could "hit" the tanks for a lot more longer range with your rifle, but if you can't aim for weakness in the plating, you will most likely waste your ammos.

In Warzone2100, we don't have deflective armours and nobody plan to add it. We have a fixed accuracy and a fixed range instead. That mean that you have just as much chances to make relevant damage to a cyborgs than a python tank at the same range. And we have a weird HP system that compensate the remaining. Like big enormous factories that only have the HP of 3 single man-sized armour. (try to explode an entire building with 20 bullets in real life... :lol2: )

Please keep in mind how much far away we are from any realistic simulation of accuracy before asking for it. The game is just working like this. thx.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by NoQ »

Please keep in mind how much far away we are from any realistic simulation of accuracy before asking for it. The game is just working like this. thx.
Sure sure (:

Also, when looking through body.txt->body.ini, i noticed that bodies in fact used to have 6 different kinetic armors and 6 different thermal armors (front, rear, left, right, top and bottom). This is never used though, and support for that is removed in body.ini.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by C27 »

I don't mean to spam by bringing up Sword of the Stars again, but that game used both deflective armor and realistic accuracy really well - sloping ship hulls, shot angles, and hull profiles became important (well, for some weapon types), which also made tactical maneuver important since it made a big difference if you could fire at the large broadside of a Tarka cruiser rather than pinging all of your shots off of its heavily armored and narrow prow. A traditional RTS could do this just as well, or almost as well since most units only have two dimensions to maneuver in, and have differing armor ratings for front/side/rear vehicle armor too - but it wouldn't really be Warzone anymore, and good vehicle design would become a lot more detailed and thus time-consuming. Which wasn't a problem in SotS since it was a mixed TBS/RTS hybrid and you had time for that. Uhh, I'm losing track of where I was going with this...
Okay, I'll say realistic armor is probably too much of a fundamental change for Warzone and would be better for a brand new game. Balance usurpation would be inevitable, and likely take quite a while to work out. Real accuracy on the other hand, where bullets follow trajectories with deviation instead of rolling dice to hit/miss, would be quite allright IMO except for the CPU load in intense firefights. It'd be especially nice for artillery, since target prediction and other such upgrades would have a very noticeable effect on trying to hit high-speed units, but if they're dodging cleverly you'll still miss most of the time. It would still take a bit of rebalancing.
I hope some if this makes sense to you.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Jorzi »

Actually, deflective armour has gotten quite irrelevant recently since it doesn't work well against KE-penetrators and shaped-charge warheads. In WW2 it was very important, though.
Most composite armour made nowadays (both vests and tank armour) is designed to catch the bullets rather than deflect them.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Iluvalar »

Jorzi wrote:Actually, deflective armour has gotten quite irrelevant recently since it doesn't work well against KE-penetrators and shaped-charge warheads. In WW2 it was very important, though.
Most composite armour made nowadays (both vests and tank armour) is designed to catch the bullets rather than deflect them.
whatever it stop or deflect. As long as there is no relevant damage.

Our armor system in warzone look more like a leather armor hit by an hammer than anything else. :lol2: .
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by manictiger »

Sloping is still relevant. Angled armor makes shattering penetrators easier and makes the average thickness generally thicker (the math is hard to explain, so you'll just have to take my word for it). The only reasons we allow the sides of tanks to be flat are to make the frontal profile thinner (see frontal views of the Abrams M1 series for a good example) and so we can add reactive tiles to them (because the sides are too long to make thick armor practical).
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Jorzi »

I study physics at the university so go ahead with the maths ;)
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by manictiger »

Jorzi wrote:I study physics at the university so go ahead with the maths ;)
Basically, it's Pythagorean theorem. The angled side of a right triangle will have more length than a vertical one, right?
So, for the equivalent tank height, you can have more armor "length", which translates to more armor from a front-attack perspective.

The only alternative to sloping it, is to make the front even thicker, which would unbalance a turret, increase the surface area of side armor (which increases mass) and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure to have missed.
This is why turrets are slanted. Putting a straight up box on top of a tank is simply less efficient in terms of frontal armor/mass.

One of the major goals of tank design is to slam them to the ground as much as is practically possible, hence why we were so bothered by the T-72 design when it first emerged (because it was just so dang low to the ground compared to our M-60, or whatever our MBT was at the time).

If you look at the front of an Abrams chassis, you'll note an extremely subtle slope on the top and a slope on the front. I highly doubt those are fashion statements. They are likely to balance weight/frontal armor and incorporate which area is more likely to be hit as well as including the chassis frame itself into absorbing kinetic energy.

TL;DR? I just know. :P
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Jorzi »

Hmm fair enough, although my point about deflection is still valid, i.e. penetrators and shaped-charge warheads do not bounce off sloped armor like traditional shells.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by manictiger »

Jorzi wrote:Hmm fair enough, although my point about deflection is still valid, i.e. penetrators and shaped-charge warheads do not bounce off sloped armor like traditional shells.
I can agree with that. I do think that sloping would have small effects, but nothing we could practically apply to any current game engine. That's the kind of variable you'd pump through a scientific simulation.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by ODDity »

Sloping could potentially help with deflection and also increases the relative thickness of a straight shot fairly significantly without adding the equivalent additional weight.

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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by manictiger »

ODDity wrote:Sloping could potentially help with deflection and also increases the relative thickness of a straight shot fairly significantly without adding the equivalent additional weight. *snip*
A picture really is worth a thousand words. Thanks for the contribution. Sums up it up much better than my attempt to use Pythagorean theorem to explain it.
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Jorzi »

If you examine the picture carefully, you will see that while the sloping increases the effective thickness of the armor, it equally reduces the effective area of protection. If you make both the same size, the increased weight of the sloped armor will exactly equal that of a straight piece with a thickness of 0.566
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by ODDity »

PFFFFF
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Re: Deflective armour, or why the accuracy is working like t

Post by Jorzi »

*sigh*
Apparently I have to do the maths myself...

Now the cross section area is a*b which is equal to a rectangle of sqrt(2)*a * b/sqrt(2)
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