Grenade calculations

[Fungwu]

I like RO very much but I am frustrated by how powerful grenades are, not wanting to merely whine, I tried to do some research, but the only information I could find was maximum effective distance of grenade fragments, which leave open the question of probability, and anecdotes which aren't very scientific. So I did some calculations of my own and I present them here for your review.

What is the chance that a soldier standing up right would be killed by a grenade exploding 10 feet away on the ground?

Well the fragments of the grenade would probably fly in all directions creating a shperical pattern of dispersal, except that the explosion would be directed away from ground creating a half sphere pattern of dispersion.

The surface area of a half sphere is (pi*4*r2)/2 so at 10 feet there would be (3.14*4*10^2)/2= 628 square feet that the fragments would be flying through. A man standing at 6 feet and 1.5 feet wide would occupy 9 square feet. So taking 628/9=70 we get a one in 70 chance of a hit if there was just one fragment from the grenade, but a grenade has many more than one fragment.

How many fragments come off a grenade? Who knows, but we can take the weight of a soviet F1 grenade (from wikipedia) of 600 grams subtract the explosive filler of 60 grams and get 540 grams of metal flying through the air. But how lethal is all this metal flying about?

A 30-06 bullet (again from wiki) weighs about 10g so Lets divide 540g by 10g to get 54 rifle bullet sized fragments, or groups of fragments.

Taking these 54 lethal groups of fragments, and the 70 we got earlier 54/70=77% chance of a hit against a standing man at 10 feet. Since not all hits would kill, i propose taking an approach of 50/50 lethality based on the fact that about that much of our body is made up of less vulnerable arms and legs that if hit by 10grams of grenade fragments probably wouldnt give a lethal wound. Taking 77/2= 39% chance of a lethal hit.

To put this more in game terms, a grenade landing the length of two prone men head to foot away (12 feet) would kill you a little more than 1 of every 3 times, I think a definte improvement against your chances now. A grenade landing 20 feet away or a little more than the length of 3 prone men would have a 39%/2=20% or 1 in five chance of killing you. Again a nice improvement over the current situation.

I think the current grenade damage probablity is a wild guess based on the reported maximum effective range, i think the probailities generated here would be much more fun to play with (less nade spam) and also more realistic. As a possible counterbalance,we could have more than 2.

What do you guys think?

 

[[Mad_Murdock]]

That is the smartest thing I have ever heard anybody say about anything.

But seriously, wow, i would have never come up with something like this but the nades were kinda pissing me off, so great job, i like this.

Come to think of it, why hasnt this been implemented, as far as I can remember, the fragments were actually modeled on the F1s back in the mod days.

However, this still leaves the question of the German Sg.39 grenades we have, which are HE, rather than Frags.

 

[PUTZ]

Russian F1 is a Fragmentation grenade, which is designed to shatter into small pieces and readiate in a circular pattern. You'd get much more than 54 fragments, let say, 200 fragments in varying sizes and shapes spewing out at a very high rate of speed. If you catch anything in the face...you're gone.

However, the German Steilhandgranate 39 is an Concussive (might be a better word...) grenade, which just explodes (without fragmentating) and has a far far shorter kill distance, and this is accurately represented in the game.




The mini-nukes from the mod days are gone...there were times where you could get 6-7 kills from one F1, but the most I've seen in Ost is 5. A german nade gets on average 2-4.

 

[Quietus]

As far as I'm aware RO doesn't model actual fragments. Grenades explosions are simply a generic "kill zone"

 

[Fungwu]

"That is the smartest thing I have ever heard anybody say about anything."

Ha, Take that Jesus!

"However, this still leaves the question of the German Sg.39 grenades we have, which are HE, rather than Frags."

I did leave out blast effects in my calculations because I couldn't think of any way to calculate it.

I will share some thoughts and stories. Once a player in game told me after I complained about grenades effectiveness that the effect of an HE concussion would kill you even if fragments didnt from the overpressure liquefying your organs, I suspected at the time that this was Bullsh*t.

Later I read a story about a reporter in Iraq who tried to throw back a grenade only to have it explode in his hand. He lost the hand and was knocked unconcious, but his organs were not shattered even though the grenade exploded extremely close to him.

Another story I read was in WWII a german grenade landed under the rifle butt of an infantry man lying down. The blast shredded his rifle but he was fine, again his organs were not liquefied.

Another story I read was about germans throwing grenades into a russian pillbox, after a couple the russians came out and surrendered because of the concussion. Like I said earlier anecdotes are not much to go by because the story told could easily be the exception, and not the rule.

Anyhow I propose this simple system for blast effects, closer than 3 feet to a nade and you die 100%, farther than that and the probablility of you dying is determined solely by the fragments, using my calculation above the chance would be 54/the area of a half sphere with the radius of the distance from the explosion divided by the surface area of the target, and all that divided by two.

As for german grenades just give them the same chance of a russian nade, under the priniciples of simplicity and balance.



EDIT

As far as I'm aware RO doesn't model actual fragments. Grenades explosions are simply a generic "kill zone

Yes, i Know this. What i am proposing is to change the "kill zone" I only considered fragments to try and determine what exactly this kill zone should be. Under my plan the grenade kill zone at 10 feet from the detonation would kill you 40% of the time. At 20 feet, 20% of the time and so on up to the maximum effective range.

 

[PUTZ]

As far as I'm aware RO doesn't model actual fragments. Grenades explosions are simply a generic "kill zone"

You are right, which is relative to the real-life probability of getting hit by a fragment and x, y, and z distances and correlates to the amount of damage you receive. If a nade goes off near you, you either get an appendage (arm, leg, head) injured, and then a 2 hit-zones (an arm AND a leg or any combo of two others...), the next is the killzone. Which means that 3 parts of your body were "hit" and you die...

In a round-a-bout way I guess I'm saying is that I have no problem with nades.
​

 

[Hyperion2010]

While the nades do seem powerful, this is more because people use them in unrealistic ways than because they are unrealistically powerful. I usually save mine until I really need them because they can be real lifesavers. IMO they work much better when they are used like they are IRL.

 

[Fungwu]

"Russian F1 is a Fragmentation grenade, which is designed to shatter into small pieces and readiate in a circular pattern. You'd get much more than 54 fragments, let say, 200 fragments in varying sizes and shapes spewing out at a very high rate of speed. If you catch anything in the face...you're gone."

If you followed my post I did not say that there would be only 54 fragments, I know that there would be more, but rather that if you took the total weight of the grenade (600 grams) subtracted the explosive filler (60 grams) you would end up with 540 grams of metal flying through the air. I got 54 by divided 540 by 10 grams, which is the weight of a rifle bullet. What I am saying is that a nade exploding puts as much metal in the air as 54 rifle bullets, and i based my calculation off that number.

If we took your hypothetical 200 fragments, we would get 540grams/200=2.7 grams per fragment, so you could put my calculation in other words to say what are the chances you would get hit by 4 of these 200 fragments (2.7grams per fragment*4 fragments=~10 grams, or a rifle bullet worth of damage) The chances of that many fragments hitting you at 10 feet is what i discuss in my post.

As for taking one in the face I disagree with you. If a fragment hit my in the cheek I would not be "gone" if one hit me in the ear i would not be "gone" if one hit me in the chin, i probably wouldnt be "gone" Same goes for the nose and the mouth. IF one hit me in the eye, i probably couldnt continue fighting even If i lived. As for the brain, most of it is protected by my helmet. So i doubt one fragment in the face would kill me, but more than one certainly could.

Further more my post is not saying that a fragment in the face shouldnt kill you, I am just wondering what are the realistic chances of a fragment killing you.



"The mini-nukes from the mod days are gone...there were times where you could get 6-7 kills from one F1, but the most I've seen in Ost is 5. A german nade gets on average 2-4."

Once I detonated an F1 as the whole team left spawn at the start of a round of kransyi, my score before was somewhere between 5 and 10 and after it was -15, so the maximum possible kills from a nade is atleast 9-12


Edit
" While the nades do seem powerful, this is more because people use them in unrealistic ways than because they are unrealistically powerful."

Your comment confuses me, how do people using grenades unrealisticly make them seem more powerful? Can you give me an example of how someone using a grenade unrealisticly (like running with one until it blows up) makes it seem more powerful?


My point is that I don't like when a grenade goes off 20 or 30 feet away that I die. Obviously, my not liking it is not a reason for change, after all Im sure other people dont like it when I kill them. However, I have crunched some numbers and have come up with a new way to model the lethality of grenade, which will make them, while still effective, less deadly then they are now, based not on my desire to stop being blown up, but rather on the objective, though speculative calculations, that i presented in my first post, and on the premise that this is a realistic game, I think my suggestions should be considered.

Furthermore, I like this game, because it is a game of skill where the best player wins. There is no crosshair, there is only iron sights. You have to aim to kill, even smgs are not very effective unless you aim, you have to intend to kill someone and shoot acurately to do it. But with grenades you can miss by a huge distance and still kill your enemy, you can kill people you didnt even know were there, the maps we often play on have more close combat and more narrow chokepoints than the most real world battles, with a constant supply of respawning players means a constant supply of grenades. Sometimes there is a constant rain of grenades thrown blindly into a battlezone against enemies whose presence is only guessed at, if you miss no problem when you die you will get more nades to throw, and missing is hard indeed when you need only get into the neighborhood of the target. The skill and aptitude needed to suceed with other weapons is lacking in grenades.

Yes i know that skilled players can toss a perfectly cooked off nade into your lap and poor players will waste, miss throw, or fail to cook their grenades, and also using some comonsense you can avoid areas of nade spam, but I argue that if nades are changed as I have laid out, not only will they be more realistic as I have explained, but they will take more skill to use, yes you can nade spam still, but it will be less effective, players will have to aim their nades that much more, cook them that much better so you cannot run away, in short the changes will improve the game's realisim as well as it fun factor by fostering more skill and forthought in a tactical shooter where skill and forthought are what should bring success.

 

[deees]

If you followed my post I did not say that there would be only 54 fragments, I know that there would be more, but rather that if you took the total weight of the grenade (600 grams) subtracted the explosive filler (60 grams) you would end up with 540 grams of metal flying through the air. I got 54 by divided 540 by 10 grams, which is the weight of a rifle bullet. What I am saying is that a nade exploding puts as much metal in the air as 54 rifle bullets, and i based my calculation off that number.

Keep in mind the shrapnel is typically traveling much faster than bullets. Very small splinters of metal can cause severe wounds, (near the center of the explosion, poor ballistic properties cause the fragment to decelerate rapidly).

 

[PUTZ]

You probably killed a commander, which is -6 kick in the nutsack, in addition to 5 or 6 other people.

--

What he means by "unrealistic use makes them more powerful" plays off the "nade spam" Ala Danzig. Soldiers would never carpet bomb an area with nades...but in this scenario they are ultimately powerful in most cases

 

[BuddyLee]

In RL grenades are serious buisness. . .

You would most likely die if one went off around you. Unless...

"God came down from Heaven and stopped those M-F'in bullets"

 

[PUTZ]

ahahaha

 

[Teq]

Make it simple.

1) add sound when the nade land!!!
2) Reduce kill zone or kill probabillity.. ESPECIALLY when prone
3) Increase suppression power (add more blur, aim shake and 50% stamina loss!)

Thats it!
Now you can hear the nade land..
So you can go prone
So you can increase your chance of survival.
BUT you will still suffer from suppression...

EDIT:
Nadespam problem solved.
People needs skill to use the nades
Offensive nades can be used to shatter enemy attention
Nades will be more tactical and will be used at more correct situations
You will conserve your nades to the proper situations.

 

[Fungwu]

"Keep in mind the shrapnel is typically traveling much faster than bullets. Very small splinters of metal can cause severe wounds, (near the center of the explosion, poor ballistic properties cause the fragment to decelerate rapidly)."

Do you have any source for this? In a F1 grenade 60g of explosive is the propellant for 540g of projectile, on wikiepidia I found this reference "139 grain bullet with a powder charge of thirty nine grains for a muzzle velocity of around 2500" for a type of rifle bullet. This is 9 grams of bullet being pushed by 2.5 grams of powder. THis gives as a ratio of 3.5 grams of projectile for every gram of propellant in a bullet, and 9 grams of projectile for every gram of powder in a grenade. Thus a bullet should theoretically go faster than shrapnel from a F1 grenade.

I know small splinter of metal can cause severe wounds, what my question is and what i hope to anwser is a probability of being wounded by those small splinters of metal from a grenade when you are standing a certain distance from it. Your statement is very general, it boils down to grenades are dangerous. What I want to know is if I am standing x feet from an exploding grenade what percent chance is there that I will die?

The number of fragments that i came up with, 54, seems to be causing problems. I realise that there are more fragments than that from a grenade, but i have heard numbers anywhere from putz's 200 to 2000 from some tv show. All these seems speculative and even if we could have an exact number of fragments how many would it take on average to hit you to kill? I know possibly just one, but I am looking for average so we can model a realistic grenade.

To explain fully where i got 54 from, I didnt make it up out of my head on a number that "felt" right. In this game there are a lot of rifle bullets flying around. Taking a rifle bullet as sort of a standard of damage, since there is an accepted value of how much damage a rifle bullet should do already in the game I took the amount of metal that actually is in a F1 grenade (540 grams) and the actual weight of an average rifle bullet (10 grams) both numbers which i got from wikipedia, and decided arbitrarily that for every rifle bullet worth of grenade fragements that fly through the air there should be a rifle bullets worth of damge delivered to the player. To put it in other words, if a 10g rifle bullet kills you in game, 10g of grenade fragments, whether that is 100 .1g fragments 10 1 g fragments 1 10g fragments or any other combination, should also kill you. In real life there might be a million billion fragments from a grenade and the tiniest one could kill you for all i know, but I do know there is 54 rifle bullets worth of metal in a grenade so I used that real world number to get a workable number that I could combine with the area of the blast to get a hard probability that you could code into the game with some justification of logic and realism. Statements like a tiny fragment could kill you, while perhaps true, do not provide any sort of number you could code into the game.

To state my full case:

If you think grenades feel right, that is your opinion and I respect it fully. I however think they do not feel right in an otherwise great game they seem too overpowered. I did not want to say "they should be toned down in power because I dont like them" because that is no argument. Rather I have tried to look into real world numbers and logic, so when i say they should be toned down I can say exactly how much and also why it would be in keeping in line with realistic weapons model that is the basis of RO's gameplay.

If you are content to say I like grenade the way they are, I have no argument with you. If you want grenades to be realistic then lets try and find out what that would be. Unfortunetly the only hard numbers I could find were the grenades max effective distance, which only provides the basis for a complete guess on effectiveness, which is what we use now for the basis of grenade damage, a complete guess. Statments like there are a lot of fragments, and small fragments can kill you do not help because they are unconnected to a number with which we could get a probability of a kill at a certain range, which is ultimately what the programmers need if they are to make a change. Again, if you are arguing on the principle that you like things the way they are I have no counter argument other than lets take a vote, and if more people think less powerful nades are fun then lets have it that way. If you are arguing that my numbers aren't realistic then please provide counter number not just general statments, like shrapnel travels very fast.


Edit:


"Make it simple.

1) add sound when the nade land!!!
2) Reduce kill zone or kill probabillity.. ESPECIALLY when prone
3) Increase suppression power (add more blur, aim shake and 50% stamina loss!)

Thats it!
Now you can hear the nade land..
So you can go prone
So you can increase your chance of survival.
BUT you will still suffer from suppression...

EDIT:
Nadespam problem solved.
People needs skill to use the nades
Offensive nades can be used to shatter enemy attention
Nades will be more tactical and will be used at more correct situations
You will conserve your nades to the proper situations."
__________________

I think all these suggestions are good

 

[slyder73]

Make it simple.

1) add sound when the nade land!!!
2) Reduce kill zone or kill probabillity.. ESPECIALLY when prone
3) Increase suppression power (add more blur, aim shake and 50% stamina loss!)

Thats it!
Now you can hear the nade land..
So you can go prone
So you can increase your chance of survival.
BUT you will still suffer from suppression...

EDIT:
Nadespam problem solved.
People needs skill to use the nades
Offensive nades can be used to shatter enemy attention
Nades will be more tactical and will be used at more correct situations
You will conserve your nades to the proper situations.

These are all based on personal judgement. A personal belief that nades are not used "correctly" in game to begin with. Many, including myself think the nades are just fine. Nade spam is not spam, I prefer to call it a volley. This is a good tactic.
As it is now, it is up to the player to avoid if possible situations where greandes will be falling, and recognizing that they need to make some changes if they keep going into the nade volleys. To kill or be killed by a grenade is pretty much in the players control.

Avoiding being killed by them is not as difficult as some posters here have implied, IF you are aware of the situation you are running into and know that it's a bad idea to be in doorways, rooms or craters for more than a few seconds. IF you know that it's a bad idea to travel the same path to a place over and over.

I think the way the grenades are now forces players to think and plan for the grenades. Changing the system to reflect something like what has been suggested would remove the "danger factor" of the grenades and even moreso encourage that run'n'gun without having to think attitude that is already FAR to prevalent in game. Yes, I understand that the mechanics of the grenade in game is not exactly like it was in real life, but sometimes in games, complete "reality" has to be changed to fit the way it affects gameplay.

 

[PUTZ]

Not to be an ass, but Wikipedia probably isn't the source you'd want to use for your info.

 

[Athena]

Anybody calling Ost grenades too powerful obviously never played the Mod

 

[Dheepan]

Yep.

As an anectodal story in BfE campaign 2, the germans surrendered on Volkhov River. Stating that the "nade spam" made it impossible for them to win.

Ost nades are just fine imo, I don't get killed often by grenades unless I'm in a room or something like that.

 

[BuddyLee]

I feel like I get robbed in-game by underpowered 'nades, to be honest.

And without damage and penetration of objects like walls, furniture, the second story floor from grenades going off downstairs etc. they just feel to weak to me.

I can duck behind an overturned cottage table and survive.

 

[Teq]

These are all based on personal judgement. A personal belief that nades are not used "correctly" in game to begin with. Many, including myself think the nades are just fine. Nade spam is not spam, I prefer to call it a volley. This is a good tactic.
As it is now, it is up to the player to avoid if possible situations where greandes will be falling, and recognizing that they need to make some changes if they keep going into the nade volleys. To kill or be killed by a grenade is pretty much in the players control.

Avoiding being killed by them is not as difficult as some posters here have implied, IF you are aware of the situation you are running into and know that it's a bad idea to be in doorways, rooms or craters for more than a few seconds. IF you know that it's a bad idea to travel the same path to a place over and over.

I think the way the grenades are now forces players to think and plan for the grenades. Changing the system to reflect something like what has been suggested would remove the "danger factor" of the grenades and even moreso encourage that run'n'gun without having to think attitude that is already FAR to prevalent in game. Yes, I understand that the mechanics of the grenade in game is not exactly like it was in real life, but sometimes in games, complete "reality" has to be changed to fit the way it affects gameplay.

cant see how you can say that sound of a grenade is Personal beleif.. have you ever heard a 600 grams of stield landing on most surfaces ?

Increasing suppression is by no means personal beief as well... the shock of a nade landing nearby is horrid... even for a well trained soldier... I will find source.

About decreasing kill zone I primary suggest for prone soldiers!
Decrease kille prob by 25% when prone.

This will force enemy to hit the dirt and stay there.. and they you flank and do what ever you want with them.. while they are recovering from their stamina loss.

Regarding your comments on avoiding danger areas.. Well I agree. You should take care..
and you still have to take care, cause if you get a nade lading at your feet, you have to go prone, and then you suffer a heavy suppression ... unable to fire effectively back for a couple of seconds...

BUT you are still ALIVE, if the enemy doesnt do anything... and can keep on fighting.