Alright, well i've given it a few hours, and i'm slightly better. Seems it gets more powerful the closer you are. Who would have thought *ahem*. Almost got 3 tanks destroyed in one life >_>
Camping around the bridge on Arad, or the craters seems to work wonders. Love using it as a sniper rifle too xD
Also, at the guy who posted videos, thanks man, i'll test those tricks out.
Just one question, does anyone have any tips for taking out treads? I'm trying to be a nuisance to enemy tanks to distract them from friendly tanks, and holding them down with a broken tread works wonders...but it's so hard to do. Is there a knack to it?
When you travel through the air you have a constant force acting against you in a direction opposite your motion....friction....wind resistance.
After bullets have left the air they come into a state known as "free fall" in which they stop accelerating. So essentially you lose velocity over distance. And because kinetic energy is directly proportional (it increases as velocity increases) to velocity, this means the round loses energy over time and thus is less capable of penetrating armor over longer distances.
So the game is modeling that effect correctly, your ability to penetrate armor in game is going to be directly proportional to your distance from the tank in addition to what thickness of armor and slope you're attempting to penetrate (although you clearly understand that).
As TT33 said, the PTRD was only capable of penetrating thin armor on tanks, late war tanks had very, very thick armor and thus were essentially impervious to anti-tank rifles requiring shots to weak points in the armor to achieve penetration. The RO model is such that, for whatever reason, despite your round penetrating, it does a set amount of damage to the tank's health. The PTRD's damage is nonsensically low, probably to compensate for the real world unlikelihood of penetration.
By the way the Panzerfaust essentially was capable of penetrating the frontal armor of any tank in World War 2, even most super heavy tanks and tank destroyers anywhere within its effective range. It was kind of an enigma of its time, far beyond the capacity of tank armor to withstand it.
So it's basically a matter of realism versus game balance.
But if you think of it as a game balance issue, consider this....the PTRD can be used as a long range sniper rifle. It kills in a single shot in nearly every part of the body at any range with a obscene velocity. It is single shot and thus fires about half as slow as a bolt action rifle but this is compensated by the velocity of the round making it easier to hit human targets. You also get a handy bipod meaning you can get a recoilless and driftless mount for the operation of your little sniper rifle. This is not entirely realistic but it is awesome. I spent a little while plinking away at bots and noobs on Leningrad and dear god it was some of the most fun I've ever had.
EDIT:
TT33 I hope the penetration values are not that extreme in the RO model. If so this needs to be fixed. Like I say, though, I do think it balances out somewhat by the fact that the PTRD has a tendency to require half a dozen to a dozen shots to kill medium tanks or even troop transports even upon penetration.
I also want to add for a comparison that modern ammunition out of a PTRD has a kinetic energy of 30,000J versus multiple millions of joules of kinetic energy for even an average AP shell for your average medium tank. There's a significant difference in penetrative capacity for obvious reasons.
