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What is the armor rating of tank bottoms

Please stop spreading those tall tales. It has been discussed before: no way a ricochet is going to penetrate 25mm of steel plate, especially off of a road.



The belly plates vary by tank in real life, anywhere from 40mm to 10mm.

Not sure what they are in game, but I know they are thin enough to where a grenade can kill the crew when thrown underneath.
 
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Jack said:
Not sure what they are in game, but I know they are thin enough to where a grenade can kill the crew when thrown underneath.

I hope this is a bug and gets fixed. Or I really would like to see a reference that shows how a grenade can take out a tank by throwing it under. Again, based on other simulations I've played (Steel Panthers, Squad Leader, ASL, etc.) I don't recall being able to take out tanks so easily with a grenade. I can see you doing some damage to a an engine if you got lucky.

Heck I would like to see the devs adding something that every tank simulation I've seen modeled. Morale. You have to make a morale check to get near a tank. If you make it you can approach and attempt to attack. You could implement morale failure by either making you fall prone and/or increasing fatigue. Maybe make one of the bot AIs take over control for 10 seconds making you run randomly away from a tank :p
 
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karhuwaari said:
In that "tale" there was video footage of P-47 fighters nose where they did shoot the tigers "belly". Its still a heck of amount of .50cal ammunition that they fire there.


It doesn't matter: you could shoot a hail of .22 LR from a gatling gun at a Tiger, doesn't mean it would do anything just because there are a large amount.



I have seen that footage on the internet, and I would like to learn more about the guy talking in teh background about the belly kills.





There is just no way it can be correct though. A bullet hitting a dirt road, like in the film, will either be absorbed by the ground, or break apart. Only a very small percentage would ricochet, of those, only a couple would do so at an angle to hit the belly plate, and of those, none of them would have enough terminal energy left, nor the ballistic shape, to penetrate.

Either that pilot was BSing on purpose, or he mistook seeing crew members abandoning a tank after a strafing run for getting a "kill." Other than war stories, I haven't heard anything about this, nor see any pictures of Tigers destroyed by belly penetrations from .50 cals.


EDIT: Here is something else that is stupid about the whole idea, and yet no one mentions it.

The top plate of the Tiger is also 25mm.


So the pilots recognized that their bullets were ineffective shooting at the top skin of the tank, but somehow ricocheting them off the ground underneath was more effective? It's BS.
 
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I could see a thin skined tank being penetrated on its weak top armor. Allied planes had 6-8 .50 cal. MGs. Depending on pilots preference, the ground crew would often line the guns up to converge on a small point... say 1000 yards/meters. thats 3300-4400 rpm or 55-73 rounds per-second converging on the same point. I asume this would have a different effect than a single .50 cal. round would. :)
 
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Yeah, that sounds pretty shady...

But I usually go for belly shots, too... especially when the Germans are charging the North field on Arad, and they're bouncing up over the crests of hills where I can put shots under them. I get a lot of kills that way, but I suspect that that's due at least in part to many of the tanks being PzKw IVs. =P
 
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That ricochet belly kills talk is not possible. The .50 cal is amazingly powerfull, but even that couldn't do it on hard steel. Maybe it could penetrate if it came at a right angle without having bounced off of something, but a ricochet wouldn't kill a tank like that.

That said I think the tanks should be more vurnible to scatchels that are thrown under the tank, or on top of the engine hatch. Occasionally I see this happen and the tank doesn't get destroyed from one scatchel. That's like 4 kg of explosives isn't it? Well enough to penetrate way more than 25mm armor.
 
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