Crew body armor - A modification that could be researched

Machinery of War Discussion
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Do you think this would be a good idea?
  • Yes
  • No
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What would this do?

I was thinking about a modification that could be researched for some Ground vehicles crews (specially open top vehicles with little to no armor) called “Crew body armor” this would give you the ability to, well, research a modification to some vehicles that would add crew body armor, increasing each individual crew member “hit points” giving them a bit more survivability against things like light machine gun rounds and artillery splinters.

This modification would be good for vehicles that have no armor, and completely/semi exposed crew, and could be added to some ground vehicles and also to the world war 1 tanks.

How would it work?

This modification wouldn’t add armor pieces to each individual crew member, like “2mm helmet”, or “1.5mm chest plate” instead it would be just a general buff to the crew “hit points” it would add to the crew survivability status, for example:

  • Without the modification the Driver would survive 5 rounds of 7.62 hitting him directly, now with the modification researched he would survive 7-8 rounds of 7.62 hitting directly.

What ground vehicles?

A lot of Ground vehicles could receive this as a modification, but like i said before, i would recommend it getting added just to a few select vehicles, tanks that have proper armor protection wouldn’t need this, i would recommend it only to open top vehicles, tanks with no armor or very light armor, and the world war 1 tanks. For example:

Germany:
  • Sd.Kfz.221 (s.Pz.B.41)
  • A7V
  • Beutepanzer IV
  • Flakpanzer I
  • Flakpanzer 38
  • Garford-Beute
  • Sd.Kfz. 6/2
Great Britain:
  • Mark V
  • Light AA Mk. I
  • Alecto I
  • Staground AA
  • QF 3.7 Ram
USSR:
  • SU-5-1
  • Garford
  • GAZ-AAA (4M)
  • GAZ-AAA (DShK)
  • GAZ-MM (72-A)
  • ZIS-30
France:
  • St-Chamond
  • P.7.T AA
  • Lorraine 37L
  • CCKW 353 AA
Italy:
  • Lancia 3Ro (100/17)
  • AS 42
  • AS 42/47
  • CM52
  • 47/32 L40

And other vehicles like these, i’m not saying that only these tanks should receive the modification to add more survivability to the crew, i’m using them as a example of stereotypes of vehicles that could receive the modification. But anyway let me know what’s your opinion on this idea.

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I think its not a bad idea per se and I fully agree that it’d not be a good idea for any vehicle without exposed crew due to a risk of a reduction in gameplay/damage-consistency.

For open tops and then especially for vehicles where the crews actually had such, I don’t see why not.

Maybe it could be combined with a reduction to their overall performance (albeit slight), like for example aiming time (on manually traversed/elevated turrets/weapons), reload-time and maybe some of the driving related skills (breaking, gear-shifting, turning etc.).

Again, certainly not all of these debuffs above and not a major disadvantage but one where players actually need to start considering whether they want to trade worse crew-performance for increased survivability against machine guns and/or artillery shrapnel - this means modelling it in a way where the crew armour is still very much viable but not to a point where its so good that there is no consideration needed anymore.

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