I haven’t been able to test this conclusively so I thought I’d ask.
Once a shell penetrates tank armour, I know that some of the time the shell will continue travelling and it can still bounce and ricochet until stops.
What I can’t work out is whether or not the chunks of shrapnel and spalling also ricochet within the tank. I know the impact analysis is limited because it generally only renders spall that impacts modules. So I can’t tell if the pieces of shrapnel bounce off the internal surfaces of the armour. I suspect that they don’t amd I’d be curious if solid AP performance could receive a justified and realistic buff if shell fragments had increased lethality owing to internal ricochets of shrapnel.
Yes and it’s quite easy to replicate: APHE to the cupolas of tanks
Though I think Gaijin’s idea of solid AP shrapnel is that the momentum of the shell carries the shrapnel with it but the momentum is not enough to pierce through the other side of the armor, so the shrapnel kind of just “splats” against the other side of the internal armor wall, which does line up with how AP post pen damage behaves in game
I don’t think I’ve explained myself clearly. In another game I play, one of the assumptions following a shell penetration is that the fragments themselves will ricochet within the vehicle rather than just a single cone of fragments. I’ve checked again in the protection analysis and the shrapnel produced by a shell impact does not ricochet at all, it simply travels allong a vector and then impacts whatever is in it’s path and stops, it does not bounce of in the interior of the tank (not referring to the actual shell itself which can be clearly seen ricocheting of the interior in certain circumstances)
See below, where fragments of the shell ricochet within the tank hull and bounce up into the turret and around the interior. I believe these secondary shrapnell/spall chunks if modelled within war thunder would give British and French tanks a realistic and justified buff to their post pen performance (if this is a genuine behaviour of shells with evidence in reality) and close the performance gap between AP and APHE
The explosive filler of APHE does bounce around inside the vehicle, otherwise killing the gunner and loader by shooting the cupola of a Tiger 1 would not be possible.
Personally, I have not had an issue when using solid AP shots, mostly because I am already familiar with the module and armor layouts of vehicles and know which areas to target. The whole “AP and APHE are not equal shells” stems from the fact that a large chunk of the playerbase rely on center mass shots to kill, which the APHE is in fact and unsurprisingly better at.
A solid shot shell that passes through a piece of ammunition and makes it red will be different with APHE as it would cause the ammunition to explode
There is a difference that is beyond skill unfortunately
An unfortunately common occurrence
Combined with shells being inaccurate at ranges making precise aiming very difficult to hit ammunition in one shot and unless the target is densely packed it won’t knock all out crew like APHE does
No not really, because if APHE hits an ammorack on an open-top vehicles (I.E. SU-100P), it still causes a detonation even if the APHE does not detonate. AP shells would have had the same effect.
Also, you have to hit the ammoracks with the shell directly, as the “shrapnel” of the shell itself produces the most module damage
Also, the Su-100P ammorack stacks from bottom to top, so are you sure you’re not just hitting the part that has no ammo if the SU-100P didn’t take full?
Are you able to provide a screen shot of what you are describing? I have tested the APHE shells fairly extensively in the Hangar but was unable to observe shrapnel particles ‘bouncing’.
The only shrapnell and spall particles I was able to observe where
from the initial cone of spall following penetration
the 360/spherical projection of spall/shrapnell from the explosive charge.
Of the two conditions above, the shrapnell travel in a straight line projecting outwards from the source and stopped once it hit a module or armour, I saw no secondary bounces of shrapnel or shell fragments ricochetting/bouncing back off the interior.
I understand the APHE works from Cupola shots, but that’s an explosive charge that detonate following the impact/penetration which is a separate source of shrapnel, not a piece of shrapnel bouncing.
I think it’s fairly obvious that Gaijin does not model secondary shrapnel ricochet after it hits a module to decrease strain on server load and client load
Same with having shrapnel ricochet off of the floor and roof of the hull, it’s simply unnecessary when the “cone” of shrapnel has already sent separate pieces of shrapnel in the direction that the hypothetical shrapnel would take if it were to ricochet off of hull surfaces, even if Gaijin were to model shrapnel ricochet, the energy lost by the shrapnel when it changes direction would severely reduce the potential damage it can cause, making it effectively pointless
