There’s some truth behind it but Gaijins implementation makes just no sense, since a lot of penetration power comes from the overall weight of the shell, instead of just supplementing the core.
If the core is light, while the shell is relatively heavy, like Soviet 76mm or 85mm APCR, the shell mass should increase the penetration beyond the cores performance.
But the current system greatly underestimates the performance of the core by itself, thus making most APCR rounds less effective.
M332 APCR in-game is fired at much higher velocity than M304, yet they have practically the same armor penetration, since M304 is heavier, completely negating the higher velocity of the lighter M332, which should penetrate a T-54s turret like butter.
What do you mean? They are doing it right now. They use the total weight and the core weight with way too much emphasis on the projectile weight, which results in heavy cores underperforming.
Best example is the M41A1 which has an APDS and APCR with the same core, yet the APCR gets 220mm pen while the APDS gets 300mm pen, since APDS doesn’t use this shell mass + shell core system.
Do you guys have a database/spreadsheet with all shells ingame already calculated using your revised calculator?
I’d love to see just how much of a difference your revised calculator makes.
Based on snail foot-dragging and eventually spitting out surprisingly realistic APDS pen numbers, we know they can implement proper numbers for all shell types if they simply have enough reason to do so. I never understood why they upended historical data for many shell types that are well known instead of using a formula only for fringe cases lacking much documentation?
So, I tried adapting the formula using the core weight and 17% of the carrier weight and it works ok for US APCR. I’ll have to check other rounds when I get a chance. I do remember Peasant and Conraire discussing how much of the carrier was applied during penetration but I don’t remember specifi values. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
Now I remember why I left out shell mass. Using core weight and 17% of the carrier weight, the BR-365P went from 168mm at muzzle velocity to 244mm at muzzle velocity. I could never find a good compromise to account for it. It would either overestimate Soviet APCR or underestimate US and German APCR.
Well, it’s based on design, so no universal formula is going to fit every APCR round.
What’s important is the mass behind the core. US rounds generally have little to no mass behind the core, thus we can just look at the cores for armor penetration.