IRL yes, in game no
I can’t find any proof of the St Chamond having spaced frontal armour. All variants of it show the exact same plate on the front. That part around the gun isn’t the lower armour, that’s just the armour for the gun mantlet.
Modele 1
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Modele 2
Modele 3 (this is the exact tank the ingame version is based on. However the side plates are different from what Gaijin modelled.)
And in the interior of a Modele 3, showing no extra plate
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All the sources state it had an extra plate added as spaced armour - so you should start from the basis that it existed. Or are you trying to convince us it never existed at all??
Why would you expect an interior shot to show exterior armour?
This looks like it here -
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How does one see exterior armour from inside the tank?
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That’s the edge of the gun mantlet.
Your inside picture does not show that.
The only bit of doubled metal in that is as highlighted in the picture below, obviously above the gun barrel.
The piece I have highlighted in the picture above is level with the gun barrel
This picture appears to show a Chamond without the armour I think is the extra plates:
The added armour was added to them regardless of the stage of manufacture - although later ones were presumably had it fitted at build rather than added later.
Because those are the exact same plates as the ones you can see outside. Look at the viewport to the left of the gun. You’ve got four parts. The main plate, the mantlet plate, the cover to open and close the viewport. And a plate on the outside to reinforce it (since enemies would probably focus their fire on it.)
I’ve coloured the plates here. The main plate is red. The mantlet plate is blue. The cover for the port is pink. And the outside plate is green.
Also if you wanted to increase the armour on a tank, surely you’d put the extra armour on the outside, not the inside.
Uh… yeah… that’s what they did… what’s your point?
Given the bolted nature of the construction there is no particular reason why the added plates would have a different structure from the existing ones - so the pattern of plates outside and inside doesn’t really say anything conclusive.
However given almost all pictures of St Chamonds look like the one in the game, and apparently all St Chamonds had added spaced armour, your posts are pretty much saying “no they didn’t”, which is unsupportable.
So let’s turn this around - what do you think the additional armour should look like - got any pictures you think definitively show it?
This is 62668 ‘Pas Kamarad’ captured by the Germans. This is the exact tank that Gaijin choice to represent ingame. It does have different side armour that hasn’t been correctly modelled but it was still the same spaced side armour that the others have.
Then the outside on later variants should look different from earlier versions then.
Here’s a drawing that purports the be a St Chamond Early - and presumably without any additional armour - it has the earlier gun, and a different section around the gun mantlet area to the in game one -
Your red lines do not make any sense - this one is pure invention - the picture shows nothing of the sort -
So again - what is it you think the extra amour DID look like?
It’s right there. You can just see the upper section extending out.
There was no extra armour. The only extra armour was the spaced armour added to the sides and the reinforcements added on the outside to the edges of the plates.
62414, one of the first examples made, most likely started as 62405, the fifth prototype. This was an experimental version with side skirts covering the tracks. You can see it still has the same front plate arrangment as all other St Chamond’s. It also lacks the side spaced armour which I presume was added sometime during the testing phase.
62457, one of the earliest produced modele 1’s. Same front plate arrangment.
62530, one of the later produced Model 1’s. This one has been destroyed and you can see no secondary plate behind the main plate. As usual, same arrangement on the outside.
62608, a modele 2 that’s also destroyed. Again, no secondary plate. Outside is also no different.
And for reference, 62770. A modele 3 and one of the last ever produced examples. Still with the same exterior plates.
Btw if you were adding extra plate armour to the outside of the original plate armour. Wouldn’t you make them overlap so the sides between each plate is covered?
My sources come from here which makes no mention of the front having spaced armour. It only references the 40 examples turned into supply vehicles. I assume referring to the side armour removed to improve mobility.
So you have 1 source that says does not say there was any armour - and also doesn’t attempt to refute any suggestion that there was such armour, and that’s all you need huh?
Your page is 1 of MANY referenced in this article - Char Saint-Chamond - Tank Encyclopedia, and it says otherwise.
Now maybe all the various sources that say it got 8.5 (or 8 in some cases) additional armour, making it “up to 19mm” (so it could only be the front it was added to) - maybe they all got it from 1 place and that place is wrong - that’s been known to happen.
But until you can provide something a little more factual I’m going with the people who have apparently looked at a lot more than you.
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Tank Encylopdia, known for their reliability, for example making up names for North Korean tanks before referring to sources that don’t back it up.
TE say’s the extra plate was bolted onto the front. Adding spaced armour over the original armour should make it extremely obvious. Why do prototype, early, and late St Chamonds all have the exact same front? Shouldn’t there be a noticable gap when looking from the side? Shouldn’t the front be thicker in relation to the reinforcement bars on the corners?
There was another tank the French designed which used spaced armour. That was the Schneider CA1. We know this because we can physically see the difference between the early variant without it and the the later ones that did. One thing to notice is that the sloped front has no spaced armour. Why? Because anti-tank rounds can’t penetrate it anyway, same princicle with the St Chamond. No spaced armour on the sloped front that K-bullets can’t penetrate, sloped armour on the flat sides that K-bullets can penetrate.
I don’t even need to point out which is which for you to notice the differences.
More reasons to believe there is no spaced frontal armour. Looking at the bow machine gun port, we can only see two plates. The main plate, and the guard plate surrounding it on the outside.
You can tell it’s the guard plate when you look from inside because of the small gap that I’ve tried to highlight.
Next, there’s a box on the drivers side. I don’t know exactly what it’s for but it leads to the gap in the lower glacis. Apparently it’s a viewing port for the driver so he can look down into dead zone but the way it opens makes this uncomfortable. I personally believe it’s some sort of chute to drop grenades down into trenches the vehicle approaches.
There’s a guard plate around it, clearly the designers didn’t want enemy infantry shooting at it.
And it looks like a box on the inside. Gaijin incorrectly says it’s part of the driver controls.
And here you can see how it opens. This would be hard for the driver to look down. However I do think it would allow him to drop grenades down into an enemy trench whilst the lid still provides protection whilst it’s open.
Anyways, it’s mounted into the upper and lower glacis plate using bolts, like everything else. If we go with the assumption that the front is using spaced armour. Then the bolts should only be visibile on the inner plate.
They’re not however. You can see the bolts on the outside. It wouldn’t make sense to add spaced armour over the main plate before bolting internal components through both layers of armour.
https://forum.pages14-18.com/viewtopic.php?p=402639#p402639
Forum post with lots of good information on the spaced armour of the St Chamond, it was only fitted on the sides. There is zero mention of frontal spaced armour.