"Sherman vs. Tiger" Topic

Don't know where this started but I think it's pretty old. The axiom was that the only way a Sherman (75mm M3) could take out a Tiger was at point blank range from the rear. And for that reason, this became a basic litmus test for any new rule set and failing this test meant the rules were questionable.

No mind you, there are some games, that are more game and less simulation. I'm not talking about games where tanks have "hit points" or have armor ratings that fall into A/B/C/D/E categories. I'm talking about games where they represent the actual armor of the vehicle vs. the armor penetration of the gun. (e.g. panzer wars, Mein Panzer, ASL, Schwere Kompanie)

So how do you feel about this test? Do you subscribe to it and how does your rule system stack up?

This is not an attempt to debate which rule system is better. I don't want to debate spearhead vs. tank charts. I want to hear how you think your rules stack up against real war ballistics.

"…Don't know where this started but I think it's pretty old."""

Donald Sutherland (Oddball) talking to Kelly (Clint Eastwood) in Kelly's Heroes c.1970

The rules I play with do not involve one tank vs one tank combat but rather tank platoon vs tank platoon. Therefore, a Sherman platoon can damage a Tiger platoon from the "front" (albeit with some difficulty) and this seems to match real world combat effectiveness of larger formations. In reality, there is so much variation in armor combat that looking at "textbook" penetration and armor values is useful only as relative guides

I like the supposedly true story of the American tanker who knew he couldn't penetrate the armor of a Tiger (or was it a Panther?) so he hit it with a white phosphorus (WP) round, and the German crew bailed out because they thought their tank was on fire! See if your rules cover that!

Some German supposedly said that their Panthers were worth 10 Shermans, but, unfortunately, the Americans always had an 11th Sherman!

Certainly a Sherman could damage the suspension or track of a Tiger. And if you get close enough and are a good enough shot you can put a round through where either the hull or coaxial MG sticks thru the armor -- or thru the gunner's sight, or the driver's vision port.

The simple fact is though that a 75mm Sherman gun (or a Russian 76mm for that matter) couldn't penetrate a Tiger frontally:
The first recorded definite penetration of a Tiger's actual frontal armour ANYWHERE, by ANYTHING occured on 18th July 1944 at about 11.00am during Goodwood, possibly from a 17pdr, probably from an 88 in a friendly fire incident.
(combat history of schwere pzr Abtlg 503)

This is sort of a ‘sensitive' issue to me; because some players have claimed that my rules fail this test.

Even in 1:1 engagements there are ways for a tank to take out another tank without penetrating its armor or even significantly damaging it in any way.

In many rules a "wreck" or "destroyed" outcome really means any outcome that takes a tank out of the game. It could be anything from a catastrophic explosion to a crew deciding to back away to fight another day. In either case the GM may say "wrecked" and place a smoke puff on the model, so outwardly the latter case is not ‘simulated,' but I think that it is incorrect to use this as a basic litmus test.

This is true even in games where the actual armor of the target vs. the armor penetration of the gun is used to resolve the outcome of a hit.

Chris, in your rule system….what percentage of time would a Sherman take out a Tiger frontally and what about short range vs. medium rang? And so does that then include morale failures as well or is that seperate?

In my rules you first roll for "To Hit," and if successful you then roll for "Fire Effect."
Obviously, the first roll is to determine if a shot hit the enemy and the second is to determine the result of a hit. In reality, the two must be taken in combination and I tweaked the rules so that the net effect of the two rolls taken together seems correct to me. So looking at just the "Fire Effect" result in isolation can sometimes give odd results. Also, while during play each roll on the tables seems like a single shot (i.e. a single round fired at the enemy), statistically it usually represents more than one round. So small weapons may seem to penetrate a little more often than they should and large ones may seem to penetrate less often than they should, but this is a tweak to correct for rate of fire, etc. This keeps things simple (well, it keeps the game simple, not the game design).

Let's assume that all range modifiers are 0.

First, "To Hit":
A d10 is used, with a 6+ needed for a Hit (a base 50% chance).
If we assume that both the Sherman and the Tiger have just come to a stop (i.e., neither have achieved overwatch), no cover for the Tiger (it's not hull-down, in woods, etc), and a range modifier of 0, then this roll is unmodified.

Second, "Fire effect":
A d10 is used with four possible results;
1-4: No Effect
5: Stun
6: Immobilize
7-10: Wreck
(A base 50% chance of permanently damaging the hardware. For some reason I like making the base 50%.)

This roll is modified by;
The target's armor rating; -3 for the front of a Tiger I
The weapon size; 0 for 75 or 76mm (75/76mm is taken as the ‘standard,' thus 0)
The weapon ‘type'; 0 for the Sherman 75, +1 for the Sherman 76, +2 for the Firefly
The range; 0

For the Sherman 75 this results in a fire effect result of;
70% no effect
10% stun
10% immobilize
10% wreck

Multiplied by the 50% chance of a hit, then a full turn of firing away results in;
85% no effect
5% stun
5% immobilize
5% wreck

Morale only comes into play at the platoon level after tanks in the platoon start to get knocked out. That is, either the entire apltoon passes morale or the entire platoon fails. At the individual tank level morale is assumed to be part of the "Hit Effect."
So "wrecks" include undamaged or immobilized tanks whose crews bail out and "stuns" include mental confusion and disorientation.

1 inch = 100 feet (roughly).
So the range modifiers on "To Hit" would be;
Inches : Modifier
0-3.9 : +2
4-7.9 : +1
8-11.9 : 0
12-17.9 : -1
18-25.9 : -2
(after this there are different modifiers for the different weapon types)

For "Fire Effect;"
0-5.9 : +2
6-13.9 : +1
14-29.9 : 0
30-53.9 : -1
54 + : -2

Please feel free to double-check my math on this.

…and feel free to start shooting holes in what I have done (I'm at your mercy), though I don't think that I have to remind this forum to do that :-)

"and feel free to start shooting holes in what I have done "

That will depends on the dice as mostly ever. So if during a game an allied player is above average lucky or has very good luck the German will blame your ruleset telling it's flawed because the results were impossible. If the allied player gets stuns and no effects and no wrecks then the german player will think the ruleset is fine.

In my rules you first roll for "To Hit," and if successful you then roll for "Fire Effect".

The two must be taken in combination…

*If we are focused on whether a Sherman 75mm defeats the tiger from the front, then we shouldn't take the "to hit" percentage into account. We've already decided there has been a hit or hits. Now we want to see if we did any damage

There are 3 hit locations from the front and the effective armor rating is:

Turret: The mantlet is 100mm or 120mm depending on your source; and then there is another 100mm of armor behind the mantlet. The mantlet covers the entire front of the turret so there is no chance of penetration here.

Upper hull is 100mm with an effective thickness of 101mm

Lower hull is 100mm with an effective thickness of 110mm due to it's 65 degree angle.

Test reports show 76mm penetration for the Sherman 75L40 @500m. Statistics show that if we drop from 500m to 100m range, that we can expect up to a 10% improvement in penetration. So let's just say 82mm penetration at very short range.

Also, the US specifications state that the definition of penetration is applied once the shell can penetrate the armor thickness 50% of the time.

Rich commented above

In reality, there is so much variation in armor combat that looking at "textbook" penetration and armor values is useful only as relative guides.

Even if we use the above data as a relative guide, then we still have a complete failure of the Sherman 75mm to penetrate unless perhaps they hit the drivers vision slot.

And even on the side Armor, the Sherman gun should fail unless at very close range.

So yes, I think that 10% chance to wreck and 10% chance to stun are ridiculously high and I would feel the rules do not realistically reflect the difficulties the allies found themselves in during WWII when they sent in Allied Tankers in against the Tiger and found themselves completely outgunned.

The mantlet covers the entire front of the turret so there is no chance of penetration here.

Then how does the tank's own gun get thru?

<Q/> If we are focused on whether a Sherman 75mm defeats the tiger from the front, then we shouldn't take the "to hit" percentage into account. We've already decided there has been a hit or hits. Now we want to see if we did any damage. </Q>

I understand exactly what you are saying, and logically you are correct. But it's not really that simple. There are many things on the battlefild that effect "To-Hit" that are not explicitly reflected in the rules, and there are many things determining actual "Hit effect" that are not explicitly reflected in the rules. The SU-152 is given the same rate of fire as the PzK III, for example, and players do not declare or keep track what type of ammo is being used. Since the "Hit Effect" table is never consulted unless the "To Hit" table has first been used, they must always be used in conjunction. This gives the game designer the opportunity to use "flaws" in one table to cancel out flaws in the other.

Keep in mind that my aim was to create a set of tables that on average give the right feel while covering 200+ different tanks & SP-Guns.

Also keep in mind that simulating the probability of penetration is NOT the aim of the tables. Rather, the two tables in combination were designed to determine whether or not the fire from a given tank takes a target out of the action.

Here's a way in which one player's 57mm anti-tank gun base can take another player's Jagdpanzer IV out of the game without the requirement that a 57mm be able to penetrate the armor of a Jagdpanzer IV. It is from a section in W. C. Cavanagh's 'The Battle East of Elsenborn & The Twin Villages' (published 2004) describing an engagement at Dom Butgenbach Belgium, December 20, 1944.

"Corporal Warner hit the nearest tank with four (57mm) shots, knocking it out and setting it alight. Sergeant Odenski re-loaded and Warner knocked out a second tank with a further four well placed rounds. With the last shot, his gun's breechblock failed to close and the gun would not return to battery. A third tank appeared from the right and opened fire with its machine gun. Henry Warner's crew leapt into foxholes to seek cover, but Warner remained at his gun. The tank then attempted to run over the gun emplacement, but about ten feet from the gun, it stopped as the commander stuck his head and shoulders out of the hatch to direct the tank's movements. Warner drew his pistol and fired at the German, then jumped into his gun pit. The tank began moving away, its commander slumped dead over the edge of his turret. Having lost their commander, the crew seemed to have lost interest in any further combat (p179-180)."

From what I can tell from other sources these were Jagdpanzer IV/L48's, and it probably should have said that the breechblock on the 57mm failed to open, not close. In game terms "wreck" or "destroyed" or "eliminated" results mean that a unit has been taken out of action for the remainder of the engagement. It doesn't necessarily mean that the unit was KIA'ed or turned into scrap.

This example is rather unusual, but combat is often just a conglomeration of unusual events.

While talking about Dom Butgenbach, here's a nice example of an "errant turn," something which can occur in my games. This incident occurred the next day, December 21, and the excerpt is from 'Against the Panzers: United States Infantry versus German Tanks, 1944-1945,' by A. R. Vannoy & J. Karamales.

"So intent were they on holding back the grenadiers that they almost did not notice the jagdpanther looming out of the fog to the left of their (57mm) AT gun. Rose quickly dropped his carbine to assist the gunner, Cpl. Irwin Schwartz, in taking out the behemoth. Schwartz fired the already loaded sabot round, which struck the jagdpanther's left front drive sprocket. This caused the left track to jam and the vehicle's forward motion made it skid around one hundred and eighty degrees. Rose loaded another sabot round, and Schwartz fired again into the jagdpanther's now exposed right flank. A tongue of yellow flame shot out of the vehicle and it ground to a halt, burning furiously (p296)."

I guess this can also be cited as an example of how 57mm fire can wreck a Jagdpanther from the front; just spin the enemy tank around and fire again! (I wonder if this was in reality another Jagdpanzer IV, but the idea is the same).

From George Forty's 'Tank Action: From the Great War to the Gulf" (Greenhill Editions 1996, orig. Sutton Publishing, 1995) we get an example of a German 88 failing to penetrate at point blank range. A Churchill commander recounts rounding a corner and "facing a barricade of greenery blocking the road, surmounted by a large black hole. It was in fact an 88, not more than 30 yd away, if that… the hole vanished in a red sheet of flame, blinding me for the moment. The tank rocked, a sound of falling kit in the turret. The right-hand junction box and roof fan had dropped, as the shell grazed the turret, taking half of the back bin with it (p118)." A second shot from the 88 missed completely before the 88 was taken out by the Churchill's bow MG. This engagement reminds us that it is possible for an 88 to score a "No Effect" hit and even a "Miss" when fired at a range of less than 1 inch on the game table (with it being even more surprising that the miss followed the hit). Players often find it hard to believe when this stuff happens during a game. The Churchill commander speculated that the MG fire probably unnerved the 88 crew during the second shot. The Churchill never got off a shot with its main gun due to a briefly jammed round. Most rules do not explicitly cover jammed guns, but in game terms the Churchill might be thought of as having "fired" and "missed." So in game terms both the 88 and the Churchill main gun fired and missed at less than an inch on the table top.

From the same book we get a nice example of a "Stun" result, although it is from a 1965 engagement on the Israeli border: "Tal's centurion was hit by a Syrian SU-100, which had been hiding behind a protective earth wall. Col Oshri was wounded and fell onto the general who was in the gunner's seat. An APHE round had hit the commander's cupola, causing a severe shock wave to pass through the tank, which subsequently effected the entire crew who suffered painful after-effects for some three weeks, although none of them (except Oshri) were wounded (p253)." If the crew had bailed out or retreated their tank from the battle then this would have been a "wreck" instead of a "stun," even though there was no penetration.

To heck with test reports :-)

Interesting anecdotes, Chris. They help to explain why "stuff happens."

Then how does the tank's own gun get thru?

What gun?

Chris,
Everything you say is very persuasive and I admire you for putting so much time and effort into the rule system.

The example about the 88 is well taken but I my challenge is not about whether you can hit the tank, it's about whether you can damage it.

My issue still remains whether the shell actually does anything after it hits.

I readily accept that tank crews can get stunned. I expressed doubt about whether it was a 10% issue. I've read many stories by tanks crews and sense of it is that it's not common. However if your rule system treats a stun somewhat like a supression where it effects their ability to return fire, perhaps with a -1 or something, then it's not an reasonable factor to use in the game.

Hitting the drive sprocket and causing the tank to spin around I think is fascinating story but certainly an obscure circumstance.

The issue about the tank retreating after their commander was shot is a good example of a morale failure, not a "wreck".

Here is an excerpt from "Tank Tactics" by Roman Jarymowycz. pg 261

Secret trials proved that although the Tiger could be killed by short range flank fire, should it choose a less aggressive tactic and choose to fight it out at long range, there was not an Allied tank in the inventory (the Red Army excepted) that could kill a Tiger. In fact, Royal Ordinance scientists discovered to their horror that the Tiger could not be penetrated at any range. Point blank engagements at under 100 yards proved that the 6 pounder and 75mm tank guns could not defeat the Tiger's frontal armor. The rounds simply bounced off.

To heck with test reports:-)"

If we throw out scientific data, which is foundational, then we should just forget this and just go play Axis and Allies instead.

Here is an excellent write up by Frank Chadwick covering how to handle armor and penetration in his WWII game, Command Decision. It covers the difficulties in transferring real world numbers to a game, while keeping the game playable.

ARMOR AND PENETRATION IN COMMAND DECISION
The reason most of us started gaming World War II was probably tank warfare –
certainly to judge by the early miniatures rules sets, which treated everything but tank
versus tank combat as an afterthought. As a result, how game designers come up with the
armor ratings of vehicles – as well as the penetration values of guns – is a subject of
natural interest. What follows is an overview of my thinking about armor and penetration
– which really hasn't hanged very much in the twenty years since the first edition of
Command Decision saw print.
The purpose of this article is to give you an insight into my thinking, and an
understanding of how the armor and penetration values got to be what they are, and why.
The purpose of this article is not to stake a claim to any sort of position of infallibility
with respect to these ratings. I'm comfortable with them--you may not be. That's okay.
Reasonable people can disagree about things as ambiguous and difficult to quantify as
this.
That's probably the most important thing I want to emphasize in this article: this isn't an
exact science, and anyone who says it is, is (in my opinion) trying to sell you a bill of
goods. More on that as the time comes.
ARMOR VALUE
The basic numeric formulae for evaluating armor protection really haven't changed all
that much since the first edition of CD. The armor value of a vehicle is its armor
thickness in centimeters, after adjusting for armor slope. The multipliers used for armor
slope are:
15 degrees = x 1.25
30 degrees = x 1.5
45 degrees = x 1.75
60 degrees = x 2
Gee, Frank, that sounds fairly straightforward. When do we get to the touchy-feely stuff?
Well, for starters, what is the front armor thickness of a tank? Is it the average? No, not
really. If half of your front armor is 20mm thick, and half of it is 60mm thick, and you get
hit by a projectile which will penetrate 30mm, you aren't safe and sound behind your
average thickness of 40mm; you're either safe behind 60mm, or you are dead, and it's a
50/50 chance.
Well, not really. It's a 50/50 chance each hit, but in a game turn covering up to 30
minutes, we assume a lot more than just a single hit, and so the chances you will avoid
being hit in the vulnerable part of the vehicle decrease; with two hits, you have a 75%
chance at least one of those hits will be on the thinner armor, and one may be all it takes.
So cut to the chase. The standard in CD has always been to use the weakest significant
armor value of the vehicle. Is "significant" a value judgment? You bet. In general,
though, I tend to discount lower front hull armor: most of it's pretty thin, and for a reason
– there aren't many actual hits suffered there. The ground tends to cover it from close
range very flat trajectory shots, and shots with a steeper angle of attack tend to miss it
altogether.
Now, there is some averaging we do in Command Decision: Test of Battle™ (CD
TOB), which we didn't used to do. We used to take the weaker of the hull or turret armor,
and that was the basic armor of the vehicle. If the turret was thicker, it got a second
(higher) rating, used only in defilade, but the thicker turret armor never affected its
defense in a normal combat situation. In CD TOB we average the hull and turret, with a
bias toward the turret armor, in part because it's used by itself whenever the tank is in a
defilade situation, and in part because I believe in many non-defilade situations a turret
strike is more likely than a hull strike. Evidence of this is, quite frankly, mixed, so there's
plenty of room for disagreement. That's what I found persuasive, however, and so that's
how it's rated in the game.
The CD TOB front armor value is hull, plus two times turret, divided by three.
A = (H + 2T)/3
PENETRATION
This is where we put on our wizard robes, because this is all black arts stuff. If you think
armor penetration is as simple as looking up a number on a table, put on your seat belt
and get ready for a wild ride.
The first, most basic question, we need to answer is, "What do penetration numbers
mean?"
It's my experience most gamers think if a weapon has a penetration of 75mm, it means it
will punch through a 70mm plate and bounce off of an 80mm plate. Right?
Not even close.
The British penetration tables are as good an example as any – all use similar methods,
although the specific numbers vary a bit. So if the chart says it penetrates 75mm, that
means if you shoot at a 75mm plate, it goes through, right?
Not exactly. What it means – exactly -- is 80% of the time it will put 20% of the mass of
the shot through a 75mm plate.
Think about that for a moment.
The problem with the way most people think about armor penetration is they think of it in
terms of a threshold event: a pass-fail, yes-no, on-off phenomenon. It isn't. There is a
continuum of levels of success, starting with no effect on the armor at all, and then no
penetration of the armor but some internal spalling, followed by fairly energetic spalling,
followed by spalling and some shot mass coming through, followed by more and more
shot mass coming through, up to effectively 100% of the mass. Since even these are not
rigidly predictable results -- even in the controlled environment of a testing range -- we
settle for four successes out of five as a reasonable description of penetration. But the
point along the damage continuum which we choose to define as a "success" – passage of
20% of the shot mass through the armor – is actually fairly arbitrary.
"It's not arbitrary," I have heard it argued. "No, that's the point at which the anti-tank
round can do significant damage to the tank."
Rubbish!
You don't kill a tank with percentages; you kill it with absolutes – absolute masses of
metal injected into the interior with absolute amounts of energy. 20% of a 2-pound shot is
not the same as 20% of a 20-pound shot, and we all know it. So from where does this
bizarre standard come?
I am fairly certain it is legacy science, courtesy of naval ordnance designers. Warships
come in all sizes, as do naval guns. You need a benchmark for performance against
armor, and delivering enough of the warhead through to explode and cause damage is a
very useful yardstick. Why? Because naval ordnance is not expected to sink an enemy
ship with one shot…instead, it's expected to make its proportional contribution to the
business of pounding the enemy ship slowly into scrap metal. That was the first rigorous
testing of penetration ("perforation," the British liked to say in the old days) I'm aware
of, and I suspect that since the method was already widely in use, it was just carried over
to Army ordnance testing as well. Certainly coastal artillery (traditionally the more
"scientific" wing of the artillery community) would have used this method.
But the standard of success against a tank isn't slow debilitation; it's a single round kill.
There is recognition of this issue in some World War II tests. Take the British 25-
pounder, for example. The standard of success for most smaller guns was 80%, but the
official listed penetration values of the 25-pounder are based on only a 50% standard of
success. Why? Because a 25-pounder doesn't have to deliver proportionally as much of
its mass through the armor to kill a tank as does a 2-pounder. Obviously. If it delivers just
10% of its mass through the armor, that's the same as the 2-pounder delivering 100% of
its mass, and then some.
But how much, in an absolute sense, does a round have to over-penetrate its target in
order to kill it? More modern tests suggest, in the case of hollow charge warheads, a
round has to over-penetrate the target armor by between 100-150mm to have a reliable
chance of killing the vehicle. That's a petty fair benchmark -- and it also provides a good
explanation of why most hand-carried World War II hollow-charge rounds were not very
reliable at killing tanks, since their total penetration was about the required overpenetration
value needed for a sure kill.
Right now in CD TOB, if you over-penetrate the enemy armor by 8 or more (80mm), you
are guaranteed a kill against anything but an elite target. Everything below is something
of a crap shoot (although if you over-penetrate it by 6 or 7, you have to like your
chances). You can argue this is generous – well, I'm just a generous guy, I guess.
Maybe not all that generous. Remember, this is a platoon level game, and each turn is up
to thirty minutes long. What we are modeling is not the likelihood of one round
penetrating and knocking out one tank. We're using those performance measures, but
only as a guide to what we're really interested in: whether or not a platoon of AFVs has
been rendered combat ineffective by fire over the course of a turn.
You don't have to destroy every tank in a platoon to render it combat ineffective. You
can also do that by blowing up one or two key AFVs – say the platoon leader's and
perhaps the best tank crew's. We know that most damage done in combat by a platoon of
tanks is usually done by one or two crews in that platoon; take them out, and the platoon
is effectively off the board.
Another way to render a platoon combat ineffective is just to bang it up. Knock a tread
off of one tank, jam the turret of another, injure crewmen in a third, and so forth. Enough
low-level damage to the vehicles, and attrition of the crews, will render a platoon
ineffective. In the game we call it "eliminated", but really, we don't care whether the
tanks themselves have been knocked out and are burning, so long as the platoon stops
doing annoying and dangerous things.
Are there still some tanks left which, if reorganized and re-motivated, could return to the
fight? Sure. That's why we have the regroup rule.
Now, here are a few odds and ends to consider,
Angle of Strike
The British test fired guns against plates angled at 30 degrees, but did not add anything to
the effective penetration of the gun for the added slope. Why? Because in a combat
situation, you will seldom, if ever, engage an armored vehicle perfectly perpendicular to
its armor. You'll always be shooting at a bit of an angle, and the British decided the 30
degrees was a good compromise, or battlefield average. Most other countries did
something similar in their tests.
Is there a lot of hard science behind this 30 degree figure? No, there isn't. It's just an
informed estimate, but I think it's a pretty sound one, so CD TOB penetration figures are
also based on a 30 degree off-perpendicular strike.
Face Hardened Armor
Face-hardened (FH) armor and the different ammunition used to defeat it is also an issue
worth touching on. Early war thin armor plate benefited considerably from face
hardening, and whether or not a gun could deal with face hardened armor could be a big
deal. (The way most countries dealt with it was by fitting a face hardened nose cap to
keep the shot from breaking up when it hit, but not everyone had capped ammunition
right from the start.) Later in the war, as armor got thicker, face hardening was less of an
issue, partly for manufacturing reasons and partly because of the different way thicker
armor reacts to impact. Not important here.
The question is, how best to cover all of this stuff, especially when you add in the fact
rounds capable of defeating face hardened armor aren't really any better against non-face
hardened armor. Having an FH armor prescript for face hardened stuff, and then different
penetration numbers for every round, based on its performance against conventional and
against face hardened, is the brute force way to do it. It's too many ugly numbers,
however, for my taste. Instead, what we did was simply rate rounds for their performance
against face hardened armor, and leave it at that.
There is some distortion there. It means tanks without face hardened armor actually get
the benefit of having it – if they are facing enemy firing uncapped ammunition. As a
practical matter this means Italian tanks may have a frontal armor value one too high
when facing British uncapped shot. I can live with that – and you've now been informed,
so you can fiddle with it if you like.
Unique Events
During the Mortain fighting, one US anti-tank gun crew took out a Panther with one shot
to its glacis at close range. How? The gunner aimed for, and put the round through, the
machine gun ball mount. Other gunners got belly hits on Panthers by bouncing rounds off
the cobblestone street right in front of the enemy tank. Others regularly would aim at, and
hit, the track of an advancing tank (provided it was close enough), and when the tank
slewed to one side, they'd hit it with a follow-up round in the flank armor, before the
driver could reverse to show the front again.
A whole company of Panthers was put out of action in one day in the east by a Soviet
antitank rifle platoon. How? AP rounds through the commander's vision blocks and the
gun sights. The tanks were still running, but they withdrew from action and were out of it
for a couple days.
How do you incorporate this sort of thing in the game without getting bogged down in
detail? We do it with two rules. First, the critical hit rule: if you roll a 10 at close range,
no matter what the difference in armor and penetration, it's an automatic kill. At longer
than close range, a natural 10 on antitank fire is always at least a force back. Second is
the rule in which all attacks on AFV in a BUA from the same BUA template are treated
as flank shots. These are far better ways to model these effects – in my opinion – than
trying to account for every possibly unique event that can happen in combat.
Large Numbers
The standard for armor and penetration in CD TOB is A = cm … mostly. In fact, values
above 10 are progressively and proportionally larger. This is less important to CD TOB
than it will be to the modern version of the rules. For values from 10 to 20 (higher than
anyone will need to worry about in WW II) for both armor and gun penetration, however,
the following **Top Secret** game values are used.
Game Cm
10 10
11 11
12 13
13 14
14 16
15 18
16 20
17 23
18 26
19 29
20 33
Oh… I told you the secret formula. Now, I'll have to kill you.

Interesting that Chadwick starts out by using the British penetration standard of 20% of 80%. I would think it rather hard to find US, German and Russian penetration data at this standard.

I agree with Chadwick's basic thesis, but I think his figures are off. The effects of slope as a modifier are more of a curve. I use:

15 degrees = x 1.06
30 degrees = x 1.25
40 degrees = x 1.55
45 degrees = x 1.75
50 degrees = x 2
60 degrees = x 2.75

Those are approximations, of course.

15 degrees = x 1.06
30 degrees = x 1.25
40 degrees = x 1.55
45 degrees = x 1.75
50 degrees = x 2
60 degrees = x 2.75

Are you factoring the 80% chance of penetration? You can go to the Russian Battlefield and check the penetrations there. See how the 0 and 30 degree angle affects their 80% Certified chance of penetration. Their "mass behind armor" I think is 50%.

Where does the 80/ chance penetration come from.

As far as accurate AT mechanics, yes I agree with test. There is plenty of evidence to back that up. My rules use the sceme. penetration in milimeters verses the armor presented in milimeters.

As far as the much talk of variations. They are not so great as to make a difference. IF there was such a massive inconsistency then testing would not be useful and progress on better AT guns would be much more difficult. Penetrative force CAN be measured. A good working average is made. One good enough to give the weapon a penetration rating and give gunners knowledge of the capabilities of the weapon. It was not till the Internet that I ever saw a rules system not rated this way. Maybe I was looking that hard, but I have lots of older rules laying around.

Where does the 80/ chance penetration come from.

British penetration criteria. 80% chance that 20% of mass passed through for 2pdr AP.

Different guns different proofs.
For example 6-pdr AP proof of shot was performed against a 60mm IT80 PLate (British RHA) at 30-degrees.
For 66% of the shot (66% by weight) had to pass completely through the plate at the specified impact velocity.

For other shells later in the war it was What it means – exactly -- is 50% of the time it will put 20% of the mass of
the shot through a 75mm plate.

Willy Pete hit for rules. WP hits Tank = morale check, fail = bail out. I would give a bonus to the morale check though as its a specific situation and IMO calls for it.

IT always fascinates me that the constant calls for simplicity stop dead at AT and then,..in come the non penetrating hits stuff. This seems to be because of a desire to water down the Heavy Panzers.

Recently I got a opportunity to witness and interview by two P-47 pilots. IT reminded me of why I just shake my head at all these convoluted schemes to "play balance" because "everybody has a Tiger". Just trump em with a Thunderbolt, Mustang, or Typhoon.

Hitting these "soft spots" from a safe distance in a Tank or TD would be a superhuman feat of marksmanship. Those guns were not sniper rifles.