"Small Arms Vs Soft Skin: Should Wheeled/Tracked Matter?" Topic

Jagdpanzer, my favorite rules for WW2, treats all soft skins equally. They die as soon as someone, anyone, shoots them. Seems reasonable to me. Why should an unarmored vehicle be treated otherwise just because it is half, or fully tracked?

The half tracks were effectively armoured compared to other 'unarmoured' transports.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were pretty small arms proof upto the heavier calibre HMG – so perhaps anything less than a 13.5 should be a 'no effect' for the sake of simplicity.

Depends are you talkin Skdfz 251 or 7?

There's a significant difference between shooting up a truck and a half track. There's a thread or two about MMGs/HMGs vs armoured cars, which aren't much better armoured than 251s or M3s, and the consensus seemed to be that the MG fire annoyed the thing but wouldn't take it out.

A truck with tracks should get the same treatment as a truck with tires.

The M-3 (1/4") and Sdkfz 250/251 (8 to 15mm) were armored and should stand up to 7.62/.30 cal, at least from a distance. This came up a couple years ago TMP link

Jack

To my mind it is a question of whether the engine and crew compartment is protected or not. Given all of the above are not, I see no difference in shooting if it is a Deuce and a Half or an Opel Maultier.

In the context of the Crossfire rules, absolutely, positively not an issue. Way far down in the weeds for the system.

The only difference I can think of is the halftracks being a little harder to immobilize (fewer tires to blow out). But if you're not counting immobilized softskins, that's immaterial.

When encountering a truck, why would you want to shoot at the tires rather the driver?

I think Griefbringer is right.

Disabling vehicles has nothing really to do with tracks or tyres – it's all about the driver.

If you shoot at drivers in un-armoured vehicles two main results tend to emerge.
a) They die or are wounded – hence the vehicle out of action or

b) Realising that a) above is a distinct possibility the driver/s bail out – fast. And the vehicle is out of action.

DB

In WWII games, I've always had any individual soft skin vehicle (ie, 1:1 representation) in a game blow up or be disabled if you look at it sideways with small arms fire from a stand that represents a squad/section.

Your very unlikely to blow anything up by shooting at it with small arms. Fill it full of holes yes, but no explosions unless it is an ammo truck or similar. Taking a couple of pot shots at a vehicle and turning it into a fireball is very "Hollywood". The softest part of a soft skin vehicle is the crew. The BBC TV show Top Gear did experiments with a Toyota SUV, IIRC putting it on top of building being blown up. It survived and they got the engine started in a couple of minutes. Anyone in it would have been killed though. Depending on how detailed your rules are you might give the driver the benefit of some cover when firing at the front, head and shoulders only exposed as the engine would cover the rest.
How do folks handle things like SAS jeeps with armoured glass windscreens, but unarmoured from the sides/rear?

"When encountering a truck, why would you want to shoot at the tires rather the driver?"

Umm, I think in reality you tend to fire at the centre mass of the target, certainly at anything more than a few hundred metres away.

Sorry Ditto. I'll try answering the actual question: a softskin is a softskin.

Jack

I wonder what parts of the average SSV are vulnerable to MG fire in that a single hit there would kill the vehicle -- and as the only value of a transport vehicle is to move stuff, I see no real difference between immobilization and a complete kill.

ISTM that a bullet would have to shear a vital brake cable or gear linkage, knock an important lump off the engine, incapacitate the driver or flatten a tire. I doubt that hits on fuel or oil tanks would be immediately effective, although they would stop the vehicle some time later.

I suspect most SAA kills of SSV are really P-kills, but otherwise I would suggest that half-tracks should be slightly less vulnerable simply because the vulnerable area of the tires is removed.

All the best,

John.

If you watch any of the police chase videos that are all over the web it tends to demonstrate having flat tyres does not render a vehicle immobile…….my wife drove home with a flat and claimed not to have noticed (!!), I have driven a 4x4 with four flats over rough ground- it was harder than normal to steer but manageable at low'ish speeds….
I think that we are conditioned by Hollywood that a 9mm pistol will cause a catastrophic explosion and render the vehicle useless. I have seen videos of cars being taken apart by full auto from fairly close and engine blocks with big holes after being shot….if the engine has no compression it will not run- a big or little hole will render it immobile.
Rounds in the driver or the engine will stop the vehicle. Variations on the running gear are not gonna make much difference- the 'soft' halftracks of WW2 were trucks with modified rear-ends.

Good points -- I once managed a few klicks on a flat in Saudi Arabia, simply because changing a tire on the hard shoulder is a very poor risk when the hard shoulder is frequently used for high-speed undertaking by idiots in BMWs and sunglasses.

Also, the thought occurs to me that some WW2-vintage vehicles might still have solid tires; and I'm not sure when the first "run-flat" tires came in, but one can omagine armies being early adopters.

All the best,

John.

ISTM that a bullet would have to shear a vital brake cable or gear linkage, knock an important lump off the engine, incapacitate the driver or flatten a tire. I doubt that hits on fuel or oil tanks would be immediately effective, although they would stop the vehicle some time later.

A car or truck will not go far with a hole in the radiator -- several holes are even better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

Holes in radiator are a pretty quick stopper, especially the older cars. Flat tires are annoying, but my Dad drove for ~45min on a really bad dirt road literally without noticing the flat tire (when they came back, that tire had no sidewall left!).

But that's in a modern Jeep Cherokee with a 4.0l inline six-cylinder (and more horsepower than a 1945 2.5ton truck), not a 45hp 3/4ton truck

The radator would be vulnerable. Presumably a few bullet holes in the fuel tank won't help, even if (& contrary to Hollywood) they don't usually explode.

John – at least some WWII era British armoured cars had a run-flat type of tyre.

As a result of the Beirut barracks truck bombing in 1983 the US did some tests on what it took to KO a moving truck. I believed it showed that it took a surprising number of bullet hits to actually stop one moving at speed.

Wartopia, in Crossfire (which doesn't deal with soft skins) when I have them, I have them rolled at as if they are infantry in the open with 4-6 as hits on the dice rather than the usual 5,6. Any passengers get the same medicine, pins are ignored.

That makes perfect sense for Crossfire!

The trouble is, people never bother to do target vulnerability analysis for non-sexy targets like softskins. It may perhaps be that certain design characteristics have a strong influence on survivability, even if we seem to have decided that wheels vs. tracks is probably not an important one. Examples from other fields are inline vs radial engines for aircraft, and Zuckerman's WW2 finding that artillery pieces are often put out of action by hits to the recuperator, so guns with recuperators under the barrel are in general noticeably less vulnerable than those with recuperators on top.

Now, if we can just find a few hundred representative 3-D models of sofskin vehicles, we could write some simple code for shotline analysis and start to get a grip on some answers -- I womder, have our chaps done this for 5.56mm bullets against the mighty Toyota Hiace yet? Can't leave all the vulnerability work to Clarkson, after alll…

All the best,

John.

Cherokee Smerokee, I once drove from Khartoum to El Obied across the southern Sahara in Sudan in a Landrover – we had 7 flat tyres due to thorns and rocks, luckily carried two spares and 4 spare inner tubes and 'hot patch" inner tube repair kit… Landrover + sand ladders was a beast – as were the Bedford and Fiat trucks used by Sudanese truckers… Toyota Hilux? forgeddaboutit…