"FoW tanks with front and side armor of 1" Topic

Where they REALLY that vulnerable to rifle fire? A few lucky hits can bail them, and a double bail can blow them up.

I was just reading Atkinson's An Army at Dawn, and he had Yanks in Torch taking out Renault tanks (obviously FT-17s) with rifle grenades.

And I discovered that my Cossacks could take on Hornisse TDs.

Don't get me started on 0 armor…

Remember that the US Army did have antitank rifle grenades. The original bazooka round was basically an AT rifle grenade with a rocket motor attached.

SMG have an AT of 1. So I think the 2 for rifles and MG reflects Antitank Rifle Grenades and the higher power of the 7.62 and the like. Most modern bolt action rifle can go though light armor at close range. Now how many people are going to stand there pinging away? It going to take a lot more than a 1 on a d6 for me to do it.

Armour piercing bullets were available for normal Rifle cartridges and had significantly more penetration than normal ball ammo. Also the armour on many light vehicles was really only proof against low velocity pistol bullets and shell fragments. Armour 0 sometimes represents vehicles in which the crew were always at least partially exposed, eg the universal carrier.

Remember it isn't just shots penetrating the main armored hull and scoring a kill. It's all the other vulnerable bits taking damage that can render the vehicle combat ineffective.

In the winter war a Finnish Lt drove off a T26 with a pistol

Reread the 1st volume of Panzertruppen. The PzIII A-D were originally proof ONLY against the steel-cored rifle rounds, they could be pierced by 20/25/37/40mm…

Sure, they up-armored later variants, but the PzIII was a main battle tank at the start of the way and rifle bullets were the threat they were built to stop at that point.

The m1 Garand 3006 rifle with armor piercing bullets can shot through .75 of a inch at 100 yards very easily, I have fired many of them and have done it many times.

SMG have an AT of 1. So I think the 2 for rifles and MG reflects Antitank Rifle Grenades and the higher power of the 7.62 and the like.

Actually, it's the FP4+ or 5+ that represents the rifle grenades. AT2 is basic rifle ammo.

OK, so how effective is rifle fire vs FA1? Just a quick expected value analysis:

Multiply number of shots by hit probability (based on target rating) to get hits.

Each hit will be armor-saved 5/6 of the time and fail FP a further 5/6 of the time: 1/36 chance to bail.

So survival probability is M^(bails-1) (where M is the probability of passing motivation).

For a CT halftrack, you need two bails to get half a chance of a kill. That means you need on average 72 hits. Which means that you need to throw 108 dice of small arms fire

So if a Panzergrenadier Platoon spends at over 5 turns blasting away at full strength, they can destroy a single halftrack with fire, on average. Of course between each turn, the track gets a chance to remount, so actually the probability is even worse.

So I wouldn't worry about it :)

Alternately, a one-on-one fight between a Rifle/MG team and a FA1 CT armored car:

the RMG team will get two hits 4/9 of the time. 1/1296 times, both of those will bail. Half of those times, the vehicle will fail morale and be destroyed.

So the RMG team will kill the armored car 171 times in every MILLION attacks. A chance of about 1 in 6000.

For comparison, the car's Hull MG hits dug-in CT infantry an average of 3/2 times. 1/3 of those aren't saved, and only 1/6 of those pass FP.

So the armored car will kill an average of 1/12 of an infantry stand per attack.

The armor makes a very, very big difference.