"Conjectural Team Yankee Armor Ratings - Older Armor" Topic

I'm interested in the whole Cold War period, from the 1950s through the 1980s, but especially during the pre-1980s period, due to all of the older, interesting tank, APC, and IFV models.

Now, of course, we all know we have armor values for just a few vehicles in TY, though it appears to me that those from Fate of a Nation, and the Vietnam rules sets are very similar, if not identical to many of those used for TY as well.

Luckily, due to some of the older rules, we get armor ratings and other stats for a lot of useful kit, e.g. T-55s, M-48s, M113s, BMPs, PT-76s, etc.. However, a lot of kit is still missing, and I'm impatient, so did a bit of on-line research for the BF stats, and comparing armor values for various vehicles, including their adjusted thicknesses to account for armor sloping, average armor thicknesses between turret and hull, or in some cases, several different values for the hull, and/or turret facings.

I also tried to come up with a rough guide for the TY armor values, expressed as a level of protection against various weaponry, since in some cases, that's the best info you can get on some vehicles, e.g. statements claiming that a particular hull facing, or facings are "proof" against various guns, like 7.62mm rounds, 12.7mm, 14.5mm, or 20mm rounds, etc..

So, without further ado, please see the following chart, which I think with the added 1D6 random die roll to them, provides a requisite amount of protection against various weapons, but still allows for the occasional "bailout", or "destroyed" result to occur, as seems to be the case in the other TY armor values I compared these against:

Weapon Armor is Proof Against = TY Armor Rating (not including the 1D6 Random Die Roll)

7.62mm = 1
12.7mm = 2
14.5mm = 3
20mm = 4
25mm = 6
30mm = 8

Obviously, adding 1D6 to the above base Armor Values will result in an armor level 1 to 6 points higher than the above numbers, which in many cases means the armor will indeed be "proof" against that weapon, but in some cases a "bailout" or "destroyed" result may still occur, as we see in the regular TY rules as well, currently. This could be due to tread or bogie damage, knocked out periscopes and vision ports, a jammed turret, etc..

Feel free to let me know if you agree with the values, or think they need to be adjusted.

Also, as a general guide, it appears that TY uses a factor of 1.5 Armor Points for each 25mm of armor (line of sight thickness – so, adjusted for slope, so 6 points of armor protection for 100mm of line of sight armor thickness), so a vehicle with 1.5" of armor would have a rating of 2 (1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25, rounded down). A vehicle with 50mm of armor would have an armor rating of 3.

FOW appears to use a 2.0 rating for each 25mm of armor, in case you want to use any WWII vehicles for post-WWII gaming, with the TY rules.

At the very lower end of the rating scale, this doesn't always appear to be the case, e.g. as shown by the M113s rating in Fate of a Nation of 2/2/1, but in TY with a new rating of 3/2/1. Also, a bit confusing, are the BMP-1 and BMP-2 ratings of 2/2/1, when most of the open-source info I've read mentions they are proof against 20mm fire from the front (which should rate a 4 using my armor thickness rating system), while the M113 is only proof against small arms fire (7.62mm fire, even though it has a 50mm average frontal thickness, and an average side thickness of 38.1mms, or 1.5" – presumably that may be due to it being aluminum, instead of steel. I read on-line in one posting that 48mm of aluminum armor is needed to be "proof" against 7.62mm fire, so it appears to be considerably weaker than steel plating, if that is true).

Not sure how to deal with those discrepancies, so will leave them up to you, but do suggest that if the M113 gets the frontal 3 armor rating, the BMPs should too.

For other APCs/IFVs, I propose the following armor ratings:

Spz Kurz (Spz 11-2) 2/1/1
HS-30 (Spz 12-3) 3/2/1
Marder 1, 1A1, 1A2 4/2/1 (proof vs. 20mm fire from front arc)
Luchs 4/2/1 (proof vs. 20mm fire from front arc)

FV-432 1/1/1
Warrior 3/3/1 (proof vs. 14.5mm fire from all around)

M114 3/2/1 (or 2/2/1 if you prefer the Fate rating, like for the M113 in those rules)
Bradley M2A1 3/3/1 (proof vs. 14.5mm fire from all around)

M26 8/6/2 (note the lower rating in TY, compared to the FOW WWII stats)
M46 8/6/2 (as above for the M26)
M47 11/8/2
M48 12/8/2 (90mm and 105mm versions)
M60A1 13/8/2
M60A2 15/8/2
M60A3 14/8/2

T-62 13/8/2
BTR-60PB 1/1/1 (BTR-60 – also an open topped variant with top armor of zero)

Anti-tank ratings, and gun ranges can be worked out by comparing with other source data provided from TY, Fate, and Vietnam rules.

Some of the newest tank values seem a bit low to me, but perhaps they are adding in the 1D6 die results to the base armor values to account for those, and/or to not make them impossible to kill, e.g. like for the M1 tank, and some variants of the T-64, T-72, and T-80, etc., which seem to me to need a base armor rating of 24 = 400mm of line of sight armor, using the above formula guess I came up with, to attain that. In some cases, with Chobham armor and HEAT rounds, the values quickly escalate to a TY armor value of 36 – 72, as do the penetration rates for some of the latest, high-tech, high density weaponry, e.g. depleted uranium rounds, high-tech HEAT rounds, etc..

Note – there's been a lot of discussion about whether the rounds fired by the guns of many Cold War tanks could penetrate the frontal armor of the opposition. Some post-Cold War testing seems to indicate that was not possible, in many cases, especially with the 105mm round vs. the latest Cold War Soviet armor.

It is also interesting note that some/most of the side armor values for the tanks seem to be rather high, in comparison to their frontal armor ratings, given their real thicknesses and slopes, so I suspect some angle-off modifier is in effect to adjust for those, since they seem to be anywhere from 50% – 100% greater than might otherwise be expected.

I hope the above will permit some of you that are interested in using older vehicles in your games to do so, sooner, rather than later.

I'd also love to see some other conjectural armor stats for other vehicles too, especially in the Leopard family, and for other West German armor, but also including various models of the T-64, T-72, and T-80.

I'm working on some stats for the older JS-III, T-10, and T-10M, as well, but need to review them a bit more, so will post as soon as that is done.

You're welcome.

Let me know how they work out for you.

Hmmm, tanks are about right, I think, but need to revise some of the IFVs and APC upwards, since I used the M113s armor as a baseline, not realizing it is aluminum, so only about 1/3rd as dense as steel armor.

More to come.

There was some discussion about how FOW rates armour slope some years ago and apparently their formulae derate the effect of slope so it's not a simple LOS formula. IIRC it was something like taking the square root of the increase due to slope. eg a 60 deg slop doubles LOS thickness but would only increase it by about 1.4 in FOW armour formula.

Aluminium armour is much weaker than steel but is also even lighter so you actually get better protection weight for weight against some types of attack.

Thanks for the info.

I got a reply from Phil, who is apparently one of the TY designers, and he said they are using a logarithmic scale for their armor, much like their weapons ranges.

I looked at the Challenger 2000 ratings for a lot of stuff, in comparison to the TY T-72 (which is apparently a T-72A model), which helped with coming up with a lot of ratings, so will post those, when time permits.

Thank you for posting these. :) I'm thinking of doing a US Army National Guard unit with M48A5s, and maybe a Bundeswehr reserve unit w/ M48A2G and M113G.

You're welcome.

Yea, I want to do M48s and M113s, and/or Spz 12-3 (HS-30s) for the Bundeswehr vs. Soviets and Warsaw Pact too, not to mention a lot of other stuff as well, e.g. Leopards, Marders, Jagdpanzers, etc..

More stuff to come, when I find the time to post.

A lot of the values are done, at least for the armor. I presume people can just use US/Soviet values for the other things like Courage, Morale, etc..

Phil, from BF/TY mentions they use a logarithmic scale for the armor protection, so I won't even try to guess how that's done.

I did look at the weapons' ranges scales though, and came up with the following approximations – seems they use "effective range" for their ranges, so I think: the 32" 125mm gun range = 2,000m (Soviet tank guns, and others); 40" = 2,500m for the US 105mm gun; and 48" = 3,000m for the TOW missile (3,750m max. range).

For the really high end armor, we'll need to come up with some new AT pen. values as well, since the armor values get really crazy at the end of the Cold War – shockingly so.

Mako 11:
You have been a busy little beaver! Well done, sir! On first examination you have done a good job. Honestly, I don't know enough about the FOW-TY system to be of much help but from the perspective of the uninformed layman, you seem to have covered all the bases. On a side note, I looked all over for my Challenger 2000 rules, but could not find them to respond to you question on another thread. I'll keep looking and maybe one day reply out of the blue. Thanks again for sharing your armour values.
Cheers and good gaming.
Rod Robertson.

Thanks Rod.

No worries.

See here for the latest update, with lots of Cold War armor value conjecture goodness:

TMP link