Tanks - Damage improvements

[Beagle 684]

1 minute ago, scavenjer said:

Euh, ERA explodes when you hit a wall with the tank at high speeds... didn't see this before the patch went live

https://streamable.com/f6hvp

happened in dev build weeks before. I remeber to have writen about it.

[scavenjer 112]

Just now, Beagle said:

happened in dev build weeks before. I remeber to have writen about it.

Didn't see it during my testing, tested in the virtual arsenal against those virtual blocks, that's a bit weird...

[Beagle 684]

Just now, scavenjer said:

Didn't see it during my testing, tested in the virtual arsenal against those virtual blocks, that's a bit weird...

I did all the testing on Altis. It happend quite often with the low dry walls in the fields and with T-100. The Arsenal is not a good place for a shake down test.

[mondkalb 1087]

Heya, I wrote in February about making sure the armor simulations receive proper base classes.

Could you please look into applying this baseclass change also to the sub-classes?

class CfgArmorSimulations
{
	class Default // yay, a baseclass!
	{
		class Default // yay, a baseclass!
		{
			[...]
		};
		class AP // oh no, not inheriting from a baseclass
		{
			[...]
		};
		class HE // oh no, not inheriting from a baseclass
		{
			[...]
		};
		class HEAT // oh no, not inheriting from a baseclass
		{
			[...]
		};
		class TandemHEAT // oh no, not inheriting from a baseclass
		{
			[...]
		};
	};
	class Armor_ERA_Light: Default // yay, inheriting from a baseclass!

Thanks!

Edit: I know its a bit pedantic, as the values inside these subclasses are only two in total. But one never knows what might happen in the future with this class, and what extra might find its way into this. And Class Default also already exists. :D

Edited April 12, 2018 by mondkalb
Clarification on my pedantry :P

[bumgie 49]

Could Strike_Nor or someone else with better tools and knowhow test what is wrong with the damage modelling on the AFV-4 Gorgon (I_APC_Wheeled_03_cannon_F).

 

When I fire 30 mm autocannons at it it doesn't appear to take any damage. The only thing I am able to archive is disabling the turret and occasionally injure/kill some crewmembers. Engine for example never receives any damage.

I fired at it with the FV-720 Mora from about 50m.

[jone_kone 158]

51 minutes ago, bumgie said:

Could Strike_Nor or someone else with better tools and knowhow test what is wrong with the damage modelling on the AFV-4 Gorgon (I_APC_Wheeled_03_cannon_F).

 

When I fire 30 mm autocannons at it it doesn't appear to take any damage. The only thing I am able to archive is disabling the turret and occasionally injure/kill some crewmembers. Engine for example never receives any damage.

I fired at it with the FV-720 Mora from about 50m.

 

+1, my community has experienced the same issue. 

 

The ACE cookoff bug also made vehicles indestructible, but that should be fixed by now.

[Yoshi_E 179]

@bumgie @jone_kone Vehicles (APC) are now better and more realistically protected.

Nothing high quality, but here a short clip explaining the armor of the Gorgon, I hope it helps.

(u can share the video)

 

 

[jone_kone 158]

13 minutes ago, Yoshi_E said:

@bumgie @jone_kone Vehicles (APC) are now better and more realistically protected.

Nothing high quality, but here a short clip explaining the armor of the Gorgon, I hope it helps.

(u can share the video)

 

 

 

Great video! You should make one for every vic. ;) I think I havent seen any video or document describing the new damage model as clearly.

 

However i still feel putting 30 ap rounds through the non engine side of the vic should have some impact on the vehicle. But maybe a little bit late for that.

[scavenjer 112]

Hm, seems like the HEAT shells and missiles using the new submunition system have incredibly low splash damage, @oukej is this intentional or did you forget to change the values from placeholder ones?

105 or 120 HEAT pretty much can't kill anything with it's splash damage.

[Beagle 684]

13 minutes ago, jone_kone said:

 

Great video! You should make one for every vic. ;) I think I havent seen any video or document describing the new damage model as clearly.

 

However i still feel putting 30 ap rounds through the non engine side of the vic should have some impact on the vehicle. But maybe a little bit late for that.

AP rounds have the tendency to simply "overpenetrate" thin armour and damaging only personel or equipment on its way out on the other side. The Anti Spall lined and layered and often soft (aluminium Alloy) Armour in IFV and APC does not produce much Spall neither. A round with an explosive filler would do harm, but those are not used anymore. Also HEAT rounds on thin armour is far from devastating. In fact an heavy MG is more dangerous to the people inside then a single RPG hit from the side....ther is basically just a lot of empty space inside.

[Bram Dijkman 0]

I don’t know if it’s intentional but ,

 

•Panthers can get taken out with one alamut HEAT from back and sides.

•Bobcats can get taken out with one HEAT from back.

 

Also the RPG caging doesn’t seem stop a HEAT round.

 

Is this intentional or a bug?

[Beagle 684]

53 minutes ago, Bram Dijkman said:

I don’t know if it’s intentional but ,

 

•Panthers can get taken out with one alamut HEAT from back and sides.

•Bobcats can get taken out with one HEAT from back.

 

Also the RPG caging doesn’t seem stop a HEAT round.

 

Is this intentional or a bug?

basically all armored vehicles, IFV in particular, have rather thin armour in the back and the sides. Also for MBTs it is only the frontal armor that is deemed "impervious."

This is now a correct behaviour, less of the hitpoint behavior ArmA had before. You need to know where the enemy is to orientate your frontal armor for best protection, on the contrary, ambush for side and rear now really work as it should.  The Alamut is simulated as a tandem charge HEAT...the first charge defeats Cage and ERA, the second one penetrates the main armor. There might still be some config quirks that will get fixed in the hotfix, but the main working priciple of armor simulation will apply.

[scavenjer 112]

3 hours ago, Beagle said:

-snip-

Pretty much this^ yeah.

Though it does seem cage armour doesn't care about tandem or not and blocks it most of the time regardless.

Which might not be such a bad thing at all, considering the MAAWS, RPG-42 are tandem... 

Otherwise it would only stop RPG7/titan AT and HEAT shells, which is a bit lacklustre.

 

It does matter where exactly you get hit, I have seen some weird behaviour but without having the tools there's no telling what exactly happened.

[Strike_NOR 898]

On 5/3/2018 at 9:53 AM, Beagle said:

There might still be some config quirks that will get fixed in the hotfix, but the main working priciple of armor simulation will apply.

 

As far as I can tell right now, the damage simulation has received the following "core" alterations:

 

- Exterior armor (anything specifically designed to protect from armor-penetrating threats), when penetrated, will transfer quite little damage to the vehicles "global health" aka hitHull hitpoint and crew members.

- A new firegeometry or material called "vehicle_interior" now serves to detect damage that happens once the penetrator has entered the vehicle, which does significantly more damage to hitHull and crew.

- All HEAT weapons now utilize a penetrator ammo type, that spawns upon impact, which can "reach inside" the vehicle - unlike before where splashdamage was the way HEAT was incorrectly simulated.

- Armor Components was introduced to subtract energy from the ammunition "type" (AP/HEAT/TandemHEAT) accordingly, so certain weapons are ineffective against certain armor protection types (SLAT, ERA, HEAVY ERA).

 

 

What remains a little "unpolished" is that since all vanilla AT weapons use a single penetrating projectile, only a direct hit will "directly damage" a crew member. So to kill a driver, and only the driver, you need to hit exactly where the driver is, and the shell has to physically impact him. Otherwise, crew receive damage as a factor of damage dealt to the hitHull global health. A simplified example would be if all units have health range from 0-100, an impact on vehicle that deals 80 damage to vehicle, would deal on average 60 damage to all crew members (0.75 factor). There are slight variations between each crew member, but generally the distance between impact to crew does not matter, only the damage dealt to vehicle global health.

 

How I try to fix it: I am currently working on a modification that creates spall fragments, shards and whatnot depending on ammo type upon vehicle impact. The shards have a high ricochet chance and will bounce around inside the vehicle upon impact. These shards do little to no damage to  the vehicle itself, but they are lethal to crew members. It also means, that if the upper front glacis is struck at an shallow angle, the shards can ricochet off the hull and spray over the drivers hatch and turret, causing damage to turned out crew. It allows for vehicles to be completely knocked out by a single shot, although unlikely, by killing all crew members before tank health is dead.

 

Because you have to hit EXACTLY where the crew are with vanilla config, you are more likely to destroy the vehicle before you can take out the crew. With my WIP mod, I am able to consistently kill crew by aiming for weak spots where I know the crew are, preferably in line with each other.

 

 

I am also looking into creating spall for HE ammo, and have some success, but I have met a wall when it comes to submunition parameters. I have made a help request in the config editing and scripting section, if anyone wants to help me out :)

 

 

 

[scavenjer 112]

@Strike_NOR how many fragments do you want to create?

For somewhat realistic simulation you'd need 20+.

 

The reason I said that this would be expensive to run in arma is mostly because I was thinking about 50 odd fragments or more upon penetrating any steel armour layer.

Now, I'm genuinely curious how many you want to use and how much impact this would have on performance.

[Strike_NOR 898]

Right now it's experimental, but the fragments are simplified as much as possible. I also noted that there is a pretty scalar relation between damage and number of fragments.

 

I can do 20 fragments that deal 25% damage to crew each, or make 10 fragments that do 50% damage each and get quite similar results.

 

I can also play with fragment speed, dispersion, hit values, lifetime and airfriction to get different results. For instance, gravity is disabled to save computing ballistics.

 

The big difference is performance. I have experimented with 20 fragments and I'm not noticing any FPS drops in 4v4 tank battles. There are'nt many situations where AT weapons are spammed, so performance impact is not an issue so far.

[Hvymtal 1251]

Spamming AT munitions to the point where it would impact performance requires a couple things.

 

1. You know the enemy has tanks and that they are coming to you, and the number and type of tanks is sufficient to require specialist weapons

 

2. You have the logistical capability to acquire a large number of high-power AT weapons and associated ammunition, and sufficient personnel to employ them

 

3. You have time to properly prepare firing positions that would maximize the effectiveness of said weapons

 

4. The terrain is highly favorable to the defender

 

5. The enemy lacks the situational awareness to be able to detect or predict the use of heavy AT weapons in such terrain

 

6. Your force is sufficiently well-coordinated to be able to attack multiple vehicles simultaneously

 

7. The enemy actually chooses to roll in with tanks in terrain highly favorable to defenders who are known to have large numbers of heavy AT weapons and are well-coordinated; and they allow the defender sufficient time to prepare defenses, and the forces on the ground have a massive SA fail, all at the same time

 

Alternatively: Large scale tank engagement with numerous AT-capable supporting arms, and all of the infantry, tanks, helis, and jets happen to land their all of their hits within about the same 2-second window. 

 

In both situations, there are probably some other things going on that would impact performance. Such as, oh, I dunno, the large amount of players and AI on an Arma 3 server all engaging in a relatively small area at the same time. 

 

 

As for whether this type of engagement is plausible in real life, you would say that "no commander would ever be stupid enough to do that, especially when there are bypass options likely available." To that, I raise you: never underestimate the stupidity of brass who got armor commands, in peacetime, with no prior experience commanding a front-line combat unit of any type.

 

Also, heavily mountainous and forested terrain, like Afghanistan. Commies learned that one the hard way and we still seem to haven't quite figured that one out, though we are getting there. Eventually.

[scavenjer 112]

8 hours ago, Strike_NOR said:

Right now it's experimental, but the fragments are simplified as much as possible. I also noted that there is a pretty scalar relation between damage and number of fragments.

 

I can do 20 fragments that deal 25% damage to crew each, or make 10 fragments that do 50% damage each and get quite similar results.

 

I can also play with fragment speed, dispersion, hit values, lifetime and airfriction to get different results. For instance, gravity is disabled to save computing ballistics.

 

The big difference is performance. I have experimented with 20 fragments and I'm not noticing any FPS drops in 4v4 tank battles. There are'nt many situations where AT weapons are spammed, so performance impact is not an issue so far.

Interesting, thing is, with less fragments you have a lower chance and lower consistency of actually hitting the crew.

Do you generate frag upon hitting concrete or buildings and stuff? 

I can imagine that you get a fairly significant performance drop when buildings or other objects come into play and you go through a tank sideways and go out the other side.

 

Still, if you can get good, consistent behaviour this could be very interesting and possible to implement in Arma 4 .

 

You could make this quite realistic and adaptable to the situation, good stuff!

[Strike_NOR 898]

21 hours ago, scavenjer said:

Do you generate frag upon hitting concrete or buildings and stuff? 

I can imagine that you get a fairly significant performance drop when buildings or other objects come into play and you go through a tank sideways and go out the other side.

 

It spawns on hitting "things" right now, and does currently not use scripting, only config adjustments, which should mean better overall performance.

 

There are some occasions where it does not work as intended, but they are easily outweighed by the times it works as intended. It also spalls on bunkers, houses, vehicles and other, making both HEAT, AP and even HE cause spalling lethal to unfortunate bystanders. 

 

Right now, only used by high caliber, long reload or "one shot" weapons which mean less performance drop. The beyond cover/armor effects are highly satisfying and more realistic, causing increased crew lethality. They also obey same penetrating laws as parent munition, so if the main shell doesn't fully penetrate, then most likely spall won't either. However, since spall generates in a cone, the occasional fragment will travel through armor at a more oblique angle, and may therefore get through. This is acceptable, and will roughly simulate "buckling" of interior walls chipping off spall fragments, like HESH is designed to do.

[Yoshi_E 179]

Had some free time at hand, and big compliment to the devs for "sneaking in" such a detailed damage model. Its fun to explore the weaknesses in the armor layout, and to experiment around to find the best attack spots.

 

 

 

[scavenjer 112]

21 hours ago, Strike_NOR said:

 

It spawns on hitting "things" right now, and does currently not use scripting, only config adjustments, which should mean better overall performance.

 

There are some occasions where it does not work as intended, but they are easily outweighed by the times it works as intended. It also spalls on bunkers, houses, vehicles and other, making both HEAT, AP and even HE cause spalling lethal to unfortunate bystanders. 

 

Right now, only used by high caliber, long reload or "one shot" weapons which mean less performance drop. The beyond cover/armor effects are highly satisfying and more realistic, causing increased crew lethality. They also obey same penetrating laws as parent munition, so if the main shell doesn't fully penetrate, then most likely spall won't either. However, since spall generates in a cone, the occasional fragment will travel through armor at a more oblique angle, and may therefore get through. This is acceptable, and will roughly simulate "buckling" of interior walls chipping off spall fragments, like HESH is designed to do.

Beatiful! I'd love to see this in action :D

This is pretty much what I had in mind with the indirect stuff, performance was the main reason I didn't think submunitions would work all that well.

 

You could potentially define different behaviour for different materials and velocities and such, doing it through configs is definitely the right way to go.

[martin_lee 33]

On 09/05/2018 at 5:03 AM, Strike_NOR said:

It spawns on hitting "things" right now, and does currently not use scripting, only config adjustments, which should mean better overall performance.

 

There are some occasions where it does not work as intended, but they are easily outweighed by the times it works as intended. It also spalls on bunkers, houses, vehicles and other, making both HEAT, AP and even HE cause spalling lethal to unfortunate bystanders. 

 

Right now, only used by high caliber, long reload or "one shot" weapons which mean less performance drop. The beyond cover/armor effects are highly satisfying and more realistic, causing increased crew lethality. They also obey same penetrating laws as parent munition, so if the main shell doesn't fully penetrate, then most likely spall won't either. However, since spall generates in a cone, the occasional fragment will travel through armor at a more oblique angle, and may therefore get through. This is acceptable, and will roughly simulate "buckling" of interior walls chipping off spall fragments, like HESH is designed to do.

I think this is quite an amazing implimentation, especially when it can work on buildings and bunkers as well.

 

Spawning fragments on hitting anything could have an unexpected (or expected?) advantage. Say if I shoot at an unsuspecting tank with turned-out crews. My shot falls short, for reasons best kept secret for eternity, the fragments would still hurt the crews.

 

Could you share your computer spec as a reference? I am wondering if a mid-high end laptop would show a noticeable slowdown in the short window when the shell hits. It does sounds promising, though. I am wondering, say I have a few miniguns going off, would that amount of bullets have the same load as the fragments?

[Yoshi_E 179]

@Strike_NOR I would suggest you guys to move this into a new thread, instead of starting a discussion about a script/mod here.

[fallschirmjgergewehr 1]

Thanks for buff mantlet(already done before release)

Sorry for spam this topic to say buff mantlet but finally buffed Thanks Tank DLC

[Strike_NOR 898]

Any word on what was done to "increase predictability of HEAT penetrations" introduced with fridays devbranch update? :)