Strike_NOR

@oukej @Asheara and to whom it may concern (whoever has been sweating their butts off to recommend, design and program this into the game). My deepest, most sincere thank you :) The addition of HEAT shaped charge simulation to the game is something fundamentally important in order to re-create realistic results in armored warfare. I got my hopes up when the PCML had this introduced, but I feared for a while that it was a "test-case" to see if one should move forward with it or not. I'm happy you chose to move forward with it! In case anyone was wondering why this is important? Have a look at these screens (warning: viewer discretion is advised!) These things were not possible previously, but now you can use HEAT weaponry to target vital modules and crew, rather than just dealing a fixed amount of damage no matter where you hit! FAN-TASTIC! :D I see the damage values are WIP, and I think that the mechanics still need some tweaking to be game-friendly and realistic at the same time. Because right now, I can't seem to find a weak spot in the vehicle that will deal massive damage to it (ie. ammo rack-ish things). It's great that penetration from HEAT doesn't deal a crazy amount of hull damage, but now we need those vulnerable hitpoints (well protected by armor) that will send the hithull to 100 in few shots (simulating ammunition or fuel etc). Also, there is no spalling/fragmentation post-penetration, so you still have to score a direct hit at the crew/module to significantly damage them. But nonetheless! This is fantastic news! I also noted that the missile does explode and do HE damage, while the projectile does AP/penetration damage. Absolutely fantastic! I'm in love right now!

So.. Dunno if this is uncalled for, or below the belt. But.... If the devbranch logistics truck is driven by the vanilla AI..... :) (I hope you take it in good heart)

I'll explain. If a shot is deflected, then it did not reach the inside of the vehicle. Ergo: the shot does not hit the crew, modules or anything else inside. Main armor (thick steel/composite) has no moving parts or function other than stopping shots from penetrating. Ergo: damaging this is like shooting a block of wood with a BB gun. Even if it gets dented, you are going to need astronomical amounts of BB's to get through it. The exception arises when the shot reaches so deep, that the surface on the opposite side bulges and cracks, creating "spall". High-Explosive Squash Head (HESH) coined this method by smearing plastic explosives on the armor surface, before detonating it. This causes the shock to travel through the armor block and make the inside wall "explode" into metal shards. In either way: what bothers me is that in ArmA3, the hitpoint "hitHull" which is the vehicles global health pool took a crazy hit from even a glancing ricochet. Imagine a steel block of armor about 10cm thick. Imagine a shell dipping 2 cm into it, causing a "cut" before ricoheting out again. Is it fair that this kind of shot deals ~15% damage to the health? Which in turn brings me to; What is actually vehicle health? It's actually a game phenomenon. It's a way of easily handling damage with maths. We both know real life is far from it. ArmA strives to be realistic/authentic while keeping the perfect balance of interesting and engaging gameplay. So why do I even care? Well. The damage mechanics are being worked on. This is the time to make suggestions. A ways back I already suggested that devs don't remove damage to the hull when ricochets occur, but lessen its influence on the global health. It used to be that 6-7 grazing hits (ricochets with 0 pen) caused an MBT to detonate. It'd be more realistic if it were tenfold. Armor is to the tank, what the ribcage is to our body. Or the skull to our brain. The armor protects the pieces of the tank that are required to operate it. Namely crew and modules (tank systems). So here's hoping for less arcadey tank explosions, and more module/crew kills. Think about it. If you shot your car 500 times in the door. Would it explode? No. But how arma does it, every hit - even non penetrating will eat a good chunk out of the vehicles health and when that reaches 100% dmg - boom.

Also, can anyone confirm what Rhino performance improvement is? I'm not at the luxury of having access to A3 atm. :) Hoping for better torque acceleration

I have basically quoted the developers, not shared my opinion*. Watch the Tanks DLC teaser, read the first post in every Tanks DLC developer-created thread and you should get the idea. Anyways, the amount of salty sarcasm in both of your posts is not going to sway anyone. At best people just don't care, at worst you end up annoying them and throwing away their valuable time. There are better ways of approaching this, and you know it. *except This: And this: Which the devs actually adressed in todays devbranch after listening to constructive feedback from the community.

Well... it appears to me that the hatch of the right-side crew is actually partially blocking the driver from getting out. Must be fun during emergency crew evacuations :P Either way, there may be other reasons for this. Just a nitpick ;) I'm happy about the FFVs! Hopefully for Rhino MGS soon :)

At this point I already lost interest in your post, but decided to read everything anyhow. While your observations are correct, the entire post is loaded with personal feelings, and while that is OK, there are two important factors to remember. 1. The DLC is not finished 2. The vehicles are still getting balanced. Also, bohemia has thoroughly explained why we ended up with the Rhino and Nyx. They are highly specialized vehicles that help diversify the game. Giving all factions an extra MBT would be cool, but at the same time; it would almost over-saturate the game with MBT options that all employ the same strategy: Full frontal attack. The Rhino has a powerful LOAL/SACLOS ATGM that can hit any other faction tank from behind cover. This effectively removes the need to face the enemy tanks directly. Other than that, it does have a capable gun and high max speed. Imho it only needs better acceleration/torque. The Nyx can be airlifted, has high speed, is highly maneuverable and offers decent Multi-Purpose capabilities. The Autocannon variant deals with infantry up to medium armor and helicopters. The AT variant deals with everything. The AA variant deals with air threats ans infantry/light vehicles and the Recon can act as datalink broadcaster. It is also very small, making it harder to hit and easier to hide. Also. You forgot to comment the new AT launchers and added Offroad/4WD AT variants. Most likely, the HEAT weapons will receive a major mechanic overhaul, making the majority of ingame Anti-Tank weapons interact differently with vehicles. They are also continuously tweaking armot values, placement and projectile properties across the board, making the entire way tanks fight eachother different. So at best, this is your subjective PREview of the DLC. I'm waiting until release to review the DLC properly, because only then will we know exactly how these tanks and platform upgrades play out :)

@scavenjer The way I see it. The current fcs tells the shot at which angle it should leave, so why shouldn't it be able to feed that angle directly to the barrel elevation animation - and feed the traverse angle to the turret traverse animation. Probably easier said than done.

Just thought I'd try testing penetration yesterday, to see if I could see any changes. The good news is that it was the first time I experienced a ricochet from a Sabot round, where the ricochet did not damage the Hull of the vehicle! :) Don't know if it was random, but I was pleased to see it happen! Shot from Kuma, at about 1km. The shot strikes and detonates the front/right turret ERA of the Varsuk, then ricochets into the sky! Second shot, in the same area (although a less oblique angle), penetrates and deals damage to the crew and tank. Before, the first shot would usually deal full damage potential to the vehicles hull :) Don't know exactly what's going on "math-wise" at the point of impact with regards to ricochet, but it seems as if the shot ricochets because of hitting the ERA, and does not even touch the armor behind the ERA. So the question remains, would the hull receive damage, if the bounce happened on the surface of the turret, instead of the ERA panel?

It would be nice if ArmA at some point featured multiple zamerny points arranged by prioritization high to low. Your high priority would typically be center, then lower would be evenly divided around the target, so that if the high priority point is blocked from LOS, the AI fires at whatever point is next in priority if it has LOS to it. I guess in 2018 there may be other, more efficient ways to hardcode the way AI aims, but ArmA could definitely benefit from this. Technically speaking: if a tree trunk was obstructing LOS to both zamerny and center of mass at once, the AI can't fire, even if 90% of the target is visible?

AFAIK you have to "lock" targets differently with russian missiles. You have to use the visual TGP sensor to stabilize (point-track) an enemy target. Then you activate laser and fire when the missile has a lock on that. Effectively, the TGP is now lasing for you. Works the same for LGBs on both sides.

@Night515 @martin_lee @fn_Quiksilver & @Ex3B . Don't mean to nitpick, but you have gone off-topic. This is the Missile flight profiles and weapons improvement thread :)

Submunition parameters have been trickling in one by one over the last couple of weeks. It all points towards redesigning the way HEAT ammunition acts in the game, which is good :) Like you say though, the implementation of new HEAT mechanics, have not been introduced. Yet. However, what @FoxFort is seeing may be a result of: Which has also been done over the last two updates, and may not be complete yet :) I'll just say this. Size isn't all :) The actual explosion is often very small, while slow burning compositions and more generate a lot of smoke, giving the appearance of a large explosion. That's why Hollywood uses fuel canisters to create "explosions", rather than real explosives. Real explosions are "boring" for the audience :) I've been so lucky to have experience with different military grade high and low-explosives, professionally. It all depends on: -What type of explosive is used? -What composition is it used with (zirconium for incendiary, phosphorous for smoke/incendiary etc). -Where does it explode? (on ground, under ground, over ground, far into the air, water etc). -What is around the explosion? (Dust, dirt, mud, water, grass, leaves etc). -What is the weather conditions? (Shockwave condensation/visible shockwave?). Also, most high explosives are so powerful that they last so briefly you have to be expecting it to happen for the eye to catch it. C4 actually detonates with almost no smoke residue, just a huge bright yellow flash. Anyways. I hear your point. There is little variation in ArmA 3 explosion effects. I know Reyhard was showing off some smokepuff effects with the cluster bombs a while back. It could probably be used in the same fashion for HEAT, if they inherit the same submunition configuration :) *Waiting patiently*

Yep. We are all intensely waiting for that one devbranch update. It will change some damage mechanics quite drastically. It could be any day now....

In any case, it will be interesting to see how SLAT armor will react to AP, HE, HEAT and tandem HEAT in the future dev updates. If the devs wanted the SLAT armor to be a "Get out of jail free card" (as it is now) then technically you could just angle the tank 90 degrees and use one of the other 3 sides of SLAT armor to keep taking hits without consequence. However, I am getting the feeling that they are trying a rock paper scissor method where: SLAT = reduce or cancel effectiveness of light HEAT weapons (rpg-7 - maaws basically). ERA = reduce or cancel the effectiveness of all light and medium HEAT weapons (larger HEAT weaponry/small tandem HEAT). Heavy ERA = reduce or cancel the effectiveness of ALL HEAT weapons (meaning even large Air to Ground missiles may see reduced effectiveness against tanks). Otherwise it just becomes rather bland. Add-on armor = 1 extra life guarantee. I'd laugh if the Nyx cage armor protected it from a Macer (maverick), or Vorona.

I can see that, but one of the main advantages of the cage armor is that it is lightweight and cheap compared to most other anti-HEAT systems, except APS (in weight - APS is very costly, and you would not primarily use that against RPG-7 anyways).

Basically what Scavenjer said, except I do not think the devs said the Titan AT was single warhead, but definitely lighter/smaller and with less armor penetration capabilities. The Vorona is a big fat missile. It'll mess up anyone's day and doesn't care much about ERA :) Among other balances: Titan AT is fire-and-forget, meaning the shooter can relocate to a safe position and reload before the shot has landed. The Vorona is SACLOS meaning manual guidance and constant line of sight to target is required (also it is harder to aim).

HEAT is most likely subject to change in a very near future update to the devbranch. They introduced an offset parameter now that allows you to spawn the submunition forwards or aft of the parent munition (simulating stand-off distance) to the target. This mechanic allows for two very important things: If the parent munition can have its own hit effect, it can now be a pure HE/Frag effect (like a real HEAT warhead has). The submunition can now act as the penetrating shaped charge jet, which has an armor-piercing effect. This means that ArmA3 should now handle the HEAT weapon as a true multi-purpose weapon, as well as be tailored for different balances of HE and AP effects. Currently, before HEAT rework, the HEAT ammo works as a strange splashdamage weapon (indirectHit) with very high damage. This does not reflect how these weapons work IRL, nor make a lot of sense from a game-design point of view. It's basically like saying "Let's make a second HE ammo, make it explode with more damage, but in a smaller area and call it HEAT". - In other words, it is essentially abusing excessive HE damage to gain anti-tank lethality. So to address your comment/observations, the HEAT ammo currently deals very high damage intended for tanks, but that in turn makes it just as deadly towards medium/light vehicles. Since these have lower HP/Protection they simply die faster. APFSDS works by penetration mechanics, which makes it deal damage based on how much speed it loses in the target. If it's a light target, it can "overpenetrate" without dealing very much damage. This means APFSDS can actually do more damage against heavily armored targets, than lightly armored ones. (You can see this when shooting the back of pickups, trucks and even sometimes when shooting through helicopters.) Current HE does somewhat large damage over a large area, and as such, during a vehicle direct hit, it may actually do less damage than HEAT, and therefore seem weaker. So let's hope for a complete HEAT rework soon, where HEAT has A: An explosive effect (small fragmentation) and B: An armor piercing effect (strong against heavy armor/weak against unarmored). Yeah, there was a huge SLAT vs RPG debate. I guess it ended with ArmA3 isn't real life. But to sum it up: SLAT cages are designed to specifically counter RPG-7 rockets, due to their fuze wiring. During a best-case successful defence against RPG-7, the fuze is destroyed before the warhead can detonate - meaning the entire armor-piercing effect is lost. This leads to minimal damage to the SLAT and vehicle. The second best-case is that the fuze is destroyed, so the shaped charge cannot form, but the warhead still explodes on impact. This means there is no armor-piercing effect, but the HE charge still detonates, causing some fragmentation and possibly significant damage to the SLAT cage. Worst case scenario: If the RPG-tip hits the actual SLAT bars (instead of between), it will explode as designed - but have an increased standoff distance. This allows the shaped charge to completely form before hitting the vehicle main armor and may even increase the effective penetration depth - compared to hitting a vehicle without SLAT armor. So from a game-design standpoint this is really hard to simulate, as it would require extremely detailed firegeometry meshes, or a Random Number Generator feature that emulates the chance that the RPG reacts in one of the three ways I described above. This is also unwanted, as it causes unpredictability. The best realistic approach (AFAIK) would be to make it only work against RPG-7, and do virtually nothing against other heat weapons (except for maybe very oblique angles). The best game-design approach (IMO) would probably be to make it effective against RPG-7's and a little effective against every other HEAT weapon. A bad game-design approach (IMO) would be to make SLAT defeat ALL HEAT weapons (because why the heck would you ever opt to use a vehicle without SLATs then?) Edit: Against APFSDS and AP ammo (High Density Core ammo) SLAT should effectively do near nothing. As if shooting plywood with .50 cal. Sure, the bullet will take some damage, but it will still do significant damage to whatever is behind it. On the other side, SLAT armor should not suffer much damage from these kinetic penetrators, since it is like the equivalent of shooting a wire-mesh fence with a .50 cal bullet. Even if you hit a piece of wire, the fence will be mostly intact!

Ok. Let's try the glass half full version :) Devs have said repeatedly that Tanks DLC marks the end of the current ArmA3 roadmap. I can't recall that they have stated anywhere that they will stop supporting ArmA3 along with that? Bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations are most likely going to continue for a while, probably even after their next flagship installation launches. We will most likely NOT see more official DLC though. Bohemia has, however, opened up for officially supported/reviewed third-party DLC which I think is a great idea. Just look at what Jets DLC accomplished with B01 studios! This way, Bohemia will make sure the quality of said content meets a certain level before going into release. We will most likely witness anything from large faction packages to total conversions (such as RHS and IFA3). So hopefully, the art dept. will find the time to make some olive skins for the forgotten vehicles somewhere after the DLC, if not before :)

The only possible reason I can think this is the case may be as a type of safety feature. There's a lot less collateral damage if you accidentially fire some 7.62 as opposed to 120mm. Either that or it is an oversight.

Interesting information from the developers today :) @reyhard thanks for the screenies. Would be nice to access the game in this diag mode for testing purposes :) The shot and hitpoints diags go a long way though :)

I have a strong suspicion that HEAT is going to receive a rework before tanks DLC release, in which case, top-down attack will have a much higher likelihood of reaching the crew and taking them out. This means that tanks will more frequently be incapacitated by crew loss rather than vehicle destruction. I hope :)

Well... rumor has it that the Titan will be balanced either by new damage mechanics or general damage tweaks. So let's wait and see how that fares

AFAIK top down attack saclos is rather uncommon. Not 100% certain, but the real life counterpart of the titan would probably use IR contrast seeking. Meaning it should lock onto heat sources/shapes. I believe that it can be used in a form of "area lock" too where the sensor tries to hit whatever is under the crosshair when you fire. But after launch, the missile should be "fire and forget", meaning no saclos. However...... Titan is inspired by Rafael "Mini-Spike" system which was discontinued in 2016. They could make it any way they like.

Haha, nice random bug there. So to break down what's happening: Like @HaseDesTodes pointed out - you fired the missile in Direct Attack mode - so it's pure luck that the missile didn't hit anything on the way to the target. You should be using Top Attack mode for these kinds of shots, but nonetheless, the missile did, in fact, acquire a lock early on and track the target. The funny bit here is that missiles in ArmA can not ricochet. They either collide with something (and explode) or they do not. So this means that by some random chance, the missile missed the laser spot, camo tent, sandbags and all on the first attempt (basically it barnstormed the AA emplacement) Barnstorming: The really wonkyness starts now: For some reason, the missile can still track things that are outside the seekers field of view, and decides to go straight up and back down! Apparently, it doesn't respect the missile laws: Ultimately, it rises up and gets a better look at things (because why not) and dives down into a HESCO wall - because nevermind the actual target now. (lol). Anyways, here are some observations/lessons learned: Use Top-Attack mode for Lock-On-After-Launch targets. Missile should have lost track once it lost line of sight (and fly off into the distance). No U-turns bohemia!!! ;)