Yak-9T - incredible firepower (or maybe incredible tank's lack of armor?)

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by JtD

Pursuivant, the shrapnel created by a single 20mm or 30mm round penetrating is by far not enough to reliably take out a medium sized or larger WW2 tank.

Agreed. But, my point about 20-30 mm AP rounds is that if they penetrate they're going to do a fair bit of damage to their local area - probably resulting in injury or death to a crewman or to some vital system. You won't get a "brew up" or "catastrophic kills" with a fuel or ammo explosion, instantly dead crew and a fiercely burning tank, but you will get a tank which can no longer operate offensively - which is what IL2 "kills" are actually measuring.

This is why I think it would be more realistic for IL2 to have three damage states = healthy, mobility kill/retreat/crew bailout, dead. No new damage textures are needed, you just have mobility killed/retreat/crew bailout tanks stop moving. The player might see a HUD message along the lines of "enemy tank damaged".

Additionally, there should be an option for "realistic tank armor" which considerably boosts the armor and durability for AFV, making them much harder to actually kill and bringing actual tank kills in the game in line with modern research into actual effectiveness of air-to-ground attacks. Perhaps doubling or tripling existing "panzer unit" scores for heavy tanks, and doubling panzer unit scores for medium tanks, would do it. Light AFV might get a 50% increase in panzer units, with no increase for soft vehicles.

That way, assault planes could still be hell on earth for convoys of soft vehicles, but not the "tank killers" they were purported to be.

Originally Posted by JtD

The reason why the standard AP round carries more energy is because it carries part of its energy as chemical energy of the explosive inside.

This is only true for APHE or similar rounds. If you're talking about standard AP, as was used at the beginning of WW2, the penetrator was just a piece of hardened steel. Soon after the war started standard AP was upgraded to Armor-Piercing-Capped (APC) where there as a soft metal tip placed on the tip of the shell to help it "grip" the armor rather than shatter on impact.

From there, there were a number of improvements to standard AP, such as API, APHE/APE/APEX, HEAT, APDS, APIT and APT. The Germans were the pioneers in developing APHE and APDS rounds. The British never developed a satisfactory APHE shell and mostly used just AP or APC for their tanks.