hello Pooners,

 

i was wondering since some times what was the exact effects of the armor ratings that one can assign to the ships and facilities in DB editors and Dale Hillier (aka VCDH) kindly answered to that question.

 

[15:41] Jan: would you know the exact effect of the Armor ratings?

[15:42] Jan: does it multiply the DP for example?

[15:42] VCDH: They are based on H3 paper rules

[15:42] VCDH: and no they don't affect DP

[15:42] Jan: ok

[15:43] VCDH: it affects how a weapon will affect a ship however

[15:43] Jan: does a warhead need a particular flag to affect the armoured platforms?

[15:44] VCDH: yes

[15:45] VCDH: in H3 the parameter is the warhead type

 

now in the H4 rules, there's a table titled "Armor effects" (page 7-5, section 7.3.3) where it's shown for example that a GP, an AP shell of 76 to 120mm caliber, an HE shell if 76 to 130 or fragments from an exploding missile can penetrate a light armor.

 

if you know more facts about the Armor Ratings, please share them

 

cheers,

 

Jan

Some amplification is necessary here:

 

Armor works much in the same way as the Harpoon3 paper rules (from which H2 was based on back in the day).

 

In the source code, there are two sets of tables that deal with armor. The first one deals with warhead penetration while the second deals with critical hits vs armor. I'm going to deal only with the first one here because I haven't looked at the second yet.

 

H3ANW uses 4 different levels of armor class: None, Light, Medium, Heavy and Special.

 

The amount of penetration a warhead has is directly related to the type of warhead it is and the amount of explosive power it contains (DP). The higher the DP rating of the warhead the more penetration it has for a given warhead type. The table is meant to provide a modifier for to the DP value vs the armor class. Please note that the DP value of a weapon is directly related to the amount of explosive it carries and NOT the total weight of the weapon. A Mk84 2000lb bomb for example, carries just under 1000lbs of explosive. The rest (fuse and steel casing) is not factored into the calculation.

 

Example - AGM-84 Harpoon series

 

Warhead:

 

Semi-Armor Piercing Type (there is a modifier for the warhead type)

227kg of HE carried

H5 (not H4.1) DP rating is 53dp (yes there is a change coming in DP calculation)

 

Under the table listed in the source code, there is an entry for this warhead class:

 

'101 - 250kg High Explosive'

 

The engine then preforms a lookup to determine just how effective the weapon will be vs the armor classes in this particular case:

 

None - 100% full effect

Light - 100% full effect

Medium - 50% of full effect (so 27dp)

Heavy - 25% of full effect (13dp)

Special - 5% of full effect (3dp)

 

It should be noted that this example covers about 40% of the warhead types in game.

 

There are a few caveats here to make note of. First is that ANW determines explosive weight on the basis that 1dp equals 5kg of explosive. So the engine will read 53dp as 265kg of explosive power. This takes the warhead into another category on the table but the only difference is that Special Armor effect is doubled from 3dp to 5dp (the rules state that you round down the value, the exact value is 5.8dp). This means that you should use the current (not H5) dp values.

 

Anti-Radar type weapons should have their warheads listed as Fragmentation types in ANW. This forces the engine to limit damage to the ship that would normally suffer more damage than the proportion warhead would indicate. In ANW Fragmentation is an airburt type weapon. Under the code air burst type weapons are unable to penetrate any kind of armor whatsoever. ARMs are tasked (if they score a hit) to preform a critical hit on the radar they are aimed at. So there may be light damage to the ship but nothing it can't handle. The radar on the other hand, will be smacked down.

 

A spreadsheet to help calculate DP values will be released with the H3 Platform Assistant in the near future.

 

Later

D