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HEAT rounds

TMO

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PIAT etc. has two types of round, HE and AP. The reality is only one HEAT round fulfilled both AP and HE capabilities . Can the real life multi-purpose round (i.e. HE and AP capability) be modelled in Command Ops?

Regards

Tim
 
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PIAT etc. has two types of round, HE and AP. The reality is only one HEAT round fulfilled both AP and HE capabilities . Can the real life multi-purpose round (i.e. HE and AP capability) be modelled in Command Ops?

Regards

Tim
HEAT means High Explosive Anti-Tank, colloquially known as shaped charge, primarily used for armor piercing (AP), but in some cases bunker busting.

I think the AP round for the PIAT is actually a HEAT round, since the other version of an armor piercing round relies on the impact of a high velocity high density projectile, and the PIAT (muzzle velocity 76.2 Meters per Second) doesn't fire at high velocities (more than 762 meters per second for a cannon, nearly 500 meters per second for a tank).

In game terms, the power of a round is determined by its armor piercing capability regardless of the speed the weapon firing it propels it. A PIAT round can pierce nearly 110 MM of armor.
 

ioncore

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Can the real life multi-purpose round (i.e. HE and AP capability) be modelled in Command Ops?

Tim,
Yes, you can assign the same shell type (HE, or HEAT or whatever you want that shell type to represent) both to the anti-personnel and to the anti-armor roles of a weapon. So, e.g. you can have a field gun which only has HE rounds, but it can still fire these HE rounds at an enemy armour for self-defense (of course, the penetration values for HE shells are usually quite low).
This kind of engagements will be happening in the upcoming East Front DLC that features a lot of field gun types employed in AT role without having any dedicated AP/HEAT rounds back then in 1938-1939.
 
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TMO

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As I said before the PIAT as currently modelled has 2 rounds HE (max range 500m) and 8 rounds AP (max range 100m). The British and US armies liked to work in multiple of six where possible in my opinion. A British platoon with one PIAT had six rounds (check out Gary Kennedy). I now see I can combine blast radius and armour penetration in the estab editor for an individual weapon. My questions are, does it matter if I add burst radius to the AP capability, or armour penetration (110mm) to the HE capability. Also the blast radius according to Matthew Moss, The PIAT is 4.5m. So If I model a PIAT round with both HE and AP capabilities (i.e. the HEAT round) does this affect the game mechanics? For instance If I model armour penetration 110mm penetration and a blast radius of 4.5m, does that mean that any armoured vehicle within 4.5m also gets a hit?
 
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As I said before the PIAT as currently modelled has 2 rounds HE (max range 500m) and 8 rounds AP (max range 100m). The British and US armies liked to work in multiple of six where possible in my opinion. A British platoon with one PIAT had six rounds (check out Gary Kennedy). I now see I can combine blast radius and armour penetration in the estab editor for an individual weapon. My questions are, does it matter if I add burst radius to the AP capability, or armour penetration (110mm) to the HE capability. Also the blast radius according to Matthew Moss, The PIAT is 4.5m. So If I model a PIAT round with both HE and AP capabilities (i.e. the HEAT round) does this affect the game mechanics? For instance If I model armour penetration 110mm penetration and a blast radius of 4.5m, does that mean that any armoured vehicle within 4.5m also gets a hit?
In terms of munitions, it creates a fantasy if an AP round has a "blast radius" greater than the impact point, and a HE round has an armor penetration number in a radius greater than a direct hit.

Modern weaponry sometimes uses multi purpose rounds which are little more than canisters that disperse multiples of shaped charges over an area to accomplish both the damage of HE (an area weapon) and armor piercing on lightly armored targets. The technology for a gun tube to fire a shell with a number of shaped charges which dispersed over an area just before projectile impact wasn't available in WWII.

The closest weaponry got to dispersing massive damage over a large area was the first designs of napalm bombs dropped from heavy bombers and late in the war by carrier-based combat support aircraft.
 

TMO

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HEAT rounds, as I'm sure you know, could also be used as regular HE when required.

Regards

Tim
 

TMO

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Jim, not trying to create a 'fantasy' weapon, just trying to recreate a 'real' weapon

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Tim
 

ioncore

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My questions are, does it matter if I add burst radius to the AP capability, or armour penetration (110mm) to the HE capability.

Step by step guide:
- create single projectile type in the editor (say, PIAT HEAT)
upload_2020-11-15_23-40-53.png

- make sure you use new projectile both in aarm and aper and assign 6 shells in aarm tab and 0 in aper tab
upload_2020-11-15_23-43-25.png

upload_2020-11-15_23-43-43.png

- when firing in aper mode, PIAT will still feed on projectiles from the aarm pool because of the same projectile type used, so you'll be equally able to fire any of these 6 projectils in aper or aarm role.

- do NOT assign burst radius to a weapon in aarm mode and do NOT assign penetration in aper mode, this won't make a sense.

So If I model a PIAT round with both HE and AP capabilities (i.e. the HEAT round) does this affect the game mechanics?

It will function properly if you model it as described above.

For instance If I model armour penetration 110mm penetration and a blast radius of 4.5m, does that mean that any armoured vehicle within 4.5m also gets a hit?

No.
 

TMO

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Thanks for this. Would this be the same with Bazooka rounds and Panzerfaust etc.?

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Tim
 

TMO

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Another question. How often, if at all, were Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck rounds used purely in the HE role? (Gunnar, going to need your help here.)

Regards

Tim
 

GoodGuy

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PIAT etc. has two types of round, HE and AP. The reality is only one HEAT round fulfilled both AP and HE capabilities . Can the real life multi-purpose round (i.e. HE and AP capability) be modelled in Command Ops?

Regards

Tim

Hi Tim,

as far as I know there were 3 types of round, HEAT (high explosive anti-tank), White Phosphor and "inert" (for training purposes, most likely containing weights to simulate the actual weight of a live round). The heat round contained a single-stage shaped charge. Unlike the Russian post-war RPG-7, which could/can also be loaded with special AP (anti-personnel) rounds (some are combos, means HEAT + AP, some are pure AP fragmentation rounds with a 40-mm fragmentation component), the PIAT rounds weren't really effective against infantry, unless a PIAT operator scored a direct hit on an enemy soldier, but even then there was no guarantee that the round would go off when it hit the comparably soft surface of a human body or say a soldier's arm or leg, especially with the first revision, where the warhead had to hit squarely.
During the Battle of Berlin, German and Russian units used a high number of Panzerfäuste (plural :p) only to enter adjacent buildings or to remove walls where enemy troops were hiding/taking cover.

While the PIAT warhead contained 1.1 kg of explosives (the manufacturer switched to TNT in the Mark III and Mark IV revisions), the blast was purely used to create the armor-piercing plasma stream, so there was pretty much no fragmentation and only a HE blast (if at all, and that wasn't a 360° blast, ofc, as the blast was used to compress the metal component/lining and drive the resulting plasma beam forward).
EDIT: The Panzerfaust contained 1.6 kg of explosives.

For comparison, the British "Mills bomb" No. 36 hand grenade contained "only" 68.2 g of HE, the No. 69 hand grenade (a typical offensive grenade - as it did not create ANY fragments - with impact fuze) contained 92 g. The former developed its deadly effect (its danger area amounted to ~91 meters, which was 3x or 4x the throwing range) by sending out quite a few metal fragments, the latter was a special purpose grenade that only created a (HE) blast, which was supposed to be used when its operator had no or little defensive cover and in confined areas on the offensive.

The same goes for the German Panzerfaust shaped charges. The Germans worked on something they called Splitterring ("splinter" or "fragmentation ring"), at least according to a number of publications, and which were planned to be put on (or around?) the Panzerfaust warheads - I guess, but there are no reports of actual use. A pure AP version ("Schrappnellfaust" = "splinter fist") never left the design stage.
 
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ioncore

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unless a PIAT operator scored a direct hit on an enemy soldier, but even then there was no guarantee that the round would go off
This reminds me of this Soviet guy who've knocked down two enemy soldiers with a Panzerfaust in a melee (near Neiße, March 1945, pretty ordinary thing for a melee if you ask me, but later propaganda turned it into "more than 10 Germans" and that's how he became famous, but whatever).
Sadly we are not capable of modelling this kind of anti-personnel capability of an anti-tank weapon in CmdOps2 properly.
scale_1200
 

GoodGuy

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In terms of munitions, it creates a fantasy if an AP round has a "blast radius" greater than the impact point, and a HE round has an armor penetration number in a radius greater than a direct hit.

Post-war RPG-7 launchers can be loaded with dual warheads, which contain a HEAT and an AP component. The round has a special design to still allow for creating the plasma beam while creating an AP (fragmentation) blast on the outside at the same time. You are correct, if you are saying that such warheads were not available during WW2.

But the bulbous Russian 300-mm M30/M-31 Katyusha HE rounds actually had considerable armor-piercing power, even though they were designed to be used against inf concentrations. While the rounds were designed to strike infantry with fragments at around stomach level, the fragments could (and did) penetrate tank armor. There are a number of reports (and at least one photo) where German idle/parked tanks got hit by fragments of those rounds, which - in a few instances - even penetrated the weaker spots of Panzer IIIs (IIRC), means they penetrated armor parts (corners of the hull/chassis) with a thickness of 10 - 13 mm. There was no direct hit involved in any of those instances, afaik. The travel speed of the fragments was so high that the fragments could cut through those hull parts easily.

The closest weaponry got to dispersing massive damage over a large area was the first designs of napalm bombs dropped from heavy bombers and late in the war by carrier-based combat support aircraft.

The M-30/M-31 300-mm rockets could be used to devastate large areas, IF fired in salvos of over a hundred rockets. They were pretty inaccurate though.
 
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GoodGuy

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Another question. How often, if at all, were Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck rounds used purely in the HE role? (Gunnar, going to need your help here.)

Regards

Tim

I would imagine that the actual HE blast in the immediate area was more powerful than the blast of the PIAT, as it contained 50% more explosives, but I am not sure if the blast would actually kill enemy soldiers reliably, as the actual explosion process is almost like an implosion, as the explosion works inwards and (mainly) in a forward direction, not outwards in a 360° fashion.
Maybe it could kill someone if the blast occured near the head, or let's say when the beam missed but when the compression blast would still hit the head/upper torso.
Technically, the beam of a hollow-charge warhead can penetrate armor because the armor plate behaves (pretty much) like water, once the beam (which is pretty much a beam of liquified metal: the metal lining inside the warhead is surrounded by HE explosives, and the explosion - inward and forward - creates the mentioned metal beam) hits the plate, that's why the liquified metal beam can even penetrate 200 mm of armor, easily. I am guessing that human body parts would react in the same manner, so if a round actually goes off, and if the beam hits a soldier, then there'd be a clean hole at the entry point (means a FULL penetration), in theory. The forward blast of the H/C case may also affect the area around the entry point, but I am not sure to what extent. Say the beam would develop on/hit 1 of 3 soldiers (walking in VERY close succession, with gaps of less than 1 meter) then I am guessing that the beam would penetrate all 3 of them, but the HE blast would only affect (if at all) the first soldier in the column.

EDIT: There are combat reports of the Großdeutschland Division indicating the use of large quantities of Panzerfausts in 1945, with individual soldiers firing up to 76 Panzerfausts in one operation (to eliminate enemy infantry, supposedly). A number of Abrams and M60 vets keep juggling (and speculating) with comparisons like the blast of a Panzerfaust would be equal to the blast of a German stick grenade with minor fragments (!), in some forums, but I am not sure about that, as the warhead cone's hull was designed to contain and direct the blast towards the armor, so I am not sure if and how many fragments were created.
The movie "Blackhawk Down" contains a scene where a US soldier gets knocked off his feet twice (and covered with rubble after the 2nd near hit) by RPG-7 rounds exploding next to him, but where those 2 blasts didn't even leave a mark on the guy. The scene depicts the real event that was confirmed by fellow soldiers.
I am not sure which grenade version the Somali militias were using in that area, but I am guessing that they were mostly using the pure HEAT version, as the HEAT/AP combo or the pure AP version would have created quite a few deadly fragments.
 
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TMO

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Thanks for all the input guys. I'm coming to the conclusion that in this game HEAT rounds should be modelled as purely AP.

Regards

Tim
 

GoodGuy

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A PIAT round can pierce nearly 110 MM of armor.

The PIAT could penetrate 101,6 mm (4 in) of armor. Also, at least acccording to David French (in "Raising Churchill's Army: The British Army and the War Against Germany 1919-1945", 2000), field tests conducted in 1944 confirmed the combat experiences made in 1943, the hit ratios never exceeded 60% in those tests. A lot of the problems with faulty fuzes (at least 25% of the initial production were faulty, according to French) may have been solved in spring/summer 1944. A part of the problem with the accuracy may have stemmed from the trigger system:
There was a significant trigger delay, even the manual stressed that the "trigger pressure is long and heavy. After pressing the trigger there is an appreciable delay before the bomb is fired ; it is essential to maintain correct hold and aim during this delay."
This and the grenade's tail design may have affected the weapon's accuracy significantly. Its effective range and velocity (76 m/sec) was pretty competitive, though:
The Panzerfaust 60 (range: 60 meters) had a velocity of 45 meters/second, the Panzerfaust 100 a velocity of 60 m/sec.
 
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