The issue with the shallow setup is that after an explosive shell or two your airgap is destroyed, and now you don't have any air gap at all. Which is really bad unless your opponent is firing pure shaped or squash damage like in your test setup. Your testing only works because you're firing pure HESH/HEAT at a single spot of armor. Proper explosive shells would strip the outer lay of armor off quickly. Now you have a huge area exposed with literally 0 air gap protection at all, so any HESH/HEAT shells that hit on top of that will make things go very wrong very fast in this scenario. Also, my preference would be two metal in the back and an airgap. That would literally double your protection behind the airgap. Which is obviously quite significant. Even a single space over matters a lot in such a scenario. Everything about this setup takes things too far to the extreme, granting weird results.
Everything is a tradeoff, I think the advantage against anything with a AP head might ne well worth it, but I base my conclusions on what works and not, and I may change my mind if it ends up being a miserable failure, however the tests speak for them selves and from these conclusions I will design future battleships!
@@GMODISM Honestly, doing a 3 layer armour is probably the ideal vs most things, with a thin skin, a second layer with angles to null chunks of kinetic damage to the main brick, and then the spalling layer behind that to catch any HEAT or HESH frags that have made it through the first 2 layers. The problem is that you would need at least a decently sized vessel to make it worthwhile and not simply worse than a 2 layer setup
For the Applique Panels, you can use the 4m slopes. They have the same health as the full panels for some reason, and you get a little bit of angle to help with kinetics. (Don't use the 4.5m slope panels, the hitbox is only 4m and the slope is shallower)
Small correction, at 46:00 you were shooting regular heat with high penetration factor, not APHEAT, you forgot to refill APS before shooting. You can also clearly see this by how the shell does not penetrate anything before the shaped charge goes off. Deep is always best for APHEAT as long as it's deep enough to stop the kinetic damage so the shaped charge goes off before the air gap.
@@GMODISM Yeah deep airgap seems to only work in very specific cases and is useless if the projectile can get through the thick armor layer in front, both against APHEAT and HEAT, so it doesn't seem too reliable. The only thing I can think of which would be good against both APHEAT and other rounds is both a shallow airgap and a secondary deep one. Also I feel like having the spall liner in the third layer rather than the second for a shallow airgap is the way to go because of armor stacking.
On the HESH test, there's a big issue here, and that is that because of how HESH works in the game, it is always better to have bigger HESH under all circumstances, the ROF of smaller caliber and shorter HESH does not account for the damage lost, 8 meter 500mm will always have higher damage output than any length of 200mm, if you were to use large caliber HESH against shallow armor you would suffer to an extreme extend as a single shell would blow off a solid 5x5 meter radius, and that is assuming that it is a single barreled turret hitting, if it is 2 guns hitting about the same area, you will instead be seeing a penetration on the very first hit, this test only accounts for less potent weapons and is not realistic as there are many, MANY cases where shallow armor just loses out, at least when countering HESH, you want to always have a much deeper spacing because every meter that it passes through reduces the spalling effect. The HESH test also does not take into account that, despite the deep armor being penetrated at the same time as the shallow was, the angle at which the spalling is entering the interior is MUCH lesser as that's still only a 1x4 meter hole that the shrapnel can pass through as anything taking a wider angle gets caught still, vs that of the shallow where the moment it hits the pain armor, ALL of the shrapnel now gets into the actual vehicle itself which increases lethality
I would strongly consider adding one more layer of metal to the outer armor, even if it comes at the expense of one layer of inner armor. This should make the armor more flexible in withstanding impacts from multiple, various rounds without losing it's integrity. I hope to see more videos exploring various armor schemes and nuances, these are very interesting. Thank you for making it. Side question: I know HESH AP is calculated based on the armor of the blocks it travels through before fragments spawn, but has anyone tested if it matters if lower armor blocks such as wood is more effective as the last layer, or could you place it in the middle if the outer armor for the same effect?
Glad you enjoy it and we shall indeed! Yes having 2 meters of metal is the common accepted way to get standard buffed armour suitable for anything, I do however wanna try this thin armour scheme after these results and see if it indeed can be worth it. I do remember that the last layer mattered the most, but it is some calculation of the average layers where the latter ones are more important, could be hard to test but with a big shell it might matter!
I like seeing weapon testing results. Note that HEAT pen settings will vary in actual HEAT pen metric by shell guage, and iirc shell speed, as rails get more pen factor in my memory. A HEAT pen metric of ~24.2 is enough for HEAT to penetrate 4 stacked metal beams. As AC effects this, I find myself wondering if ring shields will affect block count of HEAT pen, and logically it would, but FTD being FTD, I'll just say I haven't tested that. But 24.2 HEAT pen may be at .5 setting for some APS and like, .7 setting for others. Around 30 HEAT pen should deal with most non-excessive armor schemes, though heavy armor presence throws math off on number of blocks penned. One thing that I would like to see sometime is whether it's more effective to have half-beam slope right against another half-beam slope and then a couple solid beams, when it comes to kinetics and HE and frag, or half-beam slope backed with solid beam and then another half beam slope and solid beam. Ala which cuts more damage- the armor stacking, or the sloping, when both are used.
I like to keep my armor itself thin so I put a massive air gap between my armor and the enemy weapon. Yet it doesn't seem to be doing anything? Please help.
Not sure what you mean because this reads like this: I have thin armour because if it was thicker, I would be as many meters closer to the enemy weapon as the thickness increase. (Looking from a point of view where the ships are at a specific distance apart)
@@joonalehtinen5462 From what I remember, I was making a really dumb joke about me making my armor thinner, so that there would be a few more meters of air on top of the several kilometers of air between me and the enemy ship. Hence, a massive a air gap.
(At the early point of the video before any shootyshoots occurs); the slopes are what make the airgap? I thought it would have been a full empty space for it to be an airgap?
Yes indeed the slopes do provide an airgap that will activate hesh and heat shells, so that is handy, BUT a real block free of anything is better because thump damage will be stopped that way too, and that is also true for the new plasma system, since thump was not a serious factor, but plasma is, it will indeed change the way we are doing airgaps in the future I'd suspect, since with this added plasma we really should have a real airgap with nothing that can make the plasma damage spread over to the next layer... But for hesh and heat the beamslope gaps where fine!
@@GMODISMOk, I was really confused since when I hear 'airgap' I think fully separated from the other stuff as opposed to the equivalent of putting cut-in-half tubes between two plates of metal. lol
Why would you add armour to the shallow one then conclude it's best, what if you gave the deep armor a shallow airgap AND keep the deep airgap angled armor.
That is't quite accurate, my thought of internal armour is more like a mental note that I should have it, the results where concluded without that extra thing as you could clearly see, from my testing, shallow air gap offers the most amount of benefits with the least drawbacks, APHEAT is a counter yes, but if it's strong enough it's a counter to any of these single airgap schemes anyways
@@GMODISM Yes and AP focused HEAT APHEAT cares a lot more about a deeper airgap than this dones. You put it as SMD. There is also plenty of other shells you havent tried like SAPHE vs properly contained armor or some explosive or thump damage hitting then heat happening... If you don't math to predict the outcome, that always turns out it ends up innacurate. Empirical testing doesn't win you fights vs better vehicles if you don't get every single thing going on and need to "observe".
@@no3ironman11100 To be fair sometimes we see really weird things in tourneys where two different shell types synergise in a really unusual way that maths alone couldn't accurately show.
wow, Just watching this hurt me. Usually your videos are fine but this one is embarrassing. Not only is good airgap placement against different shell types common knowledge, but you come across as blatantly biased throughout the whole video. The methods used to test this were horrendously inaccurate to what a real scenario would be like, and multiple times you make hypocritical statements. For example, when testing APHEAT, it is well know that the deeper your airgap is the better it will perform, and your tests show this fairly well; However you rank the medium airgap below the thin airgap, not only did you rank performance on a factor other than APHEAT, but you completely ignored the fact that the thin airgap will die to way smaller APHEAT than the medium would. Another example is after the applique tests at 46:00when you run two tests both using pure heat, and you draw a different conclusion from it. That along with with the language you used throughout the video showed me that this test was not made to determine the best airgap placement depending on the shell being fired at it, but instead made to your own point. Some of these mistakes are understandable, however to try and pass this off as "Empirical Testing" is just embarrassing. Adding to the mess that is this video, you very clearly don't fully understand how heat works, yet you feel that you are in a position of authority on the topic of air gap placement. My advice to you would be to wait until you fully understand the topic before you make a video on it because I would be ashamed if i had this video attached to my name, and it looks like I am not alone on this, reading the comments, most disagree with your conclusion and many point out a lot of the same flaws this comment does. I mean this with total sincerity, Take the hint, look at actual weapons used at given price ranges, talk with people who know what they are doing in this game, do some math, and give an actual hypothesis if you are going to be doing true Empirical Testing.
The issue with the shallow setup is that after an explosive shell or two your airgap is destroyed, and now you don't have any air gap at all. Which is really bad unless your opponent is firing pure shaped or squash damage like in your test setup.
Your testing only works because you're firing pure HESH/HEAT at a single spot of armor. Proper explosive shells would strip the outer lay of armor off quickly. Now you have a huge area exposed with literally 0 air gap protection at all, so any HESH/HEAT shells that hit on top of that will make things go very wrong very fast in this scenario.
Also, my preference would be two metal in the back and an airgap. That would literally double your protection behind the airgap. Which is obviously quite significant. Even a single space over matters a lot in such a scenario. Everything about this setup takes things too far to the extreme, granting weird results.
Everything is a tradeoff, I think the advantage against anything with a AP head might ne well worth it, but I base my conclusions on what works and not, and I may change my mind if it ends up being a miserable failure, however the tests speak for them selves and from these conclusions I will design future battleships!
@@GMODISM Honestly, doing a 3 layer armour is probably the ideal vs most things, with a thin skin, a second layer with angles to null chunks of kinetic damage to the main brick, and then the spalling layer behind that to catch any HEAT or HESH frags that have made it through the first 2 layers.
The problem is that you would need at least a decently sized vessel to make it worthwhile and not simply worse than a 2 layer setup
For the Applique Panels, you can use the 4m slopes. They have the same health as the full panels for some reason, and you get a little bit of angle to help with kinetics.
(Don't use the 4.5m slope panels, the hitbox is only 4m and the slope is shallower)
While that angle is miniscule it should be better than panels, so good tip!
Small correction, at 46:00 you were shooting regular heat with high penetration factor, not APHEAT, you forgot to refill APS before shooting. You can also clearly see this by how the shell does not penetrate anything before the shaped charge goes off. Deep is always best for APHEAT as long as it's deep enough to stop the kinetic damage so the shaped charge goes off before the air gap.
Opps! Yeah all right! So deep airgap against heat and apheat is great when it is thick enough, it's just that it is really risky if it isn't
@@GMODISM Yeah deep airgap seems to only work in very specific cases and is useless if the projectile can get through the thick armor layer in front, both against APHEAT and HEAT, so it doesn't seem too reliable. The only thing I can think of which would be good against both APHEAT and other rounds is both a shallow airgap and a secondary deep one. Also I feel like having the spall liner in the third layer rather than the second for a shallow airgap is the way to go because of armor stacking.
On the HESH test, there's a big issue here, and that is that because of how HESH works in the game, it is always better to have bigger HESH under all circumstances, the ROF of smaller caliber and shorter HESH does not account for the damage lost, 8 meter 500mm will always have higher damage output than any length of 200mm, if you were to use large caliber HESH against shallow armor you would suffer to an extreme extend as a single shell would blow off a solid 5x5 meter radius, and that is assuming that it is a single barreled turret hitting, if it is 2 guns hitting about the same area, you will instead be seeing a penetration on the very first hit, this test only accounts for less potent weapons and is not realistic as there are many, MANY cases where shallow armor just loses out, at least when countering HESH, you want to always have a much deeper spacing because every meter that it passes through reduces the spalling effect.
The HESH test also does not take into account that, despite the deep armor being penetrated at the same time as the shallow was, the angle at which the spalling is entering the interior is MUCH lesser as that's still only a 1x4 meter hole that the shrapnel can pass through as anything taking a wider angle gets caught still, vs that of the shallow where the moment it hits the pain armor, ALL of the shrapnel now gets into the actual vehicle itself which increases lethality
Hey, about the hesh Shell..
The differenz comes from the AP value that it gets from the stacked Armor before.
I'am sure you know this 😉
Ah yes, harder armor because it is double, thanks, didn't think of that but yes I know it! :)
I would strongly consider adding one more layer of metal to the outer armor, even if it comes at the expense of one layer of inner armor. This should make the armor more flexible in withstanding impacts from multiple, various rounds without losing it's integrity. I hope to see more videos exploring various armor schemes and nuances, these are very interesting. Thank you for making it.
Side question: I know HESH AP is calculated based on the armor of the blocks it travels through before fragments spawn, but has anyone tested if it matters if lower armor blocks such as wood is more effective as the last layer, or could you place it in the middle if the outer armor for the same effect?
Glad you enjoy it and we shall indeed! Yes having 2 meters of metal is the common accepted way to get standard buffed armour suitable for anything, I do however wanna try this thin armour scheme after these results and see if it indeed can be worth it.
I do remember that the last layer mattered the most, but it is some calculation of the average layers where the latter ones are more important, could be hard to test but with a big shell it might matter!
We might come back with another test!
I'm surprised he didn't try two air gaps or staggered air gaps. Like a zig zag back and forth.
Simply because it is outside the scope of this testing session, but good ideas to try in future!
While doing these tests, you could add some engine cylinders or AI connectors to represent the internals after the armor.
I like seeing weapon testing results. Note that HEAT pen settings will vary in actual HEAT pen metric by shell guage, and iirc shell speed, as rails get more pen factor in my memory. A HEAT pen metric of ~24.2 is enough for HEAT to penetrate 4 stacked metal beams. As AC effects this, I find myself wondering if ring shields will affect block count of HEAT pen, and logically it would, but FTD being FTD, I'll just say I haven't tested that. But 24.2 HEAT pen may be at .5 setting for some APS and like, .7 setting for others. Around 30 HEAT pen should deal with most non-excessive armor schemes, though heavy armor presence throws math off on number of blocks penned.
One thing that I would like to see sometime is whether it's more effective to have half-beam slope right against another half-beam slope and then a couple solid beams, when it comes to kinetics and HE and frag, or half-beam slope backed with solid beam and then another half beam slope and solid beam. Ala which cuts more damage- the armor stacking, or the sloping, when both are used.
Interesting! Yeah awesome input, I will write your idea down for a future video perhaps! :)
I like to keep my armor itself thin so I put a massive air gap between my armor and the enemy weapon. Yet it doesn't seem to be doing anything? Please help.
Airgaps mostly protect against heat and hesh, what are you facing?
Not sure what you mean because this reads like this: I have thin armour because if it was thicker, I would be as many meters closer to the enemy weapon as the thickness increase. (Looking from a point of view where the ships are at a specific distance apart)
@@joonalehtinen5462
From what I remember, I was making a really dumb joke about me making my armor thinner, so that there would be a few more meters of air on top of the several kilometers of air between me and the enemy ship. Hence, a massive a air gap.
@@GMODISM Sorry bruh
(At the early point of the video before any shootyshoots occurs); the slopes are what make the airgap? I thought it would have been a full empty space for it to be an airgap?
Yes indeed the slopes do provide an airgap that will activate hesh and heat shells, so that is handy, BUT a real block free of anything is better because thump damage will be stopped that way too, and that is also true for the new plasma system, since thump was not a serious factor, but plasma is, it will indeed change the way we are doing airgaps in the future I'd suspect, since with this added plasma we really should have a real airgap with nothing that can make the plasma damage spread over to the next layer...
But for hesh and heat the beamslope gaps where fine!
@@GMODISMOk, I was really confused since when I hear 'airgap' I think fully separated from the other stuff as opposed to the equivalent of putting cut-in-half tubes between two plates of metal. lol
Well hopefully it cleared things up a bit ;)
Why would you add armour to the shallow one then conclude it's best, what if you gave the deep armor a shallow airgap AND keep the deep airgap angled armor.
That is't quite accurate, my thought of internal armour is more like a mental note that I should have it, the results where concluded without that extra thing as you could clearly see, from my testing, shallow air gap offers the most amount of benefits with the least drawbacks, APHEAT is a counter yes, but if it's strong enough it's a counter to any of these single airgap schemes anyways
But yes, shallow and deep airgaps are needed when we must protect our self against apheat
@@GMODISM Yes and AP focused HEAT APHEAT cares a lot more about a deeper airgap than this dones. You put it as SMD.
There is also plenty of other shells you havent tried like SAPHE vs properly contained armor or some explosive or thump damage hitting then heat happening...
If you don't math to predict the outcome, that always turns out it ends up innacurate. Empirical testing doesn't win you fights vs better vehicles if you don't get every single thing going on and need to "observe".
@@no3ironman11100 To be fair sometimes we see really weird things in tourneys where two different shell types synergise in a really unusual way that maths alone couldn't accurately show.
@@IainDoherty51 Maths alone can show you everything accurately. It's just a matter of understanding it.
It's quite amazing, the amount of detail in this game and yet it isn't (particularly) laggy
Yeah it is very awesome! However past the 6 million mark any PC suffers!
Ha not bad lag just means you aren't spawning enough craft in.
clearly middle armor is the best. no question.
Amour, what is that?
AIR is the tru armour!
thats why i always do two airgaps >:)
watch out for APHEAT XD
@@GMODISM XD yea i will put three air gaps from now on (:
wow,
Just watching this hurt me.
Usually your videos are fine but this one is embarrassing. Not only is good airgap placement against different shell types common knowledge, but you come across as blatantly biased throughout the whole video. The methods used to test this were horrendously inaccurate to what a real scenario would be like, and multiple times you make hypocritical statements. For example, when testing APHEAT, it is well know that the deeper your airgap is the better it will perform, and your tests show this fairly well; However you rank the medium airgap below the thin airgap, not only did you rank performance on a factor other than APHEAT, but you completely ignored the fact that the thin airgap will die to way smaller APHEAT than the medium would. Another example is after the applique tests at 46:00when you run two tests both using pure heat, and you draw a different conclusion from it. That along with with the language you used throughout the video showed me that this test was not made to determine the best airgap placement depending on the shell being fired at it, but instead made to your own point.
Some of these mistakes are understandable, however to try and pass this off as "Empirical Testing" is just embarrassing.
Adding to the mess that is this video, you very clearly don't fully understand how heat works, yet you feel that you are in a position of authority on the topic of air gap placement.
My advice to you would be to wait until you fully understand the topic before you make a video on it because I would be ashamed if i had this video attached to my name, and it looks like I am not alone on this, reading the comments, most disagree with your conclusion and many point out a lot of the same flaws this comment does.
I mean this with total sincerity, Take the hint, look at actual weapons used at given price ranges, talk with people who know what they are doing in this game, do some math, and give an actual hypothesis if you are going to be doing true Empirical Testing.
I like how a normal arguement / conversation turned into a cozy video
Haha yeah we gotta test the mechanics to draw any conclusion!