Realistic armor

Is there any type of addon that makes the armor strength more realistic? I am tired of Abrams being destroyed by one RPG round.

IMWM Is being made to have realistic armour values etc.

I don't think there is a way to really simulate the way armour works in real life.. so realistic isn't really going to be possible- besides, this begs the question as to whether it's the tanks or the rpgs that are messed up!

I don't think you can blow up a tank with a single rpg, though. For apcs, wrecking one of them with a single rpg is not too far off. Some of them are vulnerable to machine gun fire in real life!

PROPER_Gameplay_Vehicle_Tank_Armor.pbo

Doubles armor of all armored vehicles.

You could check the NWD_TankFCS project too.

This Tank FCS addon has plenty of improvements to the tanks, including damage and weapon systems.

Thanks a lot for all of your help!!

Thanks a lot for all of your help!!

I would recommend taking a look at the Tank FCS mod by NoWonderDog regardless. It's a whole other game in its own right. In fact, if you're a realism nut, look at everything NWD has done. His ballistics mod blows my mind. Not only does he put a high value on realism, he's got great reference, has some pretty elite critical thinking and math skills, and seems to have a lot of time and dedication. He's basically the archetypal realism addon maker- he was put on the earth to make ArmA better.

Warning: Very long post. Just get my NWD_TankFCS mod if you want semi-realistic tank armor and damage modeling. If you don't like the FCS, or you can't get it to work online (very likely), you can use the NWD_TankModels.pbo (which includes damage models, hull profiles, turret speeds, and so on) on it's own with only minor annoyances (fixed FOV optics, which makes the T-72 gunner's position hard to use). A fully online-compatible version of my mod is probably at least a month away.

A scientific armor simulation isn't possible with a mod. We have to work within the hit-point framework no matter what, and I don't think a vehicle can be silently revived by any kind of armor script if its damage state is reduced to zero. However, there's more you can do with hit points than would first appear -- the M1A1HA and T-72M1 in my TankFCS mod have much more realistic damage simulations than the default tanks, including much strengthened frontal armor and more ways to disable a tank without killing it. I intend to extend my method to other vehicles, but it will be slow going--I have to change the model and recreate the model.cfg for each vehicle individually.

Here's how I believe the damage system works, if you want to know what I did. All of this is conjectural, but it seems accurate enough:

First off, direct hits to the tank do not apply damage directly. This is important, as a 500 damage shell will almost never apply 500 global damage to a tank. Only the defined hit locations in the model can ever take damage. When a direct-damage shell hits a tank, it creates a zone of indirect damage just as if an explosive shell hit the tank--except that it only affects the vehicle it struck. This indirect damage is applied to the nearest hit location of each damageable component in the model depending on some distance attenuation formula--most likely the same one used for explosive damage. It appears that the damage radius is hard-coded, and I'm not sure what it is.

The default tanks had many, many points in each hit selection. There are "hull" hit locations all along the tank, "engine" hit locations at the engine, ammo storage, and the T-72 fuel drums (but, oddly enough, not the equally-poorly protected saddle tanks), "turret" hit locations all over the turret and turret ring, and "track" hit locations all over the tracks. The practical upshot of this is that any tank shell that hits a tank will damage every hit location. The "engine" and "hull" hit selections cause the tank to explode when destroyed, and the engine selection has very little armor. This basically means that anything will kill a tank with enough accumulated damage. It takes no more than 600 7.62 machine gun rounds to make a T-72 explode if you fire near the turret ring or fuel drums.

In addition, tanks have a global damage parameter. If the global damage state is reduced to zero, the tank explodes just as if the "hull" or "engine" had been destroyed. Global damage is applied from each damaged hit point, divided by armorStructural. A 500 damage shell that deals 475 damage to the hull, 460 damage to the engine, and 450 damage to the turret (very possible with the default damage models) will do 692.5 global damage to a T-72 (armorStructural=2) -- and a T-72 only has 690 global armor.

My mod does two things in regards to damage. First, the global damage is deemphasized to the point of being meaningless. The global armor my my T-72 is only 580 (the realistic CE resistance, although the figure isn't very important as it turns out), but it has an armorStructural value of 15. It would take 8700 damage to kill the tank by accrued global damage, and that should never happen because of the other modification. (ArmorStructural can't be too high because global damage is important to the AI. If global armor isn't depleted by a noticeable amount, the AI doesn't know it's been hit.)

The second modification is far more involved. I've moved all the hit locations for the tank far away from the armored locations of the tank. The "turret" hit locations, for example, are 1-2 meters above the turret. The main gun hit selection is in front of and above the gun, and angled such that those points near the muzzle are much closer to the barrel than those near the mantlet. The "hull" and "engine" hit locations are ~2 meters behind the frontal armor and ~1 meter below the tank for the Abrams. The T-72 has a single "hull" and "engine" point in the dead center of the ammo carousel. ("Hull" and "engine" aren't differentiated between in my mod, because I couldn't find a useful way to do so. Both cause destruction of the tank if damaged severely, and so must be as far from the armor of the tank as possible.)

The armor value of each hit selection was adjusted mostly by feel, such that the T-72 could withstand 1-2 BM-42 shells to the thickest part of the frontal armor but none to the side armor. The global armor value is now important only as a scalar for these component armor values -- it is meaningless on its own.

Since the hit locations are far away from the hit detection boundaries, only those shells that do high direct damage or have a high indirect damage radius (which is problematic) affect the tank. Small arms ammunition cannot damage the hit locations, and thus the tank is completely immune to anything smaller than 20-30mm. For example, 600 7.62 rounds alone were guaranteed to kill the default T-72. In my mod, 3,600 7.62 rounds, 1,000 12.7 rounds, and 11,500 3/8" canister pellets all together cannot appreciably damage a T-72.

It's not perfect, though; rockets and HE shells do nearly as much damage as before, and mines probably do more damage. This is because indirect damage apparently ignores the hit geometry of vehicles, and is applied directly to the hit locations. If it's not immediately obvious to you, this is an appalling way of simulating explosives. The only way to fix it with a mod is to replace a big proportion of each explosive's indirect damage with script-generated direct-damage fragments (which would make most kills with explosives anonymous -- a team-killer's dream). I might look into doing that eventually, especially if BIS makes a createBullet function with ownership.

Honestly, BIS could make explosives 1000% more realistic by applying the explosive damage to the nearest part of the hit geometry (or even nearest face-center or vertex) and simulating that as direct damage. This might be equivalent in CPU load to ~5-10 direct damage hits, but they already calculate occlusion fer chrissake (tanks will shield you from explosions on the other side).

Thanks a lot for all of your help!!

I would recommend taking a look at the Tank FCS mod by NoWonderDog regardless. It's a whole other game in its own right. In fact, if you're a realism nut, look at everything NWD has done. His ballistics mod blows my mind. Not only does he put a high value on realism, he's got great reference, has some pretty elite critical thinking and math skills, and seems to have a lot of time and dedication. He's basically the archetypal realism addon maker- he was put on the earth to make ArmA better.

Heh, thanks for the complement. In actuality I'm more obsessive-compulsive than having lots of free time, but everyone's gotta have a hobby, right?

A quick idea for improving tank battles (even though it doesn't improve tank armor), short of redoing the armor system or writing new addons. Basically, this short script stops the crew from bailing when a vehicle takes damage that renders it immobile. This makes armored engagements more exciting, and fighting against tanks as infantry much more intense. (I hate the rotating tanks with dead crew nearby.. ugh).

This makes abrams and even T-72's a LOT scarier, as you can land a good RPG/AT4 to the tracks, and the tank will often spin its turret around and machine gun you for your trouble. Missiles don't seem to be as effective as killing tanks than a good sabot shell, meaning that tanks are the reigning tank killer. You really need to pile on RPG's or other ordnance to kill a tank, instead of any little thing disabling the tank, causing the crew to bail.

I run this script as the damaged eventhandler for tanks in my missions:

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">_tank=_this select 0

?canMove _tank:Exit

?Fuel _tank == 0:Exit

_tankDamage=Damage _tank

_tank SetDamage 0

_tank SetDamage _tankDamage

_tank SetFuel 0

This prevents the crew from jumping out of the vehicle when it can no longer move. It accomplishes this by setting the fuel to 0, and reapplying the damage across the entire vehicle, so the vehicle is immobilized but still fights. It was pilfered from a mission thread in the WGL forums (I forget whose clever idea it originally was). The crew does bail when the tank gets to a large damage value (ie, red and about to explode).

This means that you have to actually accumulate enough damage to *destroy* the vehicle before it stops being a threat, which is *much* harder as a simple infantryman than you might expect. Multiple satchels or RPG's are needed. Merely tracking the tank just makes it angry. As a human tank commander, your crew actually stays in the tank instead of bailing and dying as is normal.

There are a few annoying side effects, such as the vehicle being mobile again once refueled, and also there not being any way to move the tank once it's been tracked (when the track is knocked out normally in arma, you can at least move the tank around a bit as the human driver).

This really should be paired with a script that checks for refueling and sets the fuel to 0 again, some sort of message feedback for the player, and another that gives fuel back to the tank if it gets repaired by a repair truck... but as a quick hack it works well enough.

(By the way NWD.. your tank FCS/armor rework is awesome. )

I don't think you can blow up a tank with a single rpg, though.  For apcs, wrecking one of them with a single rpg is not too far off.  Some of them are vulnerable to machine gun fire in real life!

you mean destroying or disabling?

if disabling, then there's nothing better than RPG-28 Vampyre in the whole world!

RPG-7s with PG-7VR(PG-7BP in russian) rockets are pretty dangerous for abramses too...

Hmm...

@The_Captain

That bit of script would not work correctly with my mod. What you've described repairs all component damage while preserving structural damage. Structural damage is all but meaningless in my mod, and tanks can only be realistically destroyed by component damage. What you've described might make my tanks between 2x and 30x more resilient that they're supposed to be, depending on where you're shooting.

Anyway, the AI seems a bit less bail-happy in my mod. Since the tracks are farther from the center of the tank, shooting at the turret will no longer damage the tracks. You have to actually hit the track now, or at least hit the engine or transmission (the fuel tank behind the T-72 driver counts, as well). I've also put in the possibility of disabling the turret traverse and made disabling the gun more likely than destroying the tank outright (neither of which causes the AI to bail--or even retreat). Usually when the AI bails in my mod, either the tank is damaged enough to make it a good idea or you can rationalize it as escape from fire. The AI doesn't aim directly at the tracks, in any case.

I have to confess that I didn't test RPGs against my tanks. As they're HEAT shells with indirect damage, they should be fairly damaging. Since they don't do a lot of damage when compared with tank shells (especially with my ballistics mod), they should be ineffective on the frontal aspect. I can't say for certain one would take out a track in my mod, but an RPG to the turret bustle probably stands a good chance of taking out an Abrams' main gun (which is my way of simulating ammo cookoff).

I have to confess that I didn't test RPGs against my tanks.  As they're HEAT shells with indirect damage, they should be fairly damaging.  Since they don't do a lot of damage when compared with tank shells (especially with my ballistics mod), they should be ineffective on the frontal aspect.  I can't say for certain one would take out a track in my mod, but an RPG to the turret bustle probably stands a good chance of taking out an Abrams' main gun (which is my way of simulating ammo cookoff).

I did I quick test and I use all of your mods. As an Opfor RPG soldier I shot on your T72. Crew bailed after the first shot wherever I hit the tank except (! ) if I hit it in the back. The tank exploded after the second hit except if I hit it in the front or back, then it did explode on the 3rd rpg-hit.

This was not an extencive test but my conclusion is that RPGs are highly effective (too effective?) against your tanks, especially as the crew bail out so quickly.

Yeah, the entire point of the snippet is to ignore component damage and make tank damage (towards destruction) entirely based on hitpoints, which is completely the opposite of your solution. I might consider faking component damage in the eventhandler by catching the damage level of certain components before "undoing" the damage. I'm assuming there's no way to catch the vector of a projectile that hits a vehicle... (to determine if it hits the front, side, etc. I assume you simulated this by relocating the tank's hitpoints)

My goal was mainly to make tanks much less vulnerable to explosives: poorly aimed missiles, rpg's, mines, satchels, etc, while still allowing them to be weak against tank shells (their natural foil). The hitpoints system does bug me, as I much prefer a system closer to what red orchestra has: shots either penetrate the armor, or they don't, and they can damage internal components on the way in. By proper tank positioning you can manage to deflect or avoid shots... Without some sort of skill in applying and taking damage, tank v tank becomes a "shoot first" game. :-/

@NWD:

What if, for the tank armor/ballistics mod, you make the direct damage tank weaponry do *much* more damage than all explosives, and increase component armor accordingly (keeping your same ratios of tank damage and tank armor)? That way explosives would still have a negligible effect on tank armor, while the direct damage projectiles would have a much more striking effect.

Always the same problem.

Each time, people go on their own work to create THE most realistic hit/ballistic/armor (choose your favorite) value.

We need to define, all of us, a standard realistic mod, to use it tomorow like the ref addon that we can plug on our work, to make all work able to be in the game at the same time.

I think NonWonderDog is going to do that very well, but need more work yet.

Ballistic is OK

Damage is unfinished.

Armor is unfinished.

And this has to be independant from any addon, just defining some CPP value.

Just "mon avis a 2 balles"

I don't think you can blow up a tank with a single rpg, though.  For apcs, wrecking one of them with a single rpg is not too far off.  Some of them are vulnerable to machine gun fire in real life!

you mean destroying or disabling?

if disabling, then there's nothing better than RPG-28 Vampyre in the whole world!

RPG-7s with PG-7VR(PG-7BP in russian) rockets are pretty dangerous for abramses too...

What is the difference between a destroyed and disabled vehicle?  Where do you draw the line?

I'm sure ap incendiary rounds crashing through a Gavin's fuel tank or engine compartment have a high degree of probability of incapacitating or destroying the vehicle.  Those things were vulnerable to 7.62 ap rounds.   A vehicle that is on fire is not yet disabled or destroyed, but the fire will, in time, do it in. Noone in their right mind would remain in a burning vehicle, though. In that case, one 7.62 hit would be enough to destroy an m113, but the likelihood is very minimal. That particular vehicle was nicknamed the 'zippo' by the israelis because of the apc's tendency to combust when hit by AT weapons. In that case, the ArmA-catastrophic-explosion-of-wonder would be appropriate.

Another consideration for any armoured vehcile is spall- whereas the inside of a vehicle will be trashed and the crew dead, and the only telltale sign on the outside will be a hole with the radius of a quarter or a blast mark.  Is that vehicle disabled or destroyed?

Any penetrating hit in the armour of any vehicle may or may not disable or destroy it based on what happens after the penetration.  Spalling, secondary damage to something combustible or explosive; crew injury, or death are all factors.

One M1 abrams tank was disabled in the iraq war by some million dollar shot that started a fire in the hydraulics system.  For that totally immobile tank, is it disabled or destroyed in ArmA language?

I guess it all boils down to what is repairable on the spot in ArmA- which is the weakness of the hit point system.  None of that damage should be repairable by a truck on the spot, and none of those individual hits should weaken the armour as a whole- so penetrating the above gavin over and over with a general purpose or heavy machinegun would have no appreciable affect on the performance of the vehicle or the remainder of the armour plate unless those bullets hit something behind it that was vulnerable and vital.

@NWD:

What if, for the tank armor/ballistics mod, you make the direct damage tank weaponry do *much* more damage than all explosives, and increase component armor accordingly (keeping your same ratios of tank damage and tank armor)? That way explosives would still have a negligible effect on tank armor, while the direct damage projectiles would have a much more striking effect.

Nope, direct damage doesn't work that way. Direct damage uses the indirect damage simulation when it's applied to the hit locations of the tank. The higher the damage, the greater the distance at which rounds will do damage (I don't know how the spillover is computed, but I think it's the same way 250lb bombs kill out to 4-5x their damage radius). It works pretty well with ArmA's default damage levels, but significantly higher damage values would wash out the location-based damage. (And lower damage values do exponentially (?) less damage to my tanks, to the point where anything less than 75 damage does effectively nothing.)

My solution should be compatible with ArmA's default damage solution most of the time, as it uses the same damage values for KE rounds (penetration in mm of RHAe). The only big departure in weapon damage I've made is in respect to HEAT shells. I've reduced them to 60-80% of their RHAe penetration, because all modern tank armor is much more effective against CE than KE. I've been lenient with the infantry-AT weapons so far, but if they're really so effective against my tanks I might have to tone them down as much as I have the other HEAT shells.

The one question I have is when it comes to weapons such as AGM-65 or Vikhr, are they still just as effective or do they become paintballs where this armor mod is concerned?

I ask because few armored vehicles on the planet - shy of ships - are capable of withstanding 300lbs of explosives traveling at 700mph. For that matter, few armored vehicles react too well to having a 500lb PGM being dropped on them from 30,000ft either.

The top armor of the tank is stronger than it should be, but AGMs should be just as damaging. I've actually boosted the Maverick damage by a lot, anyway -- while the real thing doesn't penetrate anywhere near as much as its size would suggest, it will take out any tank it hits.

The problems are things like Hydra-70 rockets, artillery shells, and land mines. Since they have a large indirect damage radius, they pretty much ignore the armor on a tank. Hydra-70s killed tanks far more easily than they should have before (near misses do far too much damage), and the weakened rockets in my ballistics mod are unfortunately just as effective against armor.

As to bombs, I'm of the opinion that a near miss by a 250 lb bomb is often non-fatal to a tank. With the default armor I'd balanced it so that a bomb that hit a tank would kill it instantly and a bomb up to 5-10 meters away would only disable it. With the armor mod a bomb landing 5-10 meters away might cause the tank to explode instead--just like in default ArmA.

Basically, in order for tanks to be more vulnerable on their side and rear aspects, they have to be more vulnerable to explosives on all aspects.

Maybe if I scripted another model to lay underneath the hull armor at all times, ArmA would occlude the explosions that would otherwise damage the tank? That might be an idea... but I don't know what the occlusion is based on. Hit geometry? View geometry? Physics geometry? Bounding box?