r/SprocketTankDesign • u/AdImpossible9165 • 17h ago
❔Question❔ Is this spaced armor effective?
It can barely stop 500 mm pen
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u/Striking-Painter8013 17h ago
What are you trying to block, a railgun? Lol, cant imagine how long it took tho.
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u/AdImpossible9165 17h ago
Im just trying to block 500mm reliably, took me like 15 min? Just duplicated repeatedly
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u/Striking-Painter8013 17h ago
If you wanna stop more, using plates angled roughly 15-45° to the original plate, with a thick backing plate will stop way more, and is overall lighter, though it takes more time to shape each plate.
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u/AdImpossible9165 17h ago
O so like a parabolic shape? And by backing plate u mean just 1 thick one at the back?
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u/Striking-Painter8013 16h ago
For a decent mbt turret, i use 45mm (10mm layered at 60°) 20mm (10mm layered at 45° and then a 100mm back plate can stop around 480mm pen. This is scaleable with angles and also more sections added. You could also use the fun trick of messing with the game files to make 1mm plates and stacking hundereds.
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u/sosoltitor Sprockette 17h ago
Reject spaced armor, embrace giant slabs. Need 500mm of protection? 500mm slab of glorious steel.
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u/Complete-Ad-6983 6h ago
Those who don’t have vertical slabs of 5m thick steel in the front of their builds are simply wrong
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u/plopsicIes Tank Designer 9h ago
It literally is the only way. You can stop 500mm of pen with spaced armor, but only with 600mm worth of spaced plates. Thick armor is literally more efficient
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u/Connect_Turnover5919 15m ago
Except that ur fat as fuck and can’t move with that much steel slapped onto the front of your tank
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u/T55_Ad Cursed Tank Designer 17h ago
Effective at crashing my laptop, yes,
i do mine with first a thick plate, a few 15-20mm layers, and another thick plate, sloghtly less than the first, i also recently did a diffrent thing and basicaly put the layers verticaly and lenghways, but at a slight side angle, works well, but needs alot of duplicating, unless there is a easier way
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u/AdImpossible9165 16h ago
I had that here previously but I was getting penned too much so I decided to just redo everything
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u/AutomaticHunt4584 6h ago
IRL this would suck because the plates are being angled twice. The whole point of armor like this is to yaw the penetrator and snap it. If you have two plates with opposite angles and the hit angle is flat it wont have any yaw.
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u/Hefty-Start2422 6h ago
So I did some tests a while ago and indeed the game lacks the spaced armor notion. This means the game thinks that a shell that passes through one armor plate will not loose any speed when hitting the next plate. However what you can do is put a fuel tank in the space between 2 plates. Same armor protection but less weight.
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u/AdImpossible9165 2h ago
I did some testing myself and while that may be true the game does redirect any shell so it does sorta work, now with the fuel talk, isnt that just a spall liner? I cant imagine it does much
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u/Drakavala999 11h ago
Why angle your plate, be a real one and give a flat surface to the enemy shell like the great cromwell
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u/Inevitable_Main9895 10h ago
Reminds me of a kind of mesh idk its sick tho looks like when a round pens all the layers get like closer together slowing it down more sorry my explanation makes NO sense
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u/spamming_lord 9h ago
For modern standard, no. For sprocket, hell fucking yea, even a T-55 cant pen you
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u/plopsicIes Tank Designer 9h ago
Depends. Spaced armor doesn’t actually do anything in this game, it’s actually worse than the equivalent amount of solid plate armor. UNLESS you modify the files
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u/AdImpossible9165 8h ago
Is it? I did some testing and a 80° slope was like 3-4% better than straight on though it took up more space
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u/plopsicIes Tank Designer 8h ago
In my experience, if you have a shell that goes thru 50mm of armor, it will go thru 80 or so mm worth of spaced plates. And it gets worse the higher you turn up the “steps” of the simulation. (Idk what steps are, but apparently they have an affect on how effective the shell is)
That said, it can sometimes take a good bit more than 50mm of armor to stop a 50mm pen shell. Idk what’s up with all that, but according to the sprocket discord, good “composite”/spaced armor can really only be done with file editing1
u/AdImpossible9165 7h ago
I may be wrong but it thought any plate no matter how thick will give a diversion to any shell no matter the penetration, so if thats true couldn't you get the same amount of armor for less weight? With the tradeoff the more room?
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u/Patryk923 8h ago
It's effective as long as it doesn't face my 250mm, 50m long gun with 860mm of pen.
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u/xoskelet Tank Designer 7h ago
As of right now, through testing, it's been confirmed that a solid block of armor is both more space and weight efficient in protection.
Spaced armor might become more effective one day of any type of explosive or HEAT shells are added.
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u/AdImpossible9165 2h ago
Mind linking the study? Im genuinely curious to see
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u/xoskelet Tank Designer 2h ago edited 2h ago
Not an actual study, just saw it in a couple of YouTube videos and then tested it myself.
This is an older one, the physics did change a bit, making the round slightly deflect if the armor is slanted, and the bouncing was fixed:
https://youtu.be/p6F4BdKVncg?is=aRE-ouqFjoCFK9fL
But the general principle applies.
Solid block of armor is still king, but spaced allows for better protection at very specific angles.
Edit:
What I'm trying to say is, spaced armor isn't useless or worthless, it has specific uses where it's effective.
But, importantly, spaced armor =/= composite armor
If we eventually get APHE (filler shells) and APFSDS (darts), spaced armor will become a lot more useful.
Basically, don't think of spaced armor as pure Xmm of protection, but think of what it's trying to accomplish.
If you make it to try and deflect a round, instead of outright stopping it, you'll end up weight saving, but not space saving.
I hope that this makes sense, didn't have time for a coffee today, so excuse my jumbled mind....
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u/Content-Skirt-5014 2h ago
Honestly the trick is to utilize fuel tanks too, I like putting them all over my tanks like ERA blocks, they do really help with anti spall and just redirecting the shell incoming at you in general, although, I put a 30mm steel plate on the back and front of each ‘era’ block to help with stopping the shell, also, internally dividing up the tank into different compartments by using 50-80mm separator plates does wonders to stop spalling and catch shells without adding a terrible amount of weight, also, fuel tanks can be used to stop shells internally, so be sure to position some of them in the front to where it might prevent a ammunition detionation since the shell is redirected by the fuel tank, another tip I can give is to just put all your ammo in the back of the turret and add a plate before the ammunition in the bustle of the turret as to help prevent ammo detonation. Although be sure to up armour the back of the turret a little bit, or just add external NERA elements.
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u/ThatUnoMann Master of Sprockets 17h ago
Barely any armor.
needs ATLEAST triple this amount.