Tank (weapon) overhaul

[Maerchen]

I suggest a tank overhaul.

The tanks should differentiate in caliber, armor thickness, engine and fuel tank capacity.

What is now called Howitzer gun and High velocity gun are in the real 2021 world different ammo types, HE and AP for high explosive and armor piercing.

Todays' tanks come with an assortment of ammo types that the commander chooses depending on the engagement. I would think that the people of SE time would be able to do this, too. Maybe a new INT target recognition skill could come in use to apply the correct ammo, modified by recon level. This would work with AT guns, too, as the famous 8.8cm AA gun of the WW II Wehrmacht was used in AT, too, where it really shined.

As there is a gun optimization applied tech already, those would deliver the modern equivalents of APDFS tech or better concussion damage on HE ammunition.

Armor and Engine are straight forward, as it is implemented already.

Fuel tank would be a new model idea, I imagine it as it is implemented in aircraft design.

Last but not least, a confirm button for all the model designs.

[zgrssd]

Shooting a AP shell on infantry would be a lot worse then only "half firepower".
AP shell designs are about creating a explosion past the enemy armor, wich usually means it uses the resistance of the armor going in to "arm" and the one going out to detonate.
There is no way to arm or detonate a shell with a single human body or even a house wall and the guy would have to perfectly line up for you to pull that shoot off. And even then, the explosion is a lot smaler as that is all that is needed to kill a tank crew in a enclosed space.

Shooting a AP shell at Infantry would be like shooting them with a Musket!
That the HV gun even has half Firepower vs Infantry, is only because there are HE shells to begin with.
Guns still are designed to fight either infantry or vehicles primarily. Adding other shells for other targets is normal, but the gun will never be as effective against them as against it#s primary.
The 88 is really a exception here.

The fuel Tank for a Tank hardly maters and is kinda subsumed into it's engine stat. There is 100 people for 10 tanks, and a lot of those will be mechanics or supply company.
1 Hex is 200 km across and 1 turn is two months, meaning there will be a lot of refills in every 1 hex advanced, with or without combat. May be should add offensive/defensive fuel use like he has for ammo?

It only mater for airplanes because they can not park on the way to refill the tanks.

[DeltaV112]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd
Shooting a AP shell at Infantry would be like shooting them with a Musket!
That the HV gun even has half Firepower vs Infantry, is only because there are HE shells to begin with.
Guns still are designed to fight either infantry or vehicles primarily. Adding other shells for other targets is normal, but the gun will never be as effective against them as against it#s primary.
The 88 is really a exception here.

This is not really the case, IRL howitzer-style guns on tanks(short 75mm guns, or the US 105mm and Soviet 122mm) were entirely displaced by high-velocity guns in similar calibers. You could mount even larger howitzer guns to tanks, but this wasn't done primarily because you don't actually get meaningfully improved effect against the sorts of targets that actually exist in the vast majority of cases. A 152mm HE round in direct fire against a typical building, bunker, or foxhole doesn't make the soldiers inside any more dead than a 105mm HE round in direct fire. For artillery the bigger round still makes sense as you can't presume a near-direct hit, but tank guns can presume that they will hit a static target dead-on(especially high velocity ones).

[zgrssd]

This is not really the case, IRL howitzer-style guns on tanks(short 75mm guns, or the US 105mm and Soviet 122mm) were entirely displaced by high-velocity guns in similar calibers. You could mount even larger howitzer guns to tanks, but this wasn't done primarily because you don't actually get meaningfully improved effect against the sorts of targets that actually exist in the vast majority of cases.

That just means it is impractical to put a howitzer on a modern tank with modern doctrines*.
Or that a modern HV gun does so much damage with HE shells (Soft Attack/defense), there is no reason to get a bigger number.
It does not mean there is no longer a difference between Howitzer and HV gun.

*Opposedly in WW2 the tankers prefered the Howitzer over the HV gun, because tanks usually did not fight tanks back then: https://youtu.be/-ZKxmlpbwqk

[DeltaV112]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

This is not really the case, IRL howitzer-style guns on tanks(short 75mm guns, or the US 105mm and Soviet 122mm) were entirely displaced by high-velocity guns in similar calibers. You could mount even larger howitzer guns to tanks, but this wasn't done primarily because you don't actually get meaningfully improved effect against the sorts of targets that actually exist in the vast majority of cases.

That just means it is impractical to put a howitzer on a modern tank with modern doctrines*.
Or that a modern HV gun does so much damage with HE shells (Soft Attack/defense), there is no reason to get a bigger number.
It does not mean there is no longer a difference between Howitzer and HV gun.

*Opposedly in WW2 the tankers prefered the Howitzer over the HV gun, because tanks usually did not fight tanks back then: https://youtu.be/-ZKxmlpbwqk

The difference is so small as to be irrelevant. Tanks still primarily fight infantry, in particular I'd look at Soviet doctrine which always favored the tank as an anti-infantry platform primarily(soviet ammunition loads were very HE-heavy in both WWII and the Cold War). If howitzers were really much better as anti-infantry weapons, you'd expect them if anyone to use them, but howitzer like guns basically disappear except on artillery vehicles in the Soviet arsenal post-WWII(the postwar 122mm is replaced by a high-power 122mm, and the 152mm has no successor platform).

Ingame, firepower values on guns don't go high enough to reach diminishing returns for HV guns. Infantry have a baseline of 100 or maybe 200 hp(depending on if combat armor has come out) and a 105 HV gun gets a soft attack base of 175. Let's note that this means the 105 HV is weaker than the smallest howitzer available, the 25mm(unless combat armor is involved). That's, uh, way too much of an advantage for the howitzer. Practically a howitzer of the same weight as a gun is perhaps 25-50% larger in caliber, not 4-5 times as large. We're pretty likely with this gun(71%) to kill a 100 hp infantry, and somewhat likely to kill a 200 hp infantry, but that's if they don't have any bonuses from entrenchment/terrain and we have no terrain attack penalties. Get those in play and even 60mm howitzer starts to majorly outperform us with 400 soft attack. If we compare the sort of advantage in weight a howitzer has versus a high-power gun, it should perform roughly equal(i.e. a howitzer with the same caliber has around 1/2 to 2/3 the weight).

I mean sure on the whole WW2 tankers bit, but at the same time WW2 doctrine favored building for more powerful anti-tank guns. The 76mm gun was intended to replace the 75mm gun wholesale, and the subsequent tank M26 had no equivalent to the 105mm howitzer at all. The only two howitzer-like guns the US would ever again mount for direct fire were the 152mm gun-launcher, which was to fit missiles(and was replaced by the 105mm/120mm in subsequent tank programs both light and heavy), and the 165mm which was a specialty weapon for combat engineers.

Probably HV guns should only have a soft-attack penalty of 50%, making them hit major diminishing returns against troops without combat armor in almost any terrain/entrench and against troops with combat armor in most terrain/entrench by medium tanks with larger guns or heavy tanks. Otherwise as-is even heavy/monitor tanks with the largest HV guns are still seriously outperformed by even light/medium tanks with small howitzer guns which is really, really weird.