Artillery Test Result Video - Needs to be buffed?

[lovewing]

not cherry picked, just quick cuts to each explosion

seems like it really needs a buff, only 1 of the explosions (the last in the vid) seemed remotely close to reasonable

 

[TEX64]

Knowing what I know about the process, data, and having read WWII Field and Technical Manuals I would say it looks right to me.

Anything outside of 20m while being upright is pure gravy. That's not even counting the very effective hard cover provided by the sandbags. Also. FB s cannot be damaged by artillery shells.

[jester]

54 minutes ago, TEX64 said:

Knowing what I know about the process, data, and having read WWII Field and Technical Manuals I would say it looks right to me.

Anything outside of 20m while being upright is pure gravy. That's not even counting the very effective hard cover provided by the sandbags. Also. FB s cannot be damaged by artillery shells.

I am surprised that with your very evident passion on this stuff that you find this acceptable. 

[warspite]

Seeing that video makes me not want to bother using Artillery, which is a shame because I can see that a lot of time went into creating them. 

I wouldn't want them to be overpowered but that looks underpowered for the game, I'm sure in real life you wouldn't just stand so close to a round landing without any consequences 

[lovewing]

Anyone who waited for 10+ years for arty is going to be depressed by this performance.

The kill radius would be acceptable at 20m but currently the only radius that will ensure a kill is 1m.

I died once at 5-10m and that was an outlier. The random number generator does not favor that happening so I assume the amount of lethal shrap at that distance is a very small amount.

I wasnt trying to damage the tents. I was demonstrating the most obvious use case an arty would have which is firing onto an inf spawn at an fb to suppress inf. Even when im not hiding under a tent I am still safe from explosions landing near me on top of the geometry of the inf spawn circle.

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Arty needs to be buffed on kill radius. If you are concerned about balance then just reduce the amount of arty available to spawn. It would be awesome if arty was a threat because then you could make awesome missions for planes to hunt the arty and even para missions for taking out arty thats well defended or hidden in forrests.

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The current best strat against arty is to not kill the arty. If you kill arty the player may actually spawn a unit that can actually have an impact/get kills. Not killing arty also means you have their FO wasting time guiding their shots instead of doing something useful.

Edited November 13, 2022 by lovewing

[Sudden]

I'm reserving judgement until Cooper flies one. Then we might see real death from above.

[TEX64]

6 hours ago, jester said:

I am surprised that with your very evident passion on this stuff that you find this acceptable. 

@jester  I find it acceptable because that is what it did historically.  It is all about shrapnel density per sq/ft (m) with several other factors thrown in.  You guys have to remember this is not Hollywood (which impacts a number of people's perception about what looks "right") type of carnage but historically modeled.  We are NOT talking about Gulf War-ERA or modern munitions but 80 year old data and the data dictates what it dictates.  That means that you have to throw a lot of lead for an area weapon to kill the enemy.  You don't even want to know how shells it takes to know out concertina because it's ridiculous and the tables are known.

@lovewing

I know the weapon has a greater than 1m damage radius.  I will see if I can provide some additional information but I make no promises due to time constraints.

 

[lovewing]

today ill make more videos of impacts and post them here. If you think I should do anything differently than I did in the original vid to make the test more accurate then just let me know.

It can kill beyond 1m but each additional meter beyond 2m starts to drastically drop the chance of death or injury

If it should have a lethal range of 20m... thats really far, the length of a tiger is like 6m. All of the rounds landed in the vid closer than 20m. The one outlier round at the end that killed me was maybe 9-10m? Most of the other rounds landing 9-10m didnt even injure me

Edited November 14, 2022 by lovewing

[Mosizlak]

It has to be nerfed like this, because otherwise you wouldn't get any soft target out of an AB, ever.  Or an FB, or a depot. Once players get good at aiming it, it would be game over. 

I still don't understand why they decided to add this. Greenies already complain about getting kill by stuff they never see, now you add this?  

If it had a normal kill radius it'd be so deadly it would be game breaking.  

[jwilly]

Scotsman, while he was still a CRS volunteer, is known to have provided CRS with unclassified data on WWII artillery and tank shells available to him in his professional capacity as a project manager for anti-armor weapons. That data gave numbers of fragments of seriously-injurious mass or greater, and the 3D distribution pattern and velocity with distance of those fragments, for every commonly fielded German and American HE shell caliber, and some British. This was unpublished primary original data from actual testing of known validity...not secondary data copied from some author who had published it in a book. Much of that data was posted by him here at the time. I don't know if it's still up, though, since he's no longer a volunteer and since there was a problem with it being made available to other game companies.

CRS has already told us that there is an upper limit to how many fragments can be thrown and tracked by the game client, given present CPU limitations, without causing the game client to choke. AFAIK, that would be primarily applicable to larger caliber shells and to heavy aerial bombs, for which the numbers of fragments are very large.

There is no such thing as a "lethal radius" for artillery and bombs. Everything is probabilistic based on presented area, cover, 3D throw pattern, distance to explosion center and number of fragments thrown.

I'm not aware at this point that those factors have been nerfed from the actual data, other than the large shells/bombs limitation. Maybe CRS could comment on that.

[lovewing]

thanks for the info jwilly, I was incorrectly using layman terms I see after reading some more.

The inability for the engine to handle generating the proper amount of splinters/fragments has been known for 10+ years so I imagine there must be an option CRS has that they can use to buff this otherwise I wouldnt think they'd dedicate all of the resources to make motor mortars and now arty + advertising it to bring new players in who specifically want to play arty

[jester]

The whole engine limitation really leaves me scratching my head... does nobody else remember when HE, especially bombs, was incredibly lethal many moons ago? Surely the game handled it then, so why not now all of a sudden?

[jwilly]

I'll certainly agree that the explosions look really fake-o. 

All WWII shell fillers exploded with a considerable amount of opaque smoke, which took 10 seconds or more to begin to clear.

Explosions are just a fire-cloud that dissipates in a second or two with no smoke whatsoever? Nope, not in any reality around these parts.

[tomppelix4]

well, in my eyes, yes, they are not very effective BUT artillery guns originally meant to be used as battery so it would be more effective... also 105mm cannon is not anything massive... but i think it still would be good idea to increase radius of damage/audit/explosion how to call it... just because current population of game, you have to be very lucky to hit anyone atm even when there is busy fight.  

in my words. its i right but still maybe need to take a bit of look into it. also explosion effects would be great to make new ones and realistic to actually create some immersion, currently we dont even know if its tank or ATG shooting or if its artillery :)

[aef]

Better off with a mortarman or a grenadier…i see the guys trying arty and they spend alot of time and energy to get it set up only to have 3 units hit and maybe 1 kill…i think there can be somewhere between mo’s gamebreaking prediction and lovewings ineffective 1-2m lethal zone….if it does become that lethal unit that can shut down an fb then its where the air support would come in or counter arty?…if it was devastating i can see where it would be frustrating in a 1 ao environment and pop is low 

[warspite]

It's not just about fragments of shell injuring or killing though surely, depending on what the round hit you'd get bits of wood, brick, stones or even just mud flying around. 

Rather than tracking X amount of shards and bringing the cpu to a standstill you could just use a percentage chance of being hit depending on your proximity to the impact. A couple of simple Raycasts from the point of impact to the unit in question would tell you if it was behind cover, no one apart from the coders would even know the difference. 

[Sudden]

Maybe a compromise would be turning up the "stunned" effect. A little shell shock never hurt anyone. This way we don't overpower the arty but the impact on the receiving end is a slowing of reaction time for a longer period (slightly longer).

We might also turn on "friendly" stunning. Not as terrible to game play as friendly fire but adds some "historically accurate" realism that we are lacking.

With that we will have to communicate to arty that we want them to hold off for a moment or two while we cap.

Edited November 14, 2022 by Sudden

[TEX64]

This is my data, not official Rat data, because I'm not a developer or producer.  I'm just a research hound who helped on this particular implementation, for what that's worth.

U.S. Army data - Field Artillery Gunnery (1945) . . . from the actual field manual:

The action of the fuze and booster causes the bursting charge to detonate, driving fragments of metal forward (nose spray), transverse to the trajectory (side spray), and backward (base spray) (fig. 5). The side spray consists of a narrow zone of fragmentation. The nose spray and base spray each form a narrow cone. The initial velocity of fragments is on the order of 3000 feet per second. This initial velocity is combined with the terminal velocity of the projectile minus the sum for nose spray, the difference for base spray, and the component for side spray. Incomplete detonation (low order burst) breaks the shell into a few large fragments.

 

Caliber               Area Covered Effectively - Depth               Width

75-mm               10 yards / 9 meters                                      30 yards / 27 meters

105-mm             15 yards / 14 meters                                    50 yards / 46 meters

155-mm             18 yards / 16 meters                                    60 yards / 55 meters

"The area covered effectively is considered to be that area in which there is at least a 50 per cent chance that a man STANDING will become a CASUALTY (not KIA).  The area is roughly elliptical."

And this for future reference . . . "The wire cutting effectiveness of shell is poor. The employment of artillery fire to breach wire requires extravagant use of ammunition."  Please note that in our game the shell-burst is spherical versus elliptical which means the round in game is actually getting a "buff" based upon how the game works.

 

Three things:

• Nothing has been 'nerfed" - the data is the data
• I repeat it is ALL about the density of fragments at a given range from the point of impact.  This is why it ALL about saturation of fire (massed guns with a gamer who knows how to properly use the kit or is willing to learn).  Of course, if you do NOT have an FO appropriately directing fire that further reduces the lethality.
• CRS will be revisiting the sound and likely the visuals for the arty rounds at a future date

[jester]

5 hours ago, TEX64 said:

Caliber               Area Covered Effectively - Depth               Width

75-mm               10 yards / 9 meters                                      30 yards / 27 meters

105-mm             15 yards / 14 meters                                    50 yards / 46 meters

155-mm             18 yards / 16 meters                                    60 yards / 55 meters

"The area covered effectively is considered to be that area in which there is at least a 50 per cent chance that a man STANDING will become a CASUALTY (not KIA).  The area is roughly elliptical."

That is definitely not even close to how it is operating. Any comment on the scotsman data from jwilly's post?

[Mosizlak]

2 hours ago, jester said:

That is definitely not even close to how it is operating. Any comment on the scotsman data from jwilly's post?

The 75mm in doesn't come close to that range, hell, the 88's HE round doesnt come NEAR to that lol, and I've used it A LOT on infantry. 

But what do I know lol. Just like the bofors BS. 

[TEX64]

3 hours ago, jester said:

That is definitely not even close to how it is operating. Any comment on the scotsman data from jwilly's post?

Sorry, I do not have enough information to even begin a massive search of all production-related tickets that may be associated with Scotsman.  And if I did find it, not even sure it would be the correct document until I reviewed each attached document thoroughly.  That's a very time intensive task, sorry.

 

1 hour ago, Mosizlak said:

The 75mm in doesn't come close to that range, hell, the 88's HE round doesnt come NEAR to that lol, and I've used it A LOT on infantry. 

But what do I know lol. Just like the bofors BS. 

Basically, that is a US document re US artillery and secondarily I believe there is a difference between an artillery round versus a tank round.

 

FYI - this is an available document that should be interesting.  Prior to it becoming public data, this was a paid for reference material.  In particular, I would direct you to pages 193 and 209.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA955369.pdf

20 ft / 6 m - avg frags per sq/ft - 0.231

30 ft / 9 m - afp sq/ft - 0.0986

40 ft / 12 m - afp sq/ft - 0.0533

60 ft / 18 m - afp sq/ft - 0.0220

etc

[lovewing]

tfw I just noticed@Scotsmanlurking this thread

 

Edited November 16, 2022 by lovewing

[Scotsman]

To calculate indirect fire round effectiveness you need to do a couple things….either by pre-calculating them and using lookup tables…or any of several other approaches.

Proper distribution of frags from point of impact is one. The type of explosive fill and the shell construction, particularly the shell wall thickness and it’s material. Steel is better than cast iron, but is more costly, etc. Pre-scoring if it’s present. The list goes on. I’m not about to go into all that but I wrote a program that let me calculate everything as long as you had the required data. I doubt CRS has the required data to do that - 
 

That was calculated for every bomb, gun, mortar and rocket for all nations in WWII. I used an assumed lethal frag minimum mass as defined by Army lethality research but I calculated a fragment distribution by mass and velocity for all those munitions. That effective frag mass is different for personnel and vehicles or equipment material damage. As a bare minimum you need to model at least those two fragment masses and know just how many frags of that reference mass or larger are generated. Fewer large frags which are effective vs material targets means a lower p(h) but the presented area of material targets is usually much larger. Thats different for every round or type of ammunition. A HEAT round generates a vastly different frag/velocity distribution than an HE round. 
 

You have to account for target posture for infantry…standing is different from kneeling which different from prone. Prone greatly reduces frag P(H).
 

An average 75mm HE Round would produce around 2500 frags. Really large bombs can produce over 100,000. 
 

I’m no longer a volunteer - I no longer subscribe to the game. CRS makes the game what they want…all I can tell you is what the round does in real life….what it should do….not what it does in a game.

[Scotsman]

22 minutes ago, lovewing said:

tfw I just noticed@Scotsmanlurking this thread

 

Geez I haven’t been around in months … that will teach me. Well done you!

[lovewing]

10 minutes ago, Scotsman said:

Geez I haven’t been around in months … that will teach me. Well done you!

my meme was me being shocked/surprised/excited to have seen you here. I am glad to see you especially in a thread about ammo and HE. excuse my autism.

Edited November 16, 2022 by lovewing