“Using poles as armor” Now i cant get the image of a bunch of polish people being used as armor out of my head lol

i had considered this many times when building heat proof tanks, and in practice there tends to be an astronomically low/never happening at all chance that a heat/hesh shell will land a perfectly perpendicular hit on your pole. the slightest, most minuscule, nuance in angling of your craft will steer the shell out of that 1 pixel threshold. poles are extremely practical for heat protection, and have never let me down, as a person who always has the projectile effects debugger on for this very purpose.

So apparently horizontal beam slopes are the best air-gap filler, and you really only need one air gap 'cos armour stacking through multiple layers is a thing that still kinda happens 'cos of FtD physics. I didn't test them properly. Armour is hard. Sorry about that! ✌ Edit: ...and apparently poles CAN benefit from armour stacking, just along the very fine lines that HEAT can pass through. Armour is TOO hard. >_

Please test beamslopes. They have the same healthpool as 4m slopes but they have a 45 degree angle which affords much more kinetic damage reduction. Ideally orientate the beamslopes horizontally in craft, slope pointing up so they angle more steeply when factoring shell arc and airborne frontsiders.

I think a thing being forgotten here is that shells don't always hit the center of a block. with poles being rounded, the further off center the shell hits the more 'angled armour damage reduction' you get. So basically you're rolling the dice with every hit. Having them vertical, you almost always have a flat surface facing the enemy, but there's also a chance they'll hit the side of the pole. Something to consider is having them horizontal. you only have a flat surface facing the enemy if they are perpendicular to you, and you always have the chance of hitting the side of the pole.

As simple as it seems, testing and interpreting results is remarkably easy to get wrong.

7:56 From my experience, both APS shells and CRAM shells spawn 2-3 meters away from the muzzle of the gun. This test might be a little off since the shell spawned in the middle of the last pole. If you want to test, fire it while the game is paused (F11) and it loads in the shell and the barrel recoil animation, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Yeah there are no circles or spheres in games, everything is a polygon or triangle. The devs could use more sides to make the pole rounder but that'd drastically increase the burden on the PC.

10:15 Wedges: am I a joke to you?

One of the big things about wedges and slopes in general against kinetic damage is the damage reduction due to the angle applies to the shell from the point it hits the angle to the point that it enters another air gap. This means that multiple layers of solid beams behind a wedge all take reduced damage from a high pen kinetic shell so although beyond 2 layers do not increase armor stacking, they can make a significant difference if all stacked behind a wedge rather than spaced out.

Hey BW, good to see you testing things for yourself. Good video overall. I know I always do this when I comment so I hate to be that guy again, but how do you think armour stacking works? Around 24:30 you mention it only works for two layers, and that's true, you don't get more benefits from stacking multiple layers, but what do you think happens to the layer behind when the first gets blown off?

20:00 poles had 2 blocks left afterwards, just like beams. Slopes had only one block of armor left afterward. Hmmmmm yes, slopes better than beams. Besides that though, great video, very informative. Keep up the amazing work!

I appreciate the part where you did the test on a spin block- people do tend to forget about angle of incidence and often just test flat-on. But with enough angle, a regular beam can bounce a shell that a slope wouldn't, because the slope would be more flat-on to the projectile trajectory. One armor scheme that I enjoy, though I admit to it only functioning as intended -most- of the time, is instead of a slope layer, two layers of vertical wedge backs, alternated. Depends on where shells hit and at what angle, of course. Always does. Doing armor testing on a spinblock is a really nice way for helping determine, for instance, what angle you might want your vehicle to approach at depending on its shape/armor scheme. :) Also as far as HEAT goes- HEAT travels straight through armor from point of impact and comes out at the same angle. HESH on the other hand, exits at the angle of the armor it exits from. So, for example, if it enters flat on a metal beam and the exit point is a 1m slope, the exit angle should be 45* from the entrance angle. In tank design, this can be really handy to angle HESH away from vital components and deflect it back outwards from the tank. ~ Thank you conversations on Arena discord for this one.

19:53 it seems to me that the slopes didn't actually do better than the poles, since the shell only went through 4m with the poles, and 5m with the slopes Having a kinetic shell go straight at it, the pole has 1318*40=52752 HP*AC The slope has 41561 HP*AC (accounting for armor stacking and the damage reduction from angle of incidence) also, I'm willing to bet that if you hit the pole off-center, it will end up having more than 0-1% damage reduction.

No matter what discord writes these videos are nice for folks who want some condensed info on one subject and personal testing is at least a sanity check to verify conclusions. You did miss the most popular schema though, which are beamslopes backed with a 4m block. They have good angles, protect from heat/hesh, and the 4m block backing provide them better net durability than other combinations. The downside is they only come in 4m configurations and need to be backed by that 4m block. That means Poles do have a niche though, and that's in light armor schemes. Beam Slopes would need [INSIDE-Block-Slope-Block-Block-OUT] or 4 blocks minimum. Poles can do it in 3 with less protection. [INSIDE-Pole-Block-Block-OUT], although I'm unsure how that compares to [INSIDE-Block-Block-Applique-OUT]. Maybe that's worth testing too :shrug:

Thanks for this info on armor & going into depth with the explanation. Helped heaps with understanding armor.

Your damage reduction test at angles is flawed, as you are only firing down the centre line of the block, because you are firing at a target on the same construct and using the same block grid. A pole rotated at any angle on a spin block (on the same construct) will always present a flat face at the centre of the block where the shell contacts. A beam will present the same angle as the spin block is rotated to, and a wedge will provide a slightly greater angle (due to the additional slope). In reality you will almost never hit a pole on the sweet spot, so will produce a contact angle between 0 degrees if you hit it dead centre of the block, taking full damage, and 90 degrees if you hit it on the edge, substantially reducing the damage. You will never be able to get a comparable test when firing at targets on the same construct as you will always tend to hit towards the centre of the block where poles receive negligible damage reduction.

Also this is off topic but borderwise you should make ships similar to the swedish costal defense boats /pocket battleship the hull shape is not hard to make very similar to a canoo (edit I forgot to mention you can make very easy realistic ish hulla and good relstic ish battleships/cruiser

If you rotate one layer to be horizontal the airgap problem becomes virtually nonexistent

8:02 Hmm interesting …. But which craft fires a Heat/Hesh shell directly in the middle of the block at point blank range…. And if it happens i tend to stick wood or light alloy (wegdes) after the wegdes or slops i use either heavy armor or metal and the wood or alloy again! (Depends on the ship typ i am build and the bugdet)if it happens it doesnt ruin my day . But very very interesting

One thing is slopes are a fraction of the weight and cost of beams. So if you are building on cost instead of volume they look way better than a straight 1 v 1 comparison. and weight is a pretty huge thing for flying craft.

That pun was a-pole-ing

I found the best way of protecting from HEAT is to place ERA blocks onto the inner side of the armour layer, then a spall catcher layer in case the same spot gets hit twice. By placing ERA blocks behind the armour, you are protecting them from being hurt by the shell explosion, so one shell only destroys one block. This anti-heat layer of armour should be a heavy armour(AHA) layer, also meant to stop kinetics. This makes it work against AP-HEAT as well. This armour doesn't guarantee your ERA blocks will be safe from HESH, though (haven't tested it yet), so it's a good idea to add an outer layer that can survive the thump damage from HESH, to trigger HESH before it reached the anti-heat layer. So, my most impenetrable armour setup against HESH, HEAT, APHEAT, and AP is: metal->wood->wedge/slope->ERA (4 meters in the smallest configuration, I recommend double metal and HA blocks behind slopes - 6 meters)

Your apology is far less accurate than your original claim. Testing with the gun perfectly perpendicular to the target is completely unrealistic, and moving the target a bit further (still much closer than normal combat ranges) doesn't really compensate for that. Poles being made of a lot of flat surfaces doesn't make much of a difference compared to perfectly round poles: for any possible incoming projectile angle there's only a small area that will take full (or almost full) damage and a much wider area that will be angled enough to take significantly reduced damage, while beams are going to behave the same way across their whole area.

Something I want to add here: You said that armorstacking works with two layers, so one should stack 2 beams and then a pole or a slope and so on. With beam = B and pole/slope = S something like BBSBSB. But that's not really optimal because the additional air gap also disrupts the armor stacking while not yielding a noticeable advantage against heat or hesh. In numbers, a stacked metal beam has an armor of 48 a not stacked one 40. With that BBSBSB configuration you have a mean armor value of 44 and a total health of 5 times beam health. A more optimal version would be BBBBSB with a mean Armor value of 45.33 and a total health of 5.5 times beam health. If shot at with an armor piercing value at or below 40 the second configuration withstands 13.3% more punishment than the first, if the armor piercing value is between 40 and 48 the effectiveness ranges between 13.3% and 10% and over or at 48 armor piercing the second one is 10% better. Tldr, one air gap is good, more not so much.

pole's health are better vs HE, laser, thump, melee, etc. pretty much everything where angles don't matter. in testing they should be only slightly more effective than slopes, in practice they leave smaller scars on your ship. when a games soo complex it has thesis and counter thesis lawl

Very interesting, but makes sense. I'm no professional at the game by FTD standards (1250hr playtime), but I have noticed one of the hardest parts about testing weapons/armor in FTD is the semi-random way things can be angled, and/or at different distances, and/or moving at different speeds etc. which all impact performance of said armor or weapon being tested. To work around this, I'd advise setting a block of armor up and having it held as a subvehicle above another moving vessel in a tractor beam then using enemy simulators so the ai can aim your weapons, also affecting overall performance (assuming your not using automatic detection, probably should though for just testing armor busting ability). What are y'all's opinions?

Hitting a shell on a vertex like that is virtually impossible. It's not even one pixel, it's less than that.

I literally just finished my medium cruiser with a layer of poles in the hull a day before this video came out lol. Good info update tho

I'm very happy I subscribed

I thought poles were modelled as octagonal prisms for physics. The range effect is probably due to the bullet spread?

I do my weapon and armor testing about 1 km. But it's probably is because i tend to use bigger ships further away and use small attack planes or subs to keep enemy not shooting my main ships...

Interesting, guess I won’t be refitting any of my battleships with poles. (Especially since they were likely going to be horizontal, which I suspect is not how it’s supposed to be arranged.) I’ll stick with the largish air gap that’s partly filled with resource or power storage instead then.

For a 4m thick armour belt, which one would you prefer - from inside to out, metal beam/metal pole/HA beam/metal beam, or metal beam/HA pole/metal beam/metal beam? (this is assuming for cost/weight reasons you only can afford one layer to be HA, and you dont have any room for air gaps.) The first has the advantage of the HA passing its stacking bonus to the outer armour layer, the second has the advantage your HESH/HEAT protection is more secure.

This game, and all its tips and tricks... I might never emerge... from the depths...

dont tell me im the only one who can hear spiffing brit during the intro

Thanks, this video was very helpful to learn about armour a bit more.

This way of testing defeats the purpose of the "slopes" on a pole because you hit them on a 90 degree of the pole so your testing the worst case for a pole a slope doesnt have that problem a wedge has the same problem on a wedge you can fix it by aiming the gun up a bit on a pole you could rotate the mantlet by 90 degrees and then change the angle by 1 or 2... i played ftd for a long time and in all the battles ive played i probably never had a gun aiming from exactly 90 degrees. Thanks for all the work though i did learn alot from watching your videos keep up the good work👍🏻

I still wouldn't dismiss poles as bad since their health compensates their lack of armor stacking compared to slopes. Also slopes can only attach from some sides while poles attaches from any side, so things wont fall off when other blocks are destroyed. As for the difference in effect point-blank vs at distance, its probably because the shell end up spawning inside the armor too. I can see poles being usefull in compact armors that dont have the luxury of having airgaps because of space. And, at least some, HESH spalling can be partially countered with aplique panels on the inside of the craft to absorb the fragments. Overall, i dont think your first unbiased impressions of poles were wrong. At worst, it was slightly romantized. XD (and i cant blame you for that since we all have favourites)

So it sounds like poles are still good. A very small chance to fail against Heat and hesh, and more raw HP against HE then slopes?

If it hits the side of the pole it really reduces it

Frankly speaking I still don't see an issue with slopes. Yes, there is a thin line of "non-gap" there. However, the same line is present with slopes too at the slope's beginning, it simply was not tested since its a real pain to catch. Yes, no stacking but nearly twice the HP. Its important against thump damage that top tier ships like so much, explosions too.

You should try to use 4m beam slopes, better choice.

I find poles only really useful for small craft larger craft just use slopes with ducts behind them

Have you tried putting two layers of poles, one horizontally, one vertically?

wait armor stacking only works for 2 layers? was this always the case?

How is it that we join this discord? I'm still very much learning about this stuff and would love a place to discuss with others and share ideas.

Wow this was rough. Just the inconsistency of testing was brutal how hard is it to do one set with slopes in the same position as poles. Just set a wall up at like 40 meters do some consistent tests.

So why are poles bad again? From the tests conducted in this video I'm not seeing it. I mean, yeah, in the scenario you get shot at from 1m away at a 90 degree angle it isn't good. But how often does that happen in practice? Literally never. VS kinetic rounds they seemed roughly on par with the beam and slope combos. And poles are just easier to build with because they connect on all sides. Build your slopes just a little bit wrong and watch the entire side of your ship fall off because you lost a couple anchor blocks. Been there. I'm sure there's ways to get around that and I just built it wrong, but the point is that with poles you just don't have to worry about it.

Second to comment les go