The issue with the shallow setup is that after an explosive shell or two your airgap is destroyed, and now you don't have any air gap at all. Which is really bad unless your opponent is firing pure shaped or squash damage like in your test setup. Your testing only works because you're firing pure HESH/HEAT at a single spot of armor. Proper explosive shells would strip the outer lay of armor off quickly. Now you have a huge area exposed with literally 0 air gap protection at all, so any HESH/HEAT shells that hit on top of that will make things go very wrong very fast in this scenario. Also, my preference would be two metal in the back and an airgap. That would literally double your protection behind the airgap. Which is obviously quite significant. Even a single space over matters a lot in such a scenario. Everything about this setup takes things too far to the extreme, granting weird results.

For the Applique Panels, you can use the 4m slopes. They have the same health as the full panels for some reason, and you get a little bit of angle to help with kinetics. (Don't use the 4.5m slope panels, the hitbox is only 4m and the slope is shallower)

Small correction, at 46:00 you were shooting regular heat with high penetration factor, not APHEAT, you forgot to refill APS before shooting. You can also clearly see this by how the shell does not penetrate anything before the shaped charge goes off. Deep is always best for APHEAT as long as it's deep enough to stop the kinetic damage so the shaped charge goes off before the air gap.

I'm surprised he didn't try two air gaps or staggered air gaps. Like a zig zag back and forth.

On the HESH test, there's a big issue here, and that is that because of how HESH works in the game, it is always better to have bigger HESH under all circumstances, the ROF of smaller caliber and shorter HESH does not account for the damage lost, 8 meter 500mm will always have higher damage output than any length of 200mm, if you were to use large caliber HESH against shallow armor you would suffer to an extreme extend as a single shell would blow off a solid 5x5 meter radius, and that is assuming that it is a single barreled turret hitting, if it is 2 guns hitting about the same area, you will instead be seeing a penetration on the very first hit, this test only accounts for less potent weapons and is not realistic as there are many, MANY cases where shallow armor just loses out, at least when countering HESH, you want to always have a much deeper spacing because every meter that it passes through reduces the spalling effect. The HESH test also does not take into account that, despite the deep armor being penetrated at the same time as the shallow was, the angle at which the spalling is entering the interior is MUCH lesser as that's still only a 1x4 meter hole that the shrapnel can pass through as anything taking a wider angle gets caught still, vs that of the shallow where the moment it hits the pain armor, ALL of the shrapnel now gets into the actual vehicle itself which increases lethality

I like seeing weapon testing results. Note that HEAT pen settings will vary in actual HEAT pen metric by shell guage, and iirc shell speed, as rails get more pen factor in my memory. A HEAT pen metric of ~24.2 is enough for HEAT to penetrate 4 stacked metal beams. As AC effects this, I find myself wondering if ring shields will affect block count of HEAT pen, and logically it would, but FTD being FTD, I'll just say I haven't tested that. But 24.2 HEAT pen may be at .5 setting for some APS and like, .7 setting for others. Around 30 HEAT pen should deal with most non-excessive armor schemes, though heavy armor presence throws math off on number of blocks penned. One thing that I would like to see sometime is whether it's more effective to have half-beam slope right against another half-beam slope and then a couple solid beams, when it comes to kinetics and HE and frag, or half-beam slope backed with solid beam and then another half beam slope and solid beam. Ala which cuts more damage- the armor stacking, or the sloping, when both are used.

While doing these tests, you could add some engine cylinders or AI connectors to represent the internals after the armor.

I would strongly consider adding one more layer of metal to the outer armor, even if it comes at the expense of one layer of inner armor. This should make the armor more flexible in withstanding impacts from multiple, various rounds without losing it's integrity. I hope to see more videos exploring various armor schemes and nuances, these are very interesting. Thank you for making it. Side question: I know HESH AP is calculated based on the armor of the blocks it travels through before fragments spawn, but has anyone tested if it matters if lower armor blocks such as wood is more effective as the last layer, or could you place it in the middle if the outer armor for the same effect?

Hey, about the hesh Shell.. The differenz comes from the AP value that it gets from the stacked Armor before. I'am sure you know this 😉

clearly middle armor is the best. no question.

(At the early point of the video before any shootyshoots occurs); the slopes are what make the airgap? I thought it would have been a full empty space for it to be an airgap?

I like to keep my armor itself thin so I put a massive air gap between my armor and the enemy weapon. Yet it doesn't seem to be doing anything? Please help.

thats why i always do two airgaps >:)

It's quite amazing, the amount of detail in this game and yet it isn't (particularly) laggy

Why would you add armour to the shallow one then conclude it's best, what if you gave the deep armor a shallow airgap AND keep the deep airgap angled armor.

Amour, what is that?

I like how a normal arguement / conversation turned into a cozy video

wow, Just watching this hurt me. Usually your videos are fine but this one is embarrassing. Not only is good airgap placement against different shell types common knowledge, but you come across as blatantly biased throughout the whole video. The methods used to test this were horrendously inaccurate to what a real scenario would be like, and multiple times you make hypocritical statements. For example, when testing APHEAT, it is well know that the deeper your airgap is the better it will perform, and your tests show this fairly well; However you rank the medium airgap below the thin airgap, not only did you rank performance on a factor other than APHEAT, but you completely ignored the fact that the thin airgap will die to way smaller APHEAT than the medium would. Another example is after the applique tests at 46:00when you run two tests both using pure heat, and you draw a different conclusion from it. That along with with the language you used throughout the video showed me that this test was not made to determine the best airgap placement depending on the shell being fired at it, but instead made to your own point. Some of these mistakes are understandable, however to try and pass this off as "Empirical Testing" is just embarrassing. Adding to the mess that is this video, you very clearly don't fully understand how heat works, yet you feel that you are in a position of authority on the topic of air gap placement. My advice to you would be to wait until you fully understand the topic before you make a video on it because I would be ashamed if i had this video attached to my name, and it looks like I am not alone on this, reading the comments, most disagree with your conclusion and many point out a lot of the same flaws this comment does. I mean this with total sincerity, Take the hint, look at actual weapons used at given price ranges, talk with people who know what they are doing in this game, do some math, and give an actual hypothesis if you are going to be doing true Empirical Testing.