Armor penetration

This guide covers the topic of armor penetration, types of shells and more.

Introduction

Understanding the mechanics of armor penetration directly influences your performance on any tank type. You can't penetrate the enemy, but their shells easily go through your armor? There is an explanation to that. Let's start with identifying different types of shells, SHELL we? (sorry for the pun).

HE shell

HE shells have relatively low penetration value, but a significantly higher damage. Besides that, if you don't penetrate enemy armor, HE shells still have an opportunity to do some amount of damage, which will be much smaller than the value given in the shell stats. HE shells can easily go through small barriers, like fences and is able to penetrate through spaced armor and tracks of enemy tanks. The most efficient way to use HE shells is to only use it if there is a 100% opportunity to penetrate enemy vehicle, or kill it given it has very little HP.

With the update of 1.13, the mechanics of HE shells is reworked, the most recent and detailed information about that is given in the following video:

AP shell

AP shell is the most common type of shell among many tanks of different levels. It can go through walls/fences and cars, with a loss of 25mm penetration. But on large distances (>100m), AP shell is also losing its penetration.

APCR shell

APCR shell is identical to AP shell, but has higher speed than AP shells. Besides that, it has a different normalization (which will be covered later on)

HEAT shell

HEAT shells is different from AP and APCR shells and does not lose any penetration with distance, however it can not go through fences, cars and spaced armor. The main advantage of HEAT shells is their normalization, as it is much better than the one of other shells.

Normalization

Besides different types of shells, the game has a mechanic of normalization. Given the angle of collision of the shell and armor, effective armor is changed. More in detail about the difference between normalization of different shell types and other tips how to effectively penetrate armor is explained in the following video:

[Sargef101]

A newbee. So how do I change from one shell to a different shell while in game combat ?

[Ghost_iq]

No problem <3

[OffBrandCheese]

i am completely new to this game, thanks for the tips on learning how Armor Piercing works