[quote=“Pieroh, post:5268, topic:42”]HEAT is High Explosive Anti-Tank, so it penetrates through any armor it encounters THEN explodes, meaning yeah an HEAT round hitting a car near you will hurt with all the shrapnel and stuff from that, but the explosion itself shouldn’t be too awfully big. Unless the car explodes or something but that would probably be unlikely.
HE on the other hand is simply High Explosive, so it’d explode on impact with pretty much everything and it would be a big explosion, meaning it’d be very very deadly to you and STILL deadly to unarmored vehicles but less of a threat to moderate/heavily armored vehicles.[/quote]
Sorry mate, you’re kinda wrong. HE has a blast fuse with a delay of anywhere from 0.5m to 2m. It hits, then after about 1 metre the fuse finishes burning and it actually explodes. APHE is a lot more sensitive, and usually goes off 0.1m after impact.
HEAT uses a very different principle, applying a shaped charge around a copper liner to form a jet of molten copper which penetrates, melts, and fragments armour it goes through. The sheer speed of the jet means that it pulls most the fragments it creates with it, which is what gives it most of its destructive potential. (Or it carves a hole through the crew compartment and creates a massive pressure vacuum on its way out)
It’s the anti-tank equivalent of using shaped charges to destroy something, careful direction of the explosion means more destruction in a smaller area, but at the cost of much lower area killing potential.
Speaking of which, HEAT is on its way out as a tank shell, KA, why don’t we just rename it to APHE? APHE shells work in much the same way that the ‘HEAT’ shells in Cata do.
