Frontally it will only really matter to the 17 pdr APDS which is just in the realm of penetrating it. Nothing else in Normandy will come close.
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Frontally it will only really matter to the 17 pdr APDS which is just in the realm of penetrating it. Nothing else in Normandy will come close.
The modifier used in Warthunder, which generally tries to be realistic in modelling vehicle capability and hard stats(unless it is spaced armor or solid shot), for the King Tiger's armor is like a 0.98x modifier. So if we use the wargame armor system, just it give it 1 less point than what should be given for the actual thickness. Let's say it'd theoretically have 21 armor with its armor thickness, but due to the poor quality it has 20 front AV
Well, the thing to remember with German armour quality is that the hardness did not change very much, what did change however was that their steel became increasingly brittle, which resulted in the plates being capable of stopping a few rounds before the plates simply failed and fell apart.
I don't recall seeing any report on King Tiger front armor hardness - the damn things were rarely encountered to begin with. The British and Americans however did do some testing on Panther wrecks, with the former noting a bunch of issues with Panther front armor hardness. From a strategic perspective, Germany had been using bad-quality ore since 1939 - a consequence of various embargoes - so it would not be surprising if German steel had quality issues in 1944 (this is covered in Tooze's Wages of Destruction).
I would note though that front armor hits very rarely struck the best-armored portions of the tank. The same British report on the hardness issues also noted that the 6 pounder could "shot trap" a penetration down the top forward hull so long as they aimed for the lower part of the Panther's turret mantlet. This, combined with the Panther's flammability issues, made the Panther something of a death trap despite what its frontal armor values and post-war "war is a joust" video games would indicate.
.98x is not a big enough difference to make it 1 point less. There's no real point to simulating that sort of granular steel quality stuff, especially since armor quality varied between individual vehicles. It would be adding RNG for your loader to be sick and thus giving a tank lower ROF.
Shooting the lower part of the Panther's turret mantlet is anything but an easy job. Even today, with laser rangefinders and ballistic sensors and computers and thermal optics, tankers are trained to shoot center mass.
It was possible, unlike the stories of killing tanks with reflected .50 rounds, but it was not routine at all.
Deliberately aiming for the lower mantlet definitely wasn't easy if it was done at range. However, as a proportion of the tank's overall frontal surface area it was a considerable percentage, so even somebody just shooting at the front may end up hitting the lower mantlet regardless. And in close range, deliberate aiming of a "weak spot" that big wasn't too far from the realm of possibility.
Only in WoT and from ambush conditions. people stop thinking if they are shot at.
While I agree with you, this is where training and experience come in.
In the Words of Chieftan, being shot at may constitute a significant emotional event.
While your training may allow you to operate the vehicle as normal in combat conditions, you are still not thinking under calm or perfect conditions. You will have adrenaline pumping through you ofr one, and thus your mind-set would be utterly different from if you were calm and collected. This can only get more apparent once shells start hitting the armour, crew start dying or things in general start going horribly wrong.
On the flip-side, aiming for weak spots was often irrelevant. Just as combat would effect the minds of the shooters, it would also effect the minds of those being shot at. A German panther crew does not know what they are being shot at when taking fire, and there plenty of accounts of crews on both sides bailing out of their tanks after being hit by rounds that didn't actually penetrate the armour, or inflicted mild damage. (often being tracked was enough reason to abandon the tank) Similarly, I believe the Allies achieved some remarkable success by simply flinging HE rounds at some of the heavier German vehicles, which either cracked the increasingly brittle plates or killed the crew via concussion, or made the crew panic and either abandon the vehicle, or attempt to drive away and get stuck, which inevitably meant abandoning the vehicle. Being shot at in general isn't really fun, and I don't blame the tankies for sticking around, even if it was statistically safer inside the tank than out of it. (a large number of tankers were killed while outside the tank, while inside they were actually far safer than most considering they were in frontline combat)
Post WW2 studies swiftly found the most important aspect of tank fighting was the simple matter of which tank shot/spotted/engaged first, and that if they did, they had something upwards of a 90% chance of winning that engagement, regardless of armour, gun, crew and such. However, having a good crew, being on the defensive or being well sited or supported are all factors which would contributed to you getting the first shot anyway, which is why the Germans often managed to get first shot capability, at least on the defensive. It was found that on the offensive, they encountered similar casualty rates to Allied armour, and more or less the same difficulties in general.