Last night I ran into an interesting question about blast weapons and vehicle combat: the players were in 2 Leman Russ tanks and were pitted against Ork Battlewagons. Both vehicles have cannons with a significant blast radius and after several relative fruitful shots (the front armour of an Ork Battlewagons is significant, just as that of the Leman Russ tank) they decided to start shooting behind the Battlewagons so the blast would hit the weak rear armour.

Inventive to be sure but something the rules don't really account for: there was nothing stopping me from applying the same tactics with the Battlewagons which would've turned the battle into a short and bloody one. Also the thick front armour most big combat vehicles tend to have is rendered useless (especially since most of those big vehicles have cannons with blast radius).

We came up with a quick workaround, ruling that the penetration value was 0 for indirect blasts. But that only partly negates the problem, the average damage of the indirect blasts to the rear armour is still roughly 10 points more then direct hits to the front armour.

Has anyone else ran into this issue and how did you solve it?

On 2/12/2018 at 12:19 PM, Hawkeye26 said:

We came up with a quick workaround, ruling that the penetration value was 0 for indirect blasts. But that only partly negates the problem, the average damage of the indirect blasts to the rear armour is still roughly 10 points more then direct hits to the front armour.

Has anyone else ran into this issue and how did you solve it?

Think what happens in-universe. Why do YOU think tanks don't do this? Yeah, it's a non-issue if you simulate it right. Just don't allow easy direct-fire at random, yet precise spots on the ground - a shell on very flat trajectory is extremely unlikely to hit anything like this. And where it hits, it's very likely to either sink a lot before going boom (and may even fail altogether, if the medium is soft enough), or ricochet due to sharp angle.

Dropping Pen would represent soil displacement - the area effect is due to flying dirt/sand/gravel rather than steel shell fragments and shockwave. Or even simpler: it's cover, it soaks damage. Sandbags have AP 8, and a shell may go even deeper than a single sandbag's thickness.

Of course, if one combatant has an Indirect weapon (i.e. mortar), it can be used to hit the top side, which is weaker than the rest. If you nail a tank in the top side with mortar shell or bomb, it's going to hurt a lot , the problem with this is actually hitting it. Which is why, of course, no one makes unguided anti-tank mortar shells to begin with. Again, no need to fix - Indirect shots scatter and mortar shells don't have anti-tank level of Penetration. Of course, there's also incendiary.