5th edition games often feature a lot of vehicles, and understanding how best to crack open that armour and feast on the goo inside can be a crucial skill for any player.  With that in mind, here’s a question:

After some poor manouevring by your normally brilliant tank commander, your shiny new Leman Russ gets hit by a Lascannon, and by a Battle Cannon.  Which is more likely to penetrate?

The ambush continues, and the Russ is hit by a Demolisher Siege Cannon, and a Multimelta at close range.  Which of these is more likely to penetrate?

For most weapons, armour penetration is relatively straightforward, i.e. weapon strength + D6.  So, for example, a Krak missile can get results from 9 to 14 (not bad against a Rhino, but smacks of desperation against a LandRaider).  However many of the best Anti-Vehicle weapons don’t follow such a simple pattern.

For example, ordnance weapons roll two dice and pick the highest to add to the weapon strength, and melta weapons at half range get to add 2d6 to the weapon strength. This produces results that aren’t as simple, and can have a couple of quirks.

How does this apply to our terrified tank commander?

The interesting thing about the opening questions, is that it depends on what side the tank is hit from.

Let’s take the lascannon versus battle cannon first.  For a rear shot (AV10) the lascannon is more likely to at least glance, but the battle cannon is more likely to penerate.  For a side shot (AV13) the battle cannon is more likely to at least glance, but the lascannon is more likely to penetrate.  From the front (AV14) the Lascannon is the clear winner and is more likely to glance, and more likely to penetrate.  Not that the lascannon is remarkable against AV14 (with <20% chance of penetrating) it’s more that the battlecannon can’t pen Av14 at all!

It wouldn’t be a WarHamSandwich without some charts so let’s take a look at the comparison.  The graph shows the odds of getting at least ‘X’ for an armour penetration roll with each weapon.  So to get the odds of penetrating AV13, we look at the 14 result as this gives us the odds of getting at least 14 (the 13 result would get the odds of at least glancing).

So we can see a crossover from 10 to 11, and from 13 to 14 where the relative efficacy of each weapon against that AV switches.

So what about that second volley of shooting?
Again it depends on the angle. The Demolisher is more likely to penetrate against side and rear, but once we get to the front this flips and the multimelta becomes more likely to penetrate.  The crossover is clearly shown in the chart, below.

So what’s the point Vanessa?  There certainly are some comparisons where you can unequivocally say weapon X is better at anti-vehicle than weapon Y, but often it’s not so black and white.  With a bit of analysis you can pick the best tool for the job at hand.  Here’s a comparison of some of the common anti-vehicle weapons so you can gauge the relative merits against various armour values.

That said, this analysis doesn’t look at the end-to-end process, from hitting to penning to what you get on the damage chart.  I guess that will have to wait for next time…