PzIII 50+20 armor?

[Ted]

I hate to sound so non-grogish but on the PzIII’s what does a front armor rating of 50+20 mean?

(And does anybody know how to bypass the music in the beginning and go straight to the start screen?)

[rexford]

Originally posted by Ted:
I hate to sound so non-grogish but on the PzIII?s what does a front armor rating of 50+20 mean?

(And does anybody know how to bypass the music in the beginning and go straight to the start screen?) Click the mouse and the music and intro screens disappear.

PzKpfw III's carried spaced armor, with a 20mm plate about 6" in front of the main 50mm armor on the turret front and driver plate.

20mm plate was designed to decap or blunt armor piercing rounds, decreasing their ability to pierce the face-hardened 50mm armor.

The 20mm plate also would detonate the HE burster in armor piercing rounds before they reached the 50mm plate, which actually defeated 122mm hits in Russian tests.

To see the impact of the 20mm spaced/50mm combo on armor piercing rounds go to

http://www.geocities.com/mycenius/

and click on army test 1. About 4/6 of the way down is a graph showing firing tests with 75mm M61 ammo against the 20mm+50mm spaced armor, the rounds with HE bursters failed on every hit while the inert loaded 75mm ammo penetrated.

Problem with spaced armor is that the 20mm plate broke up after a few hits and maintenance was probably a problem. Look at pictures of tanks with the spaced armor and quite a few will probably be missing one or both spaced plates.

[Deserteur]

rexford if the link in your post refers to your homepage. the Defense of Greece link does not work anymore.

[Ted]

Thanks for the quick explanation and great link.
I see I'll be spending quite a few minutes there.

I know about the mouse click or any key for that matter but I thought there was a few keys you press at the same time (shft-alt-enter kind of thing) and the next time you start CM it goes to directly to the start screen.