Those of you who watched the previous How it Works episodes,
already know how to damage ships and their modules with AP shells.
If you missed these episodes,
you should definitely watch them and share them with your friends!
How it Works
Today, we're going to talk about the second,
no-less-interesting, ammunition type—high-explosive shells.
These are different from AP shells, because they inflict damage
with explosive blasts and thin shell fragments.
High-explosive shells have quite modest armor penetration capability,
however, their blast nearly always inflicts damage
on a ship and its modules, and can also cause fires.
Let's get back to our Fuso
and imagine that a 203-millimeter HE shell hits the ship.
At first, there’s the penetration calculation.
In our game, an HE shell from the majority of ships
penetrates an armor thickness equal to 1/6th of the shell's caliber.
The German cruisers, British and German battleships, and some other ships
have HE shells with a penetration capability equal to 1/4 of their caliber.
And that's it. No ricochets.
Neither distance, nor relative armor, nor angle of incidence,
nor angle of normalization, nor anything else is taken into consideration.
A 203-millimeter HE shell penetrates armor up to 33 millimeters thick.
If our shell hits a superstructure with 20-millimeter armor,
it will definitely penetrate it, and inflict damage on a battleship
according to the same rules that apply to a standard AP shell.
The shell will inflict 1/6th of its full damage on the superstructure,
plus 1/6th on the hull.
To learn more details about this, watch the first episode of How it Works.
The damage from an HE shell
depends on its caliber, amount of explosive matter, and nation.
For example, any Japanese HE shell, on average, will deal more damage,
and a German shell—less damage,
compared to the same caliber shell for other nations.
In our example, a shell dealing 2,800 damage
will take away 924 [462+462] HP from Fuso.
It's important to know, if the armor isn't penetrated,
the HE shells won't inflict any damage to the ship's part,
and the battleship won't lose any HP.
However, the story of HE shells is just starting.
Regardless of whether the armor is penetrated or not,
following the explosion, the fragmentation damage area is shaped—
this area depends on the shell's caliber and the weight of explosives in it.
If the armor is penetrated, even considering a vast damage radius,
an HE shell deals damage only to the ship part that it hits.
For example, in our case,
if an HE shell penetrated Fuso's superstructure and damaged it,
then this shell wouldn't do any damage to the casemate under any circumstances,
even though the casemate is formally located within the damage area.
The fragmentation damage area has a cubic shape in our game.
This decision was made to simplify calculations.
We'll repeat this once more, both the fragments and explosive wave
don't deal damage to a ship's overall HP,
but damage a ship's modules and can even destroy them.
All the modules, even those that are within this cube partially,
receive damage. The damage value directly depends on the module's armor.
We should denote this from the start,
the modules encased with 76-millimeter and thicker armor are fully protected,
regardless of the HE shell's caliber.
We've already described how the modules receive damage
in the second episode of How it Works.
It works just like AP shells: when an HE shell hits a module,
the chance to critically damage the module
depends on the amount of damage received by this module
and on its remaining HP.
The chance to deal critical damage to a magazine
depends only on the damage received.
One more important point.
It doesn't matter whether the armor is penetrated or not,
an HE shell explodes upon contact with a target
or any other physical object in the game.
The first consequence is quite obvious—
there is no over-penetration even when a shell hits the thinnest armor.
But the second consequence is much more interesting.
If an HE shell falls into the water or on the ground close to a ship,
the shell will also detonate and inflict damage
to all the modules within its damage area.
For example, on a magazine.
The shell can even cause the detonation of a magazine.
A reasonable question arises:
if HE shells don't reduce an enemy's HP without penetrating their armor,
then why do they nearly always inflict damage on even well-armored battleships?
The thing is that any ship has superstructures with quite thin armor
that can be pierced even with an HE shell.
And even when the shell penetration isn't sufficient,
you can always increase its magnitude using the commander's Inertia Fuse skill.
But this skill lowers the chance to set a ship on fire.
And now it's high time to subscribe to our channel and click the bell,
so you won't miss the next episode of How it Works, dedicated to fire damage.