With tanks now, you can take infinite damage until any single hit/shot exceeds a threshold. Once a set level (the level of the armor) is exceeded, you do damage. If you're 1 damage point below that level, nothing will happen. This is true even if you fire 50 rounds into the same spot that are all (hypothetically) 1 hit point below the armor rating. Hell you can fire 1000 rounds just below the armor rating at a tigr and never do any damage, when realistically each of these rounds is blowing off a small chunk of outer armor. [EDIT: Or, rather, "should be"]
In AH you get no damage unless the round pierces the armor. I would like to see this changed. This might take a re-balancing of all GV armor, but let me describe it first before you critique it.
I would like 8 pieces of armor for the average tank. Planes have parts that go pop when you put enough damage into them. I want tanks to do the same. Have a left, right, front, back piece of a box for a tank hull and for a tank turret (you can add a "top" piece or just have a pie-shape "top" associated with each side, meeting in the middle -- this will distribute damage differently though). If you just barely don't make the "armor threshold" you still do damage. You damage the "hull plate" that you just hit.
Land enough hits on a hull plate and it's gone, leading to either turret loss (turret plate loss) or engine loss (rear hull loss) or fireball (non-rear hull loss).
The problem with this wish is the following:
armor-piercing rounds that pass the "armor rating" will still do damage as normal. Only rounds that fail to pierce the armor would explode on impact. This would imply 2 sets of damage for any given round, that it does when it explodes inside the tank (pierces the armor) and that it does when it only splashes on the outside of the armor (hits a hull plate). The external splash damage should be a fraction of the internal damage the shell normally does, but it SHOULD do damage! It should add up when you put 150+ rounds into a tigr and it shows no signs of damage at all.
The benefits of this wish are the following:
inferior tanks actually have a purpose now. This opens the way not ONLY for defeating the absurdly modeled Tigr tank, but allows the T34 to stand up to pnzr and tigr tanks, as long as it can get enough hits on target. Currently it doesn't matter how many times you hit -- you're not going to kill anything in a T34, except other T34s. This also means that smaller bombs are effective again, but not lethal. Dropping a lot of smaller bombs (which is more realistic) onto a tigr might disable it or kill it. Instead, this game all but mandates that the only thing that can kill a tigr (bomb-wise) is a 2x1000lb bomb load dropped directly on target.
As a side note, I dropped a 500kg (1k) bomb between 2 relatively close panzrs, the panzers being about 3 hull widths apart, and got 2 kills (both ltars lol!) but I have dropped 4 1k eggs within 2 feet of a tigr before and not killed it.
Basically, this might take some work to get it... well.. "working". It would take some thought as to how effective each round will be when it only hits the "hull plate" instead of piercing it. It would take some thought as to how tough the GVs need to be now that bombs will accumulate damage on them. It will take some thought as to whether the Hurr2D or IL2 guns are affected at all.
HOWEVER, I think this is much better than the system we have now. At least on planes we have an all-or-nothing system, where you get no damage until you reach xxx damage on a part. On GVs we don't even have that! We have a "nothing" system! No damage, EVER, until any single round does xxx damage, and if you don't have a gun that can do xxx damage in 1 hit, you're SOL.
Well that's my wish. I thought about it a bit and typed up the description as well as I could, but if you want to add to it, feel free.
