Version 8.0

Fixes for German C/11 APC.

1. Version 8.0 now includes a better rendition of the German final WWI-era C/11 APC shell design test results, for the 30.5 cm (12") L/3.4 size shell, but I assume it applies to all of them. I also fixes a couple of errors where I failed to properly update some German AP/Common projectile criteria: Nose minimum deflection damage criteria from 15 degrees down to 10 for older steel shells with normal-impact-only acceptance testing and going up to 15 degrees for the C/11 and L/3.7 APC shell acceptance criteria requiring intact penetrations against at least half-caliber KC plates at 30 degrees obliquity, and shifting the shatter (cap failure) boundary from 20 degrees used for soft caps to a separate 30 degrees for tough AP cap and the thinner hard AP caps used by some shells.
2. As mentioned in the Change Description Document, there are a number of oddball things in this C/11 versus L/3.7 update, such as the simple fact that the C/11 shells are SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER than the later L/3.7 shells in several ways, which is kind of counter-intuitive. Those things that I could not figure out, I ignored, but I fixed enough to give closer-to-reality results in many cases.

More details in the zip-file notes.

Version 7.9

Two large bugs fixed.

1. Adjusted HARVEY armor formulas such that armor thickness does not exceed 20 inches.
2. Re-evaluated Compound armor formulas to take into account Harvey and KC armor formula changes in previous versions.

More details in the zip-file notes.

Version 7.8

Two small bugs fixed.

Version 7.7

Facehard 7.6 had a bug for the uncapped 155mm and 203mm Japanese Type 91 AP projectiles when hitting armor between 0.1 and 15 degrees. Version 7.7 fixes that by hand-inserting the correct zero-deflection value into the logic and bypassing the existing logic, which was never designed to handle such a combination of SHATTER plus NO DEFLECTION (it was dividing by zero in one of the formulas). The FINAL RESULTS printout at the end of each run now states this is special logic. More details in the zip-file notes.

Version 7.6

I added some logic in Version 7.5 to handle the fact that older, weaker projectiles used the much flatter Shattered Obliquity Thickness Modifier Curve for their Holing Limit due to major breakage when they failed to penetrate, even if the damage was not actual shatter. However, this was not always true for the NBL against weaker armors, since sometimes the projectile could suffer much less damage if it hit hard enough to penetrate completely. My old logic had a major bug that gave incorrect answers sometimes for both the HL and NBL and crashed the program at 70 degrees or more.

Version 7.5

This version fixes a number of small bugs in Version 7.4 that were found by someone who is translating it into C. It also adds a corrected method of handling the case where an uncapped high-quality projectile hits thin face-hardened armor at low obliquity (up to 15 degrees obliquity) and suffers only nose damage, rather than complete shatter. I had something that did this before, but it had little data except for one set of British post-WWI tests. I now have German WWII test data, so I was able to come up with an approximation that includes both sets of data and, hopefully, is somewhat realistic. A more detailed list of changes may be found in the FACEHARD75CHNGDOC.rtf document within the FACEHD75.zip file.

Version 7.4

New update, fixing some typos and making some corrections/additions to 7.3. A more detailed list of changes may be found in the FACEHARD74CHNGDOC.rtf document within the FACEHD74.zip file.

Version 7.3

This one was pretty extensive as to armor and projectile properties in those pre-WWI times, which I had had limited data on. German KC a/A armor was MUCH more complex than I knew, with FOUR significantly different types in either composition or resistance or both by the end of WWI. Who knew? This is now included in FACEHARD as far as the data I have allows, including re-calibrating the other older armors to give the same test data as before against projectiles with new, updated properties to match the new German projectiles of the period (I assume other shells were of similar capabilities and changing them to match the new German data requires armor property changes to retain the old known FACEHARD calculation results as closely as possible - mostly, I was able to do this within a couple of feet per second of the 7.1 HL, NBL, and EL results, though a couple of these have more change than that, which I hope is now more accurate, not a screw up on my part!). A more detailed list of changes may be found in the FACEHARD73CHNGDOC.rtf document within the FACEHD73.zip file.

Version 7.1

I found a big typo in 7.0 that prevented running FRENCH PROJECTILE SELECTION #9, the US Crucible Steel 380mm Mk 1 MOD 1 AP projectile for RICHELIEU (blueprint dated May 1943). When I updated the French projectile table some versions ago, I added a new entry to the table and forgot to add one to the counter, so the last entry, this projectile, "fell off the edge".

Version 7.0

I have made a few touchups primarily to make the Harveyized Armor scaling adjustments exactly match my graphs. They were "pretty close" but as a perfectionist I had to tweak them to within 0.1% error. A single adjustment worked for all face layer percentages and projectile sizes, so it was due to the nature of the Harveyized armor's hardened steel/cementite-only face combination (I assume it works with both nickel steel and mild steel versions of Harveyized armor), not due to my KC armor adjustments being wrong.

I also found a couple of typos and added some more information about those two captured VH experimental plates - with deeper face layers than regular VH armor - that were tested by the US and Britain after World War II that proved to be the best plates ever tested by those nations. They both had face layers more like German World War II KC n/A armor and were 1% (the US plate) and 1.5% (the British plate) better than average KC n/A, way above standard VH armor. Since they are so close to one-another in design and quality, even though one was more than twice as thick as the other one and tested with two different nation's projectiles almost over a nearly double scale of diameters, indicates again Japanese super-high quality control (British CA plates vary all over the map as to quality around their average, but not Japanese armor!!).

The only details that I still need to resolve completely are British changes to the ratio of HBL to NBL (varies a lot from plate to plate), Russian armor and projectiles (very limited test data), and the exact relationship between German and Austro-Hungarian projectiles and armor before and during World War I (have a lot of similarities, but not sure who developed what).

Version 6.9

See Facehard version 6.9 change information.

Version 6.8

I have been testing the thing "to death" and am finding all sorts of small problems that only occur under certain circumstances. Some more problems with the Hooded and soft-capped shells versus various KC armors. Fixed a major bug in the logic for the Japanese uncapped 15.5 cm and 20.3 cm Type 91 AP projectiles. Fixed flaw in Harvey armor logic and a few less serious design limitations in FACEHARD. The projectile tables for all nations are now modified as to their old pre-1900 shot and shells. Russian projectiles, as far as are now known to me, are now included as a Nation Selection with a number of shells available.

Version 5.8

Fixed problems with Gruson Chilled Cast Armor and Terni Cemented Armor. Fixed bug where not zeroing the plug weights when no hole made in the plate prior to using them. This caused a minor error where post-impact behind-the-plate damage was being worked out. Splinter damage is now possible if no backing layer is mounted behind the plate.

Version 5.7

Fixed minor bugs.

Version 5.6

Fixed problem where rounding error changed ballistic limits by 1 ft/sec and messed up some of the logic for projectile damage by causing the results to shift back and forth at boundaries. Changed logic so that if the actual value is only 1 ft/sec away from a "perfect" projectile boundary, then it is always set to equal that perfect projectile value.

Version 5.5

Corrects a problem where Selection 20 was still being referred to as Selection 18 in one place, which caused an error when either Selection 18 or Selection 20 was used and that logic was applicable. Also has some wording changes to better define what is really meant by "quite possibly" and "probably" when referring to projectile wobbling/tumbling after a penetration. Noted that a weak shell that is broken above the Holing Limit but below the Navy Limit may throw pieces of itself through the plate, while a stronger shell that does not break will only punch out armor pieces. Thus, sometimes a weaker shell is more dangerous!

Version 5.4

Fixed bug for shattered projectiles at low levels of armor penetration.

Version 5.3

Fixed bug where remaining velocity of projectile was not being reset between run loops (without restarting) if the projectile had its nose break (but no other breakage) at under 45 degrees obliquity and only made a hole in the plate.

Version 5.2

Various bug fixes.

Version 5.1

Various bug fixes and rebuilt the Grüson and Terni Cemented armor logic due to both of them having plate faces that get thinner as the plates get thicker. The program now gives you the current calculated back layer percentage ("UB") used in the program and this will make it easy to override this with your own manual input values (if you did not know the old UB value, how could you determine a new one?). I also did some minor editing and clean-up of the paper printout and added TC armor to it, which I had forgotten to do in 5.0. Boy, I am sure blind sometimes!! I ran some tests and things work OK now, as far as I can tell, at least as far as THOSE bugs were concerned. Anyone finding a bug, please tell me about it!

Version 5.0

I decided to jump to Version 5.0 because I have done an EXTENSIVE modification to how the program handles SHATTERED projectiles, among other things.

My problem was that I based the original design on the U.S. World War I and shortly thereafter tests using the U.S. Navy World War I MIDVALE UNBREAKABLE soft-capped AP projectiles, which were, by definition, 1.00 quality, since they rarely broke against the World War I-era U.S. Navy Class "A" armor at up to 15° obliquity. Thus, when they DID shatter at a higher obliquity, they still had 1.00 quality and only the effective plate thickness went up. However, this means that I only had good data on 1.00 projectiles, which is good for creating the baseline to compare other projectiles, but it is bad in that the "third dimension" (projectile quality variations when the projectiles are not as good and shatter or don't shatter) was missing.

When I did my re-evaluation of German APC projectiles and armor, I used an "analyze it to death" study of the captured (by the U.S. NavTecMisEu) World War II tests of Krupp KC n/A armor as used on SCHARNHORST and BISMARCK, which was tested using many kinds of Krupp APC projectiles, INCLUDING pre-World War I small hard AP capped L/3.2 and L/3.4 APC and soft-capped L/2.9 APC projectiles. By using G.Kdos. 100 and this data and U.S. and British tests of German World War II armor and projectiles, I cross-correlated the results back and forth and back and forth (it was a REAL messy job!) until I got some kind of correlation between the soft-capped projectiles, which were always shattering against this improved armor, as expected, and the World War I hard-capped projectiles, which were shattering at 30° obliquity, but not at normal, against thick plates of this improved KC n/A armor, which I had not expected, but which makes sense, since the later post-World War I Krupp APC projectiles obviously were given different, thicker AP caps for a reason!

After all this work, I reran my recent data on the World War II Italian Terni Cemented plates being fired at at 30° obliquity by uncapped Italian World War II AP projectiles and, lo-and-behold, my answers were now even closer to the results of the tests! Eureka! Win-win!!

The following must be installed to the same directory to run FaceHard:

M79APCLC.zip contains the following files; download these if you cannot extract M79APCLC.zip:

• M79APCLC.EXE
• M79APCLC.BAS
• M79LPRNT.EXE
• M79LPRNT.BAS

The following must be installed:

Version 6.0 (June 2019)

Discovered a bug in the fix for Rev 5 concerning limiting the range of allowed values with the Percent Elongation logic. Did not allow the logic to use all possible projectile sizes (8-18" allowed). Revision 6 fixes this by correcting the values of the new variable "DPE" that was incorrectly done in Revision 5.

Version 5.0 (May 2018)

Corrected the fact that the OBDIF variable used for HOOD and WINDSCREEN modification values to the NBL was not being set correctly, giving wrong values for these changers and a bug where the Percent Elongation calculation does not work for large things like 38" 11,985-lb British TALLBOY SAP bombs or if the Percent Elongation goes much below 15%. I also fixed an intermittent error when the ANOTHER RUN? was used and the old info was not being completely cleared from the M79 NBL modifications.

Version 4.0 (February 2018)

My program differentiates between an AP Cap that merely breaks up due to pressure as it is forced through the plate while riding the projectile nose (a couple of effects) and the cap SHATTERING on the plate face after just making an initial notch in the plate face, so that most of the cap's inertia are lost to the penetration process and the NBL goes up and the Residual Velocity, now without the cap weight, goes down. I had put the check for the shattered cap along with the windscreen and Hood checks for being torn free, but they do not have this shattered case (they either go through very thin plates or are torn free and do not penetrate at all). I now had to create a new subroutine to do the cap weight change logic for cap shatter (includes loss of windscreen weight always, too) that I now jump to just after determining that cap shatter has happened from the user input of the normal-impact minimum plate shatter thickness and the program's oblique-impact adjustment formulae.

While at it, I also rewrote some confusing, to me, notes and screen printouts to better explain how the program does some functions, though these do not change the computation results.

Version 3.0 (May 2017)

Improved smoothness of graphing calculations. See text file in zip package for a complete listing of the changes.

Version 2.0 (December 2016)

Some typo corrections and small changes. See text file for a complete listing of the changes.

Version 1.0 (April 2012)

Initial release