Before update 1.79 Project X, it was possible to obtain information about the design of your tank’s armor and the location of its parts, assemblies and crew with the help of armor viewing and X-ray. This means the player could find out lots of useful information about the protection of any ground vehicle and its design. However, the information obtained about the armor thickness, angle and effective armor could not be directly compared with a shell’s armor penetration to get a clear result on whether a certain type of shell will pierce a certain type of armor or not.

As in reality, the process of penetrating armor with a shell is more complex than simply comparing the effective armor at the point of contact with the shell’s penetration strength. Shells of various designs and shapes overcome different types of armor obstacles in different ways: for example, sloped armor was a more difficult obstacle than vertical armor for early APCR shells, while for modern finned APCRs with long solid cores, it’s the other way around. For HEAT shells, armor piercing at an angle actually can be calculated based on the armor’s effective thickness, but one must take into account the presence of screens, the dispersion of the shaped-charge jet, and its loss of penetration as it flies through the air (a HEAT shell loses 100 mm of penetration power for every 1 meter of flight in the game). All these subtleties lead to the fact that it was impossible to precisely say whether a target would withstand a shot from a selected shell type. To find out, the situation had to be played out in the game – whether in a user mission or on the proving ground with friends.

The description of the defenses on post-war tanks with complex armor obstacles adds yet more complexity – composite armor, spaced armor or explosive reactive armor. The current implementation showing the defense equivalent and the frontal angle in X-ray mode was not informative enough, since the defense equivalent was shown for a specific type of shell, and when other types of shells were used on the tank, the overall defense could change – just like in reality. When the player compared the defense metrics in X-ray mode with the results of real in-game shots with different shells, it led to confusion and misunderstanding.