i’m having trouble understanding HE tank shells in-game. In this regard, i’m using german tank (like PZ III N and Pz V/IV G). Sometimes when i shot the HE shells it act like a mini nuke, one shot at a point and 12 kills in the bag (using Pz III N).
But sometimes i shot HE shells right beside infantry and it doesn’t do anything (Pz. IV G & Pz. V A). Are there something i’m missing? How does HE shells are modeled in game?
sometimes HE shells have a nasty tenancy just do not do anything,even something like a 128mm HE shell directly hitting a soldier just gives a hit mark.so yeah,it is a bug.
Shooting at the wrong range is the usual problem with HE IMO - if you are just a few meters short or long you don’t hit close enough to your target, and on relatively flat terrain that is only a minuscule difference in angle.
If there is a nearby vertical surface to shoot at you are often better shooting at that rather than trying to land it at the feet of infantry. A building, rock, wreck, etc can serve for this.
I’d want to see a replay before I accepted that as a fact!
what do you meant by this??
i will try to provide replay, but i also been experiencing this as well. Its better off to shoot, like you said, at vertical object rather than hitting the feet or the infantry itself. Since hitting them, most of the times, only resulting in that one person death while all the other just seems fine by it.
usually hitting infantry directly gives good result, it somehow works like thunder spreading on soldiers that are far apart of each other
I cant remeber experiance any instances of soldiers surviving a direct hit but it could be maybe possible if there is a desync between server and client so that is always a possibility.
Whenever I just get a hitmarker it usually is just the HE ricocet hitting a target but not beeing able to explode as such.
HE has a relatively small explosion radius in which it does damage but ontop of it the explosion does release a few hundred fragments into random directions with a lot longer range.
For example the HE of the panther itself explodes and does damage in a 3 m radius (with lower damage away from the center distance) and also releases 350 fragments each into a random direction but with a 15m range instead of just 3m.
So when you nearly miss a soldier it is very possible that he can survive by sheer luck at a distance of 5m but another soldier that is 12m away to die because a fragment was heading perfectly into his direction by pure chance.
If HE does not impact at a certain angle at minimum it will fail to ignite and will just bounce away without exploding
If you are aiming at a horizontal surface, then a small error in angle can result in the shell landing quite a long way from the intended target.
I’m not much good at graphics and couldn’t find a diagram online showing what I mean, but I hope this helps… 
In terms of the game the it might look like you are aiming “right next to” the target, but actually you are aiming a relatively long distance away - too far for the HE to have any effect. This is amplified with small guns that have very small HE content, since they have smaller damage radius.