I was testing it out, but apparently the 5mm and 8mm skirts on German tanks seem to provide 0 damage mitigation to heat rounds from m1 bazooka’s and PIAT’s.
So my suggestion is to allow for those skirts to actually provide HEAT protection.
Thank for reading.
don’t think they did irl, it was far too thin though the actual purpose of the skirts was to protect from ATRs
The German’s side skirt were design to provide protection from anti-tank rifle (mainly used by soviets) but I don’t think that they could protect from shaped charge.
From my understanding, schurtzen should deffend from HEAT to some extent.
But at the same time somebody (I think @Josephs_Piano) posted test results where they increased HEAT penetration.
Also I’ve read somewhere that ve actually don’t really know the full physics behind all of this.
So yeah… I guess it’s better to leave it simple and don’t touch it.
Irl the skirts not only didnt protect the tank, but as some recent studies show they probably enchanced their reliability by having 2 contact surfaces where the shaped charge could be activated
I see my name mentioned!! 
The thing about shaped charges is they work best at some specific stand-off distance. I have read that this is about 2-3 times teh charge diameter.
In WW2 this was not well understood, so teh warhead shapes often did not have much standoff, and detonating the charge away from teh armour may have inadvertently done so at a better standoff distance than letting the round hit.
Well, from just what my eyes can tell, you can shove a couple human head diameter’s worth between the turret of a PZ IV and the 8mm turret extra armor skirt. Meaning, it’s roughly many times the diameter of the shaped charges being fired at it. The side skirts though are roughly one-two head diameter away from the hull of the tank. Which may as well fit the criteria mentioned to be effective. Eh, me thinks.
Pz-4 turret schurzen is only 20-30cm away from teh turret, Hull Schurzen is 40-60cm.
but the exact mechanics for HEAT penetration and ideal standoff depend on all sorts of stuff - the angle of the HEAT cone, what material it is made of.
This picture is widely available on the 'net - this particular version is “cleaned up” from the originals, and I got it from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337544828_Determination_of_Shaped_Charge_Jet_Characteristics_Using_a_Neural_Networks_Model_Based_on_Hydrocode_Simulations#pf2, where the citation is:
Held, M. (1990) Shaped Charge Jet Section in Hazard Studies for Rocket Propellant Motors, NATO AGARD.
Note that for this 100mm diameter warhead, maximum penetration is achieved with a 60cm standoff - so petty much every WW2 era spaced armour variant you see would result in greater penetration rather than any protection at all!
For an idea about what people knew about shaped charges shortly after WW2 I thoroughly recommend download and perusing at your leisure - it’s a 26mb file
it has all sorts of stuff as they were trying to figure out how to design shaped charges, and a little bit on HEP, plus how to protect against them.
Eg from the ToC:
Andin how glass was better than steel (pg 377):
armoured plate didnt help
cage skirts help via deforming the shaped warhead before it goes off
and the current “cage armour” on some of the tanks in berlin wasnt spaced well enough to work infact it was noted in studys to increase shaped charges effect
plate would just but like normal armour
Many thanks, perchance is there anything about HEAT vs a steel mesh/fence like on the PZIV premium in Berlin? I will have to read up the materials at some point, but I got to finish my playthrough of “Disco Elysium” before I can find the energy to read something else.
Cheers.
Mesh either detonates the charge, or deforms it, or is not strong enough to do either and jsut gets shoved out of the way.
Modern cage armour deforms it AFAIK, which stops teh explosion focusing and makes it ineffective.
If mesh did that then it was by accident!
However they were looking at spike armor to do exactly the same - the spikes perforating the liner and causing the jet to be asymetric.
The paper I linked to mentions spaced armor but concludes that weight-for-weight aluminium is better protection:
At this time (1951) they were starting to think about ERA - it is mentioned but no testing has been carried out.