penetration and crew quality

[Weasel]

Speaking of sabot, is it true that a tank will only fire SABOT at ranges less then 500m, and regular AP over that? If so...HUH?, that doesn't make sense to me.

No it isn't. The game will determine the type of round most likely to do damage to the target at the given range and then runs a crew check to see if they figure it out themselves too. So better crews are more likely to take the right type of round. As sabot rounds usually have the highest penetration these will tend to get picked first, it's a case of the crew going for the 'sure' option.

Maybe the situation you describe stems from 'early' ww2 encounters where sabot rounds have much less range than AP rounds? In that situation the effective penetration of a abot round at ranges over 500m might indeed be lower than that of the AP round. Some german sabot round had an effective max range of only 20 hexes so 500m seems right as the range where they would stop to have more penetration than AP rounds.

Narwan

The game that raised the question was Dec 44, panthers and Su85s.