Shell Ballistics Chart
Pick any ship to chart its main-battery shells: AP penetration, impact velocity, flight time, and impact angle versus range. Trajectories are computed by numerical integration of the World of Warships ballistic model.
Charting
How AP damage is decided
An AP (or SAP) shell that hits the target runs three checks in sequence. Each one can stop the damage.
- Overmatch. If
caliber × 14.3is at least the armor thickness, the shell auto-penetrates regardless of impact angle. The 14.3 ratio is a hard game constant — no ship, commander, or upgrade changes it. The ladder above is the canonical Legends armor steps; the overmatch chip is your gun's threshold. - Ricochet. If the shell is not overmatched, impact angle decides whether it bounces. The ricochet chip shows the bounce band as min°–guaranteed° measured from the plate normal: at angles below the min the shell always bites, above the guaranteed it always bounces, and in between the bounce is probabilistic. Wider bands punish angled targets less; Yamato-class AP has 50°–65° instead of the usual 45°–60°.
- Fuse. Once the shell penetrates, it has to travel far enough inside the ship to arm and explode. The fuse chip shows the minimum armor thickness that triggers arming — below it the shell over-penetrates (passes through without doing citadel damage). IJN improved-AP fuse drops this threshold so AP arms against thinner plates than usual.
The chart's leftmost data point is at ~1.5 km, where drag has already shaved a small amount off muzzle velocity; the muzzle AP pen chip matches the in-game spec card "AP Pen Close" value (formula at v0, before drag). HE skips ricochet and fuse entirely — it uses a flat caliber-based pen and never bounces under normal hit geometry.
Hover the chart to read exact values.
Search and pick a ship above to chart its shells.