ST-CS-10-339-75
March 2002

SECTION IX

MISCELLANEA  (U)

1.  Armour  (U)

Armour effectiveness does not degrade as the armour takes damage. To put it another way, 25 points of armour protects you as well as 100 points of armour. You will only take more damage if you actually completely run out of armour.

Armour provides no protection against damage taken by falling.

Armour with a helmet covers all of the body except the legs, without a helmet leaves the head uncovered. Bullets which hit an armoured part of the body produce no visible effect, unless a headshot is achieved. Bullets which hit an unarmoured body part produce blood marks.

A headshot on an armoured player produces a burst of sparks. A headshot on an unarmoured player produces a huge blood splash. Note that an AWP hit always produces a huge blood splash, armour or no.

As mentioned in the page discussing HE grenades, armour stops 50 percent of blast damage.

It is not possible to cheaply "top up" a depleted armour+helmet suit by only buying armour. For example; a player has bought armour and a helmet and then plays say four rounds of combat. At the end of this, he has 35 points of armour remaining. At this point the player has 35 points of armour and helmet. If he now buys a new suit of body armour only (e.g. not armour+helmet) he will then have 100 points of armour and no helmet.

The armour you buy is the armour you have; what you had before is completely discarded.

The way in which armour takes a proportion of the damage inflicted by a bullet is miscalculated when headshots occur.

When a player with armour is shot, a certain amount of damage is inflicted. Each type of bullet varies in how well it penetrates armour. High speed rifle bullets penetrate very well, and so the armour only takes a small amount of the damage away from the player. Low speed small calibre pistol rounds penetrate armour badly and so armour absorbs quite a large proportion of the damage inflicted.

All good and well so far. But let us consider a concrete example. A player with armour is shot in the chest at close range by a Desert Eagle. 44 points of health damage occur, along with 8 points of armour damage.

However, when a headshot occurs, a multipler of about 3 is applied to the damage caused. But this is applied before the amount of damage stopped by armour is considered. As a result, the game now thinks about 156 points of damage have been inflicted ((44 plus 8) times 3), and so 26 points are stopped by armour.

DE headshot	DE chest shot

It does not make sense that armour absorbs more damage just because the part of the body under the armour is more vulnerable; armour stops whatever damage it stops before the round moves into the body.

The multiplier needs to be performed after the effect of armour is taken away from the damage caused.

(Note the screen caps showing damage caused by DE were taking with a round start inbetween; the chest shot was not performed immediately before the headshot).