The way the cheeks work irl is quite interesting actually. They are mostly hollow and are meant to destabilize APFSDS. When it pens the steeply sloped cheek, it destabilized and starts to tumble, hitting the armor at an unfavorable angle. So the cheeks make the armor nearly impervious to any APFSDS short enough to not be able to touch the main armor before completely passing through the cheek.
From testing it seems the Leopard 2A5/2A6/2A7's cheeks without wedge composite (shot off) protect around 670 mm kinetic at most thus the wedges in game provide an extra 200 mm of armor. In reality the wedges are effective if the rod's length is less than the wedge length, otherwise if it isn't it would hit the actual composite head on. The rod being shorter than the wedge causes most of the rod to hit the turret with its broadside. Its a miss conception it makes rods flip or go sideways when it bends the first part of the rod with lateral forces.
The first one at the turret is composite and the second one is out of the turret and it’s only air to make it slower so it can pen the first compostite armor in the turret
The wedge greatly deteriorates the structural integrity of the dart and reduces its penetrative effect noticeably. It's like shooting an armor piercing bullet at 1cm of steel vs 2 plates of steel each only 5mm (half of one cm for all Americans out there) and the bullet not penetrating in the second scenario. This principle applies here and is also used in most composite armour as they also have seperate layers consisting of different materials and due to an angel splitting of and deflecting parts of the penetrating rod.
was using the FV4005 yesterday shot a King tigers Manlet and got “non pen” then shot the roof and got the same message. But yeah 1 shot the leopards composite armor
Ever since the new update armour is broken. A CM25 penetrated my Valentine turret front on, and a BT-42 killed my entire crew by shooting my track from the front
And to think both the 2a7v and 2a7HU have the worst turret armor out of all the leopards (2a5/6/pso/122a/122b plss/122b+/fin 2a6) just show how good the turret armor really is.
