How well are you protected behind cover?

November 4, 2019

If I'm not mistaken, most soldiers in the NATO army uses high velocity rounds with low penetration these days. An example is the 5.56 mm rounds used by most soldiers of my own country of Norway in the HK 416. It's designed to do "flesh damage" over penetration, to minimize collateral damage. Naturally, you wouldn't expect such a round to go through most kinds of cover.

Previously, however, the Norwegian army used the HK G3 (Norwegian variant AG3, a "cousin" of the FN FAL) with a full metal jacket 7.62 mm round. That particular round could easily dig into fortified positions to really reach out and "touch" the enemy, easily penetrating tree trunks and sometimes even brick walls and similar (or at least splintering it into a dangerous shower of hot rocks and shrapnel). Certainly most kinds of body armour would be no match for it. Not so with the 5.56. Not a chance! This is why a lot of vets preferred the AG3 over the HK 416, though the latter is still an excellent weapon none the less.

So again, how well are you protected behind various types of cover against the different rounds in Tarkov?

On maps such as Woods, most people will take cover behind tree trunks, for instance. Now, if I rock a FAL, I'd expect to still be able to reach out and touch the guy, even if he's behind a quite solid lump of wood. Or take the Suppressor Shed in Woods, or indeed any domestic house in Shoreline; those buildings shouldn't provide good cover against high pen ammo. IMHO you shouldn't be able to take cover behind a tree trunk in Woods, if your enemy is rocking high pen 7.62 round. Yet I'm not sure how this translates to the game.

I know that Arma 3 indeed has a model for penetration through various kinds of cover, though it's not perfectly implemented, meaning that some types of concrete walls will even stop a 12.7 mm round cold when it really shouldn't. Anyway, on those places where it's well-implementend, it provides pretty cool realism. So how does this translate to Tarkov? How well does various types of cover fare against the different rounds of ammo in Tarkov?