>> actually mulching the opposing team is very firmly frowned upon by all known Armorsport leagues.
>
>So here's a related question- how are the various open-topped TDs
>(e.g. the Hellcat, Marder, etc.) handled? I know the
>series hand-waves it as "there's a fancy spall liner inside the tanks
>which prevents the girls from being affected by the shell impacts",
>but how does it work when there's, er, not enough tank to go around?

In Girls und Panzer, I have no idea; every vehicle I can remember seeing on the show is fully enclosed. Most are proper tanks, with a smattering of casement TDs (Ōarai's StuG and Hetzer, I think Pravda has a Trollcannon (ИСУ-152) and Kuromorimine has pretty much the whole range of Jagd-whatevers, since they're richer than Croesus).

Apart from the super-cheaty Karl-Gerät in the movie (which is specifically modified so the crew isn't clambering around on the outside of it), they don't do SPGs in GuP Tankery, because artillery support isn't really part of the game, and I can't remember anyone on the show ever using an open-hull TD—probably for exactly that reason.

In UF, it depends on the league. The more traditional ones want everybody buttoned up and open vehicles excluded, for similar reasons, and limit safety technologies to things that maintain the "period" feel (specialized ammunition, as Nora mentioned in Survivors, is the closest thing to a universal safety convention the sport has). In a few of the most safety-paranoid vintage classes, even dismounting is strongly discouraged-to-outright prohibited. Some of the more "open" (as it were) classes allow for things like deflector systems, not to protect the vehicles, but to prevent injury to the crews (and usually the computers keep track of who would be "dead" and score accordingly).

IAF Standard Armorsport, the ruleset under which most high schools in the Federation compete, has optional rules to allow for things like that, but both parties in any given match must agree to use them. This occasionally causes pregame disputes, as a team that uses mainly American equipment, for instance, may suspect a reluctant competitor of balking specifically to rob them of the use of their Hellcats. Like most interscholastic sports, it gets pretty political sometimes.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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