Close range - weak, far range- strong? hmmm

Trevzor: This is going to be a little dense, but I will explain all of your issues    Your damage observation: Range from a tank does not play into the amount of damage that you do to said tank. Range only impacts penetration and only for AP type shells. Penetration is not calculated into damage either. So shooting an ELC AMX with an E100's top gun with more that 230 pen through the ELC's 14 frontal armor will not yield any more damage than punching through the 150 side armor of the E100's turret would. Damage is controlled by its own separate RNG that is unaffected by distance.   Shell's power over distance: As stated before, distance only impacts the penetration of AP type shells. The farther away you are, the less penetration you have. So, essentially yes, the closer you are the less armor angle will impact the penetration of your shot.   HE penetration mechanics: HE shells normally don't fully penetrate a tank, their penetration value is far too low. HE shells, when they do not successfully penetrate a tank normally, don't bounce but explode. At this point, the blast radius is used coupled with the Damage roll on the RNG to find the weakest part of the tank to penetrate and do just that. The damage roll that was used to penetrate does not cause damage to the tank, only the remaining  damage roll does. It is important to note that the damage roll that is used is FAR GREATER than the amount of armor you are trying to penetrate. It is because of this a direct hit with a 203mm artillery shell with a base damage on a heavy tank may only yield 400 damage to the actual tank.    It is also possible for a tank to "eat" the HE shell. This happens when the shell hits a tank in an area that would cause no damage, i.e. the tracks, and explodes far away from the parts of the tank that would cause damage. In this fashion, it is possible for a tank to take what seems like a huge shell and essentially walk away from the hit with nothing more than a broken track.   HE crew damage mechanics: Originally in earlier patches of World of Tanks this type of damage model was implemented, but HE shells were causing tanks to experience full crew death so early into the match that matches were neither fun nor interesting. Because of this, the mechanic was change to HE was made to cause less critical damage as well as not being able to knock out more than half of the crew in one shot.   For more information on how penetration and shell mechanics works, please check out our wiki here: Penetration Mechanics   I hope this clears up your confusion!