If you want to take away double upgrade, then take away the need to upgrade weapons rack and just allow squad upgrade the weapon in the field just for muni, just like ANY other Axis infantry
It is indeed 50/50, one large hitbox made out of two hitboxes, here's a drawing to help you to better understand the front/rear armor.
A vehicle's side armour is split into one "front" part and one "rear" part; by using the attack ground command when attacking enemy tanks and aiming at the rear part of the side armour, you will score a rear armour hit with a higher chance of penetrating.
However, I am uncertain if the size of the rear/front hitbox differs in distribution with larger units (e.g elephant with 75/25 front/armor), but I always go clearly for the bits that are visually the back than attacking from the sides.
Keep in mind that tanks are merely divided into front/back armor and that side hits may either count as front hit or back hit, depending on where exactly the shell hits.
Is there a more detail on how side armor hit registers either as front or rear? Random black box? 50/50?
Thanks! Although I looked into that thread beforehand and found only 'penetration chance are capped at 1' but the exact relation of armor and penetration remained unclear.
I decided to look up exact penetration values and armor values and got a bit confused:
if armor value is above the penetration value, some kind of probability applies? Because I am sure I saw shots penetrate where they should not have and I don't think veterancy bonuses change much.
What if penetration value and armor are the same? Panther has 240 pen and Churchill has 240 frontal armor, for example
Where does one look up this penetration probability then? stats.coh2.hu doesn't seem to have such info