Real tanks have curves

Honestly the game has broken away from what tradition calls tanks. Think about it, tanks in this time are designed to take impact from high powered AP shells and given the technology of NS in this game it is entirely plausable that such arms are not used, in fact the closest thing to an actual day shell is that of the NS launcher. Is it not possible that all munitions in this game are of a different material and therefore the actual shape of a tank will make no difference. Vanu uses plasma, does not matter what shape your tank is, its still going to take full damage.

Tanks this day and age are designed partly in two ways, an angled armour plate is thicker than that of a flat vertical or horizontal one so shells have to pierce more armour to break through and curves plates can even be used to actually bounce (yes bounce) shells off the tank (this only really applies to older tank variants)

A tank needs to have a small of a profile as it can be, this means ok speed and manuverability whilst being as small and armourd as possible. There is no such thing as a perfect tank.

Not speaking for the VS, but at least the NC and TR still use very conventional tank shells.

This is the AP shell:



It very obviously is a saboted kinetic penetrator, similar to the M829 series:



This is a PS2 HEAT shell:



Which bears a strong resemblance to the M908 HE shell (funny how they mixed that up ):



And the in-game HE shell:



Looks very much like the M830 (the M831 being the training version) HEAT shell:



So I would suspect that sloped or curved armor would be just as effective in PS2 as in the real world... when it comes to NC and TR weaponry.

For VS plasma, sloped armor would still be more effective than boxier armor. This is because the plasma would have to eat through more armor in order to actually damage the tank (just as how it currently works for HEAT):

I never realised there where models for the munitions used in game and I can see how closely they resemble current munitions. I will admit my input was primarily based through the eyes of the VS as I have not yet played NC or TR so really I should not have assumed (bad me).

Its great to see though that the developers have spent time to recreate such details and with this new information I can see and understand the OP suggestion a bit more. Cosmeticly I can see it would make more sense to impliment some shaping to what is really a box car with a gun >.< hehe

Nicely put together

prowler should actually look bad4ss like a tank: