In War Thunder, the damage caused by APHE (Armor-Piercing, High-Explosive) is depicted as a sphere, meaning the shrapnel flies in all different directions as shown in the image below:
But in real life, the shrapnel would only disperse in a cone-shaped pattern, moving forward with the round. So why isn’t this implemented in-game? Furthermore in real life, APHE would not have a 100% chance of fusing, sometimes refusing to detonate at all inside the tank.
Fixing the behaviour of APHE would also affect: 35mm and 30mm SPAA, no more cupola trickshot bs with APHE and API-T
APDS vs APHE
In War Thunder, APDS (especially early variants) are highly prone to shattering or riccoshet, however this is not the case for APCBC and APHE. In essence, they should behave the same, so why don’t they?
As an extra on APDS, I’ve played on my friends account and tried Britan. It’s APDS is much worse than any other countries especially the 120mm APDS round found on the Conqueror. It is a much larger round than 105mm APDS and much more pen (520mm) and therefore should induce more spall, however it is simply prone to shattering and causes the medicore spall.
Yeah, they tried to actually do this change and it was unfortunately shot down by the community before even considered.
Personally believe that the APHE change should have just been forced in without any community input anyway. Gaijin has nerfed much worse ammo (APCR, HESH, APDS, HEAT, TOW-2B) for bogus reasons with no community input, so why is it necessary to beg the community to accept a nerf to bring unrealistic ammo down to realistic standard?
Honestly imo the big issue with the community vote was that Arcade, RB and sim voted together.
I participated in that big thread and some of the loudest voices against the change were… GAB players (Chihuaha for instance). Which (no shame there !) has a very different pacing and goal than RB and SB have.
I strongly believe had there been a distinction of
“Make the change for GAB?”
“Make the change for GRB?”
“Make the change for GSB?”
We’d have had different results.
(tbf we could do with differentiated damage models for AB/RB/SB in general. For air, I find people complain about guns and shells being bad in ARB with current damage models while they feel perfect in ASB (Mg151/20, .50 cals). However if the ARB-specific requests (and prolly AAB since both have regular kilometer-long 90 degree aspect shots) were implemented they’d probably become very, very stupid in ASB (where lower aspects and sub 400 meter shots are more of a thing.))
If they implemented it sensibly it would probably only take a variable or two to be changed to adjust the shrapnel angle from the shell detonating which should not have any impact on the performance.
Now we know this is gaijin we are talking about so it would not have been done this way in the first place
