The Aichi B7A Ryusei carrier-based bomber was under the Imperial Navy program of 1941, but Aichi was able to start mass production only in 1944. Due to the lack of aircraft carriers suitable for its deployment, the aircraft operated mainly from ground airfields. It was also used for kamikaze missions. During testing, one B7A2 was supposedly equipped with the Homare 23 engine, a modified version of the N1K2’s Homare 21, instead of the default Homare 12, to compensate for the shortage of engines. Together with the experimental model, a total of 105 units of the B7A2 were produced.
The main aircraft prize in the new season of the War Thunder Battle Pass “Armour Breaking Ambusher” will be the Japanese B7A2 Ryusei piston-engined, a carrier-based torpedo bomber with a new Homare 23 engine.
The B7A2 has a reputation of fast and agile aircraft for its class, making it very comfortable to carry out dive or level bombing. Unlike most bombers, the B7A2 even allows its pilot to engage in dogfights with enemy heavy fighters, and a pair of forward-firing 20mm cannons give good chances in confrontation with other aircraft.
The experimental B7A2 (Homare 23) received a slight increase in flight performance thanks to the new engine, especially with the maximum bomb load.
By the way, about the payload. Like the researchable modification, the B7A2 (Homare 23) is capable of carrying two 250kg bombs along with smaller bombs on the wings, or one 800 kg bomb, which is especially handy in mixed battles. The B7A2 (Homare 23) is a torpedo bomber and can be used in naval battles carrying a single Type 91 model 3 torpedo.
Being a Premium aircraft, the B7A2 (Homare 23) will have access to all weapon presets upon receiving and will provide a good boost to research of the Japanese aviation of early and medium ranks.
The new season of the War Thunder Battle Pass “Armour Breaking Ambusher” is coming soon - stay tuned for more details!
Not really - the B7A2 is an outstanding dogfighter disguised as torpedo bomber.
I use it to exclusively in Air RB as TT counter to XP-50s and hordes of Yak-3s. With high crew level you beat both of them in a 1 vs 1 turnfight. Just avoid headons at any cost.
You can dogfight everything in it - except lost and found A6M2s, good flown 109 E4s / Bv 155s and Spits, rarely you meet I-16s - just BnZ them. But you can very often outrun or outdive them and the plane is very fast at sea level.
Main weaknesses are the “fires won’t go out” attitude, very stiff handling and roll at higher speeds, need to find the right gun convergence due to the wide spread of the cannons and of course the highly negative impact of the real shatter feature to HE shells - you need to use ground belt, unfortunately they produce often just a lot of hits…
Totally disagree - compared to the B7A2 the SB2C is a weather balloon, unable to climb, easy to outrun and dead if caught low.
Nice - let’s see how this slight increase will affect the actual performance.
In case you want to see 2 kills and a fatal crit leading to a 3rd kill in Air RB with maximum 800 kg bomb load (even with my potato aim due to use of joystick instead of mouse aim) - watch this:
I don´t really see the sense of this vehicle. Slightly different engine, no real difference in armament or looks = basically no collectors value.
And since we can already field a B7A2 it doesnt make much sense to take a second one into mixed or naval battles as planes of a similar class get severe spawn penalties.
In my eyes the weakest BP reward we´ve seen so far.
You are looking from your point of view, others are looking from others. This plane is an all around good vehicle for people who didn’t touch Japanese flight tree. It can be CAS, it can do bombing missions or can hunt enemy bombers and even fighters occasionally. And it is also premium. Overall, good secondary reward.
Fully agree! Perfect multi role aircraft. But from my almost 300 plane losses in Air RB i estimate 200 deaths via bomber return fire. Usually a single hit sets you on fire and you burn to death…
The only disadvantage i noticed during the test drive was that they messed up something with the engine cooling - it overheats on WEP even above 6km on very cold maps.
If some of you want to use it as basebomber:
Have in mind that ur 800kg bomb produces just 0.429 tons of tnt. So even on 3 bases maps you wont kill a single (non-respawning) base. If u want to kill such a base u need to drop 9x60kg - despite the very low TNT output the “small bomb bonus” in wt kills the base.
Using it to kill 8 SPAGs, 2 4-engine bombers and 3 fighters in a single Air RB match and to win a sole survivor is possible - even in the slightly slower TT version:
I´m trying to look from an average player point of view here and I don´t think BP vehicles are a good choice for only having to offer to be of some little help to introduce some absolute new players to a tech tree, but we can agree to disagree.
Even those players, who have never touched the japanese plane tree before and now feel the urge to grind them could get the open techtree clone within a single days play. Smash a cheap talisman onto it when it´s at sale and you get away for like 2-3 €.
That´s not a lot to invest and support a game you like but that choice was a waste of a BP slot for a lot of players.
That requires spending money to a certain degree on the game, which some players don’t want to do or simply can’t do, even 2-3€.
The B7A2 (Homare 23) is the free BP reward, requiring you only to grind to level 51 to obtain it, and not pay a single cent. As a pleasant bonus it has slightly superior performance compared to the TT B7A2 while being at the same BR.
Thank you for that - and i fully agree, the SL and RP multipliers are very good - compared with the TT version they are insane.
Rewards for killing a single plane:
2.394 SL + 170 RP ------ B7A2 - Tech Tree
5.348 SL + 338 RP ------ B7A2 - Battle Pass
Nice job!
In order to improve the game experience for “new” B7A2 pilots:
It would be great if your devs could check the engine presets of the BP version - the overheating with WEP is far worse compared to the TT plane.
This makes for me no sense for an air-cooled radial engine - so as the BP plane has more HP and is faster, the cooling should be better. But the main impact of WEP is to spray a water/alcohol mix into the cylinders - leading to cool down the engine, so from a pure logical pov the engine gets hotter on 100% and cooler with WEP at 110%…i am not an engineer but Gregs Aviation channel deals extensively in his Ki-84 vid with this specific Homare engine…
Another issue - you reduced for the BP vehicle the min fuel of the TT plane from roughly 90 minutes to 60 minutes, great. As this the BP variant has just another engine i hope you can reduce the min fuel for the TT variant too.
Last but not least - i found nothing on google that the B7A had no self sealing fuel tanks - maybe a fellow player able to read Japanese can give some info if this plane was fitted with them or not - thanks in advance!
Btw - my x-ray view is telling me the BP version has self sealing tank and the TT version not…But both have to habit to burn down like a dry tree…
This depends heavily on the amount of extra work that is done by the engine when using WEP with water-methanol mix injection. If the manifold pressure and RPM difference between WEP and 100% does not increase substantially enough, then the engine will get colder. If there is a substantial increase, then it will get hotter.
Another thing is that not all planes has water-methanol mix. In a lot of planes, WEP works by simply making the engine work harder. Also, on the Homare engines, water-methanol mix is sprayed into the supercharger intake, not the engine cylinders, to cool down the air that is going into the engine.
Min fuel in game just equates to 30% of the maximum fuel load, and both B7A2s have the exact same amount of fuel that they can carry, a maximum of 1600 kg.
The B7A2 (Homare 23) has shows less time because it simply consumes more fuel, meaning that the same amount of fuel last less.
I really appreciate your post in general - so you are saying that the min fuel load in both planes have the same weight in kg? I have no access to these data mines via xbox…
Yes, they both have the same amount of fuel that they can carry.
Math and information
Here’s the weight values of the normal B7A2 with minimum fuel, full ammunition with default belts, and default loadout of ten 60 kg bombs. These values were obtained using the test drive FM tools.
“maxFuel” indicates the maximum amount of fuel that the plane can carry, “noFuel” is the weight of the plane as it currently is with all fuel removed, and “total” is just the current weight of the plane.
B7A2 (Homare 23) in the same conditions.
Difference in weight is because the B7A2 (Homare 23) carries 126 kg of “nitro” (effectively the water-methanol mix) and 54 kg of oil (for cooling) while the normal B7A2 carries no “nitro” and 57 kg of oil, leading to a 123 kg difference. This slightly lower amount of oil might also be contributing to the B7A2 (Homare 23) overheating easier.
Using the values we can easily calculate the current fuel weight by simply subtracting “noFuel” from “total”, as seen here:
As you can see it is 480 kg for both planes. It’s also very easy to check that this is 30% of the max fuel load given the “maxFuel” value of 1600 kg:
This also happened with the Italian Bf109 F4 from the previous battlepass. You had to use silver lions to obtain all the load outs. I think this is just how Gaijin does it now. I agree with you, it doesn’t seem right, but it is a free vehicle, so I guess we can’t complain too much
