Tbh my biggest issue with the era (Contact-5 and Relict exclusively) is that they auto-destabilize APFSDS at any angle and distance, which significantly reduces the residual penetration and thus damage and has a significant effect on the trajectory of the rod (so even if you aim perfectly, the era might just bounce your dart away from anything that matters).
This is also the reason why people say “fuel tank eats my dart” - which isnt entirely true, as it actually only eats the spall, wheras the ERA is what actually causes the dart to disappear in the fuel-tank or autoloader (as they’re modules) or alternatively in the 20mm plate on T-90 (and T-72’s but not as much since its not around the entire autoloader) due to a lack of residual penetration.
Relict, Contact-5 and Duplet are the only ERA types to have this destabilization feature, with the important difference being that, despite having higher or identical KE equivalent, Duplet only destabilizes the rod 20% as much as Relict/Contact-5.
The line in the .blk that does this is: responseImpulse
Relict and Contact-5 have it set to; :r=0.5 wheras Duplet has it set to :r=0.1 - the latter being enough to fully destabilize low-calibre apfsds but doesnt have nearly as much of an effect against higher-calibre apfsds (105-120mm, didnt test it with 76-90mm).
Here’s an example of what this (honestly bs) line does;
The left T-80B (“T-26” because its a custom-unit) has the line (responseImpulse:r=0.5) applied to the 8mm rubber skirts, nothing else is changed [except the durability of the skirts maybe, cant remember. This doesnt affect the destabilization/penetration in any way though].
The one on the right is a default T-80B with all modifications and max crew-skill applied.
Round fired: 30x173 APFSDS-T [PMC 287] (MK 30-2/ABM)
Same also happens with 40mm slpprj m/01 and higher calibre apfsds (just that it doesnt make the rod non-pen for the latter but still destabilizes it just as much), but I can’t find the clip rn and nvidia decided that I am no longer using Gefore Experience starting today, so see y’all in 5-6 hours when I nuked all of my settings by downgrading to nvidia app to make a new clip.
This line is (as far as I can tell) only added to the side-skirts and not on the fixed plates (unless you wanna count the upper side-plates on BMPT* as fixed, they also have the line, hence why you cant reliably kill BMPT by shooting above the tracks without gambling big time)
I wonder why they’d do that - surely not to artificially buff their survivability or anything…
