14 inch / 356 mm round with 75.85 kg TNT filler AND 307 mm penetration with the fuse delay that lets it avoid overpen, but gives it an ability to blow up ammo-racks on everything from cruisers to battleships?
The thing has:
Shockingly good penetration, even beating the Japanese SAPCBC at both: 0° and 60° AoA! (how is regular high explosive with base-fuse round beating capped ballistic capped at a high angle of attack?!)
and at the same time it has an outstanding amount of HE filler, beating everything but the british HE. I always thought that you either build thicker walls of the shell for more penetration, or you make slimmer walls for more HE filler. But somehow Russians made a round that combines both: Super-thin walls for a huge explosive filler with outstanding penetration? Stallinium much?
That muzzle velocity and a base fuse delay make it excellent for ammo-racking without the risk of overpenetration, even against destroyers.
It’s only real downside is its slow muzzle velocity… which half the time can be turned into an upside, by arcing shells on the targets behind cover, which that no other ammunition of a similar calibre could possibly hit.
Now, stats like burst charge and muzzle velocity are historical, I have no problem with that. The big questions are: What’s the source of this outstanding amount of penetration? What’s the source of the base fuse with 0.01s delay? Anyone has any source that can corroborate these numbers, because they strike me as unbelievable?
This round would relatively well-balanced if it’d just be a standard HE with impact fuse.
But instead, they have given Izmail a round that can blow up ammo racks on Amagi. And yes, it’s from 2km range, you’ll rarely fight so up-close, but it does happen in-game battles due to the design of some of the maps:
Again, I’m well aware that it’s a very short range, which isn’t common, but the big question is: Why high explosive rounds can ammo-rack these vessels at all?
I get that it’s an HE-BF round, but still… just have a look at how it compares against BR 7.0 near-peers -the shell has an absurdly brilliant performance:
As for the base fuse with a 0.01s delay, this refers to the mechanics of how shells detonate upon impact. A shorter fuse delay means that the shell will potentially detonate sooner upon hitting a target, which can be advantageous against heavily armoured targets where the shell must detonate close to the armour’s surface to maximize damage.
You’re shooting at 2km with almost perpendicular angle of attack, why would you expect the ship to not get penetrated? The Russian 14" has extremely bad exterior ballistics so the shell lose penetration very quickly over distance. At normal range of engagement these SAP shells are mostly fireworks against any heavily armoured capital ships.
That is correct. I would not expect magazines of these vessels to be blown up by a horizontally fired HE shells. I would not expect HE shells to ever outperform SAP in both: explosive filler and penetration at the same time in the same calibre. I would not expect them to keep up with SAP’s penetration through pretty much the entire combat range (either being slightly better or slightly worse then them, but staying in roughly the same range).
No, it doesn’t. Overall, it’s just slightly worse than the Japanese SAPCBC, with a marginal impact on the combat performance.
Perpendicularly it has a better penetration the Japanese SAPCBC until over 2500m
At a steep angle it’s even better than the Japanese capped ballistic capped shell - as it keeps advantage until 7500 m.
Why use caps at all, if you could put base fuse on HE round, right?
And even in ranges where it has a lower penetration than the SAPCBC - it’s still pretty close:
That’s the problem though - this is not a SAP shell. At least, according to any source I could find nor according to Russia / USSR 14"/52 (35.6 cm) Pattern 1913 - NavWeaps.
And again: it’s not “fireworks”, it outperforms SAPCBC at a closer ranges, and at a long ranges it isn’t far behind.
