Haven’t posted on here in years. It’s sad to see that the same old issues plague this game and have become even worse. Tight urban maps with one-click, one kill ammunition that barely requires you to stop and aim. Meanwhile, some players with solid shot have to stop and calculate where to hit, which crewmember to surgically remove first, which module to damage to stop them one-tapping you with an APHE shell.
While this handicap makes one a better player, it’s hardly fun to lose your entire tank just because a poorly aimed APHE round detonates your entire tank just because it penetrated the far corner of your fighting compartment. While your super-high velocity sold shot creates just enough spall for the loader to block entirely with his body.
It’s idiotic that there’s a threshold and 169g of explosive filler turns the shell into a grenade while and more 170g creates a blackhole that kills all crew within a certain radius.
What’s so difficult to implement that overpressure blackhole that it scales with the filler?
More accurately with the filler/weight ratio.
It also makes no sense that APHE acts just like HE, despite having much thicker walls, that require much more energy to break appart.
Yearly reminder we could’ve had somewhat realistically functioning APHE but some folks just didn’t wan’t to lose their get-out-of-jail-free card on the 75 Jumbo (slight exaggeration, but not even that much either)
Considered that the most played nations are Germany, US and Russia, which all use APHE, a 47-48% vote to change it is more like 70%, considering the majority of players are biased towards not making their shell less effective.
British and French players have no reason to vote against it, since it means brining APHE closer to the performance of solid shot. While the majority of vehicles rely on APHE, giving 48% vote in favor for testing out the mechanic a lot more weight.
Not to mention the mechanic already exist for Naval, which also have fuze delay based on time instead of being hardcoded to always explode at the exact distance.
What’s funny (and pathetic) is that well before naval; tanks also had different fuze sensitivity and delay settings. Then gaijin standardized them all, because terrible players who were used to just shooting APHE at everything and winning had to deal with light tanks eating their poorly aimed APHE and not immediately exploding.
That whole proposed change was a fumble on Gajin’s behalf imo. I’m a bit resentful of the portion of the playerbase that voted no, but I can genuinely understand why some people voted that way. Gajin chose to approach the APHE change in a vacuum without factoring in the other shell types, so it’s reasonable enough for people to have made the assumption that the change would have purely come at the expense of gameplay and fun. “Solid shot is bad enough as is, so why make the one good round just as bad?” essentially.
All Gajin had to do was say something along the lines of, “To compensate for reduced explosive damage, we will buff KE damage for most shell types across the board to keep gameplay consistent, and to improve gameplay for vehicles without access to APHE” and I think we would have seen a very different response from the playerbase.
Why making APHE bad and solid shots bit better would somehow make people vote for the changes tho?
Those who voted against voted because APHE are reliable, and making it unreliable makes huge disadvantages and balance issues for main nations. Removing abilities to fight severe armored machines for uptiered or just plainly badly armed tanks.
If, instead of making APHE the worse-damaging-in-direction-of-shot solid shot AP with little extra damage to random spots around the direction of the shot, they proposed to upgrade the damage of other types of ammunition, hardly anyone would be against that.
Yeah because the whole balance of WW2 vehicles only depends on APHE being completely busted in damage compare to AP. lol
If you want to reliably kill tanks than whats the problem with AP doing the same?
The whole discrepancy only exists because you can repair components that should otherwise knock the tank out.
So to actually knock out a tank in WT you need to kill crews, which APHE is artificially buffed to be the most effective at.
So somehow we can’t have APHE be realistic while every other shell somehow can.
Where‘s the logic in that?
Yak-9K can be completely busted as tank killer because it gets APHE while other flying tank hunter must use their entire ammo pool to get 1-2 kills, since they fire solid shot or APCR?
APHE isn‘t a magical round that makes your gun somehow better at destroying tanks.
So why should it be in WT?
Solid shot and APCR are almost useless because
penetrating a tank and not killing it doesn’t necessarily stop the enemy from just firing back.
So 90% it’s better to either shoot at weaker side armor or just penetrate that one weakspot over having an easier time to penetrate armor.
There’s not a singe tank in WT thats better off using solid shot over APHE.
And let’s not even talk about how APHE damage of low caliber shells is also artificially buffed, just so those vehicle are competitive.
Lots of 37mm APHE shells are complete nuke rounds, for no reason other than someone turning the damage slider to max.
No, it depends on the ability of WW2 tanks to reliably damage the armored tanks to weakspots. Perfect example - Panther D at 5.3, And tiger H1 and T-34-85/Jumbo at 5.7.
Positioning, weakspots being dependent on explosions.
Every other shot isnt. HEs use unrealistic “overpressure” damage, HEATFSes dont shatter the insidess of the armor, APFSDSes dont use the mass to count penetration, APDSes use different penetration calculations than other shots, ect.
uh. Yes it is.
Exactly
so APCR as last effort weapon for shooting enemy gunner is a thing, APCR as standart munitions isnt.
And shoudnt be?
Well then go fix that rather then ruining everything at once?
I wonder if you’ve ever read up on why the British did not use filler shot, and even went so far as to remove the filler from American munition they recieved.
I know at minimum two positions on that question. First is that the APHE was underdeveloped, meaning unreliable and had problems with early detonaton, unexplosions, breakage, and both ministry of defence of US and Britain recommended to use solid AP shots until the problem is fixed. Second is that brits were short on money and resources and didnt find the explosion damage that good of a trade off to both start producing APHE and buy APHEs of US. And the third i heard is that the protests were mainly of the old guard officers, supported by munitions producers, as they claimed APHE a new useless technology.
That being said, neither US, USSR or Germany did call off the production of APHEs. Even for newer models of armanment. So that says something
Ah and you know that because you’re such an expert in WW2 ballistics and know for a fact that APHE was such an improvement over solid shot that the outcome of an engagement was determined whether the tank fired solid shot or APHE?
Whats there to shatter? It’s a jet that penetrates armor and causes some armor spalling.
If the armor is thin enough the armor is destroyed by the blast and you have your overpressure kill in the game.
What’s unrealistic is just the simplified implementation.
So by WT logic HE is artificially buffed to kill the entire crew when in reality only crew in either turret or hull would be dead.
But no one is complaining because otherwise HE vehicles would be basically useless, if they couldn’t kill a vehicle in one shot with 10-20s reload time.
Not to mention that in reality it’s much easier to destroy vehicles in general.
In WT it doesn’t matter that an HE shell just destroyed your optics or jammed your turret or even blew a giant hole in the armor.
Many controls are also not modeled.
There might not be functional driver controls left after the driver had his head exploded by a top attack HE shell.
So again it makes no sense that APHE can kill a tank in one shot in WT, while solid shot, that would render the tank destroyed in reality, cant.
In an ideal scenario APHE should cause more damage inside of a tank than standard AP but for that as the British (and Germans don’t forget) discovered you practically need the stars to align.
Here’s the thing though as I’m sure you’re well aware the orb of death as seen in War Thunder isn’t anywhere close to being realistic. Actual APHE damage with a successful detonation was very similar to AP albeit maybe with a slightly wider cone of damage. It definitely never sent shrapnel backwards as with War Thunder as that defeats the laws of physics.
The round is broken in game and it blatantly needs a realistic nerf. If Gaijin won’t introduce realistic damage to APHE then implement the fuses failing at high angles, if APDS can shatter then this shouldn’t be a problem at all.
And if you want one shots than make it so that AP also one shots, and not just from knocking out crews.
There are so many options.
Like internal repairs are only possible with a certain amount crews or remaining crew health and otherwise the crew bails when the tank is disabled.
It should work a certain predictable way.
Like shooting a T-34 1941 through the gunner optic should kill the tank, regardless whether it was AP or APHE.
No one is going to replace the gunner and then operate the cannon with a destroyed optic while there’s a gaping hole in the armor in front him.
You just need to play a few matches with tanks of similar stats, one with APHE and one without, and then look at the kills to see the difference. This is something the developers should have fixed years ago, giving APHE the realistic and logical damage they should have, with the damage cone being slightly larger than that of full AP, but nothing more. Furthermore, APHE should also break when it has a large internal cavity and the bullet impacts against sloped armor, since if APCR breaks the bullet in spaced armor, it would be logical for APHE to do the same, for the sake of realism and balance.
Because APHE is too meta defining and creates a lot of balancing headaches; and is behaving in a generally unrealistic manner in a game that markets itself on realism. I think my proposal generally address both issues.
While I do think it needs to be nerfed, I explicitly don’t want to make APHE unreliable or unfun, hence the compensatory KE damage, which also serves the dual purpose of making most non-APHE rounds actually useable. I don’t want to just make solid shot a little bit better. I would prefer a middle ground where APHE ends up only about 15-30% worse while solid shot is gets about 50-75% better.
I could even concede that APHE damage doesn’t need to be fully realistic. Ballistics and spalling can be quite complicated matters irl, so there has to be some degree of simplification when translating to the game.
I’d settle for anything that is just comparatively more realistic than what we have currently. APHE spall cones could still be huge for all I care, so long as they aren’t the current death spheres. Even then, I could see some APHE rounds with particularly high proportions of filler retaining an almost spherical area of coverage.