Can you disable the overpressure on APHE rounds?

Tigers were not really issued APCR. Germans had little to none APCR late war.
Hence their very advanced discsrding sabot designs had no tungsten cores - because they had way too little tungsten.
Too bad from WT perspective, would love to sling APDS out of long 8.8, just to see IS-3 and 4 players SUFFER (even if they are suffering already due to HEAT-FS).

Anyway, to me current APHE is ridiculous. I got shot in the turret in Panther F - my transmission gets taken out.
It makes no sense!

Also, the fire damage - I shoot T-34, his internal fuel tanks start burning, he proceeds to fight me for over 20s without any issues.
He doesn’t have to worry about the fire, as fire in WT is absolutely insignificant. You either die from “fuel explosion”, or nothing happens for minutes even if the fire is burning inside the crew compartment.

But remember, this is a game where HE hasn’t been fusinf on Soviet props for 6 months and Gaijin shut down the bug report without doing anything about it.

3 Likes

There was 88mm APCR for the L/56.
Since there was no 88mm L/56 AT gun I imagine all the rounds went to the Tigers.

While L/71 APCR was probably for the most part issued to AT guns.

Even though there wasn’t really use for it since the long 88mm already cracked anything it could see in 1943/44.

1 Like

That might be about US Aphe shells, but there is more than enough evidence that the Pzgr.39 pattern shells had very high druability. And for Germany HVAP was used only in extreme cases, there is a manual for 7,5 cm guns, 1. Pzgr.40(W) up to 1000m, 2. Gr.38 HL 3. Pzgr.39 4. Pzgr.40 why? Simply out of cost alone. Pzgr.40(W) offered good ballistics and enough penetration up to 1000m, while being a normal Steel cylinder with ballistic cap. The Heat is well heat, its cheap. Pzgr.39 offered the best allround performance, but the alloying was expensive. The Pzgr.40 due to its 900g Tungsten core.
copyImage

1 Like

Internal fires should basically automatically result in FPE being used.
If not available the crew should bail and the tank being destroyed.

No one operates a tank that is burning on the inside.

4 Likes

The Flak also recived them aparently.

2 Likes

I mean, I know they existed, I should have worded it better. They were just so rare it was not very likely you would find such shell inside a random Tiger tank in late 1943. Alo that shell wasn’t really needed vs late 1943 targets, actually, before Jumbo and Churchill Mk VII that round was mostly pointless, at least judging by the penetration capability of Pzgr 39.

FPE should take A LOT longer to work. typical situation - I shoot a guy, he extinguishes the fire and shoots me back before I even reload. Fire is a joke.

2 Likes

The funny thing in this case is that there’s no separation between the fuel tank and the crew. Besides, the T-34 uses diesel, which means that the tank wouldn’t catch fire in principle; it would simply explode due to the diesel fumes.

2 Likes

Yeah, I’ve seen that happen during certain invasion - tank gets penetrated by HEAT around the front fuel tank. Then the driver bails out, he’s on fire, while interior of the tank seems not to be burning.
Most likely the penetrating hit caused burning diesel to spray the guy and his saturated clothes acted like a wick.
Meanwhile the tank interior, maybe miraculously clean, did not start burning, because the initial fireball did not ignite anything and diesel pouring onto the floor refused to burn.

But it’s clear any human caught in the diesel fireball is not going to have a good time, and diesel will burn just fine if there are any rags (tarps, clothing, seat covers, or just a goddamn rag used to clean excess oil/grease) and/or hot objects around (like engine, shell that has just penetrated and its parts, wonder if bursting charge could burn if it got damaged on penetration and only f.e. partially exploded).
In other words - a shot through the crew compartment fuel tanks that causes fire should result in very rapid onset of crew damage.
Of course it should be even worse with gasoline, but most gasoline tanks are NOT inside the crew compartment for a damn good reason.

2 Likes

KV-1s explode all the time due to fuel fire but T-34s somehow don’t.

3 Likes

Well, but it’s basically a 0 or 1 situation. Either instakill or “minor inconveniece, will deal with this fire after a few sips of vodka mixed with antifreeze coolant”.

Edit:
And it’s not like Gaijin is very concerned with giving you a second chance if enemy doesn’t instakill you - aforementioned Panther F will lose its transmission (how the hell…) and gun breech almost every time after a turret shot (despite the shot penetrating quite a bit away from breech, because nobody wants to hit the conical mantlet), so even if the 3km/h reverse could save you - it simply can’t, as you won’t be able to move for the next 30s.
Edit2: If so, then why all of the sudden being set on fire grants you a very good chance to not only survive but to destroy the enemy, as you can calmly reload and shoot the enemy back, sometimes even a few times.

2 Likes

That’s the actual source of the problem. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In Ground RB, tanks are incredibly precise compared to real life.

There’s a reason why so many tanks historically had “weak spots”: not every part of a tank has the same chances of being hit, and the UFP is big and near the center of mass.

Especially if we’re talking WW2 tanks, spotting and hitting your target is actually the first challenge, let alone pixel hunting like we do in WT. A cupola shot is a lethal but not too frequent occurrence in this context (which is why some countries started reducing their cupolas to prevent this issue while others kept them on).

The whole discussion about post pen would be meaningless with a realistic damage model, because in reality one penetration = the crew bails, even if they’re all alive. Jam a tank’s turret ring, and it won’t fight on. Track it, and it’s mission killed.

None of that can happen in WT because we’re shooting at each other two minutes into a match (or less) and with incredible precision and lethality.

So to get a sustained fight you have two options as a game dev.

Option 1: make hitting each other much more difficult. This is unappealing from a gameplay perspective for reasons that I don’t think need explaining.

Option 2: make tanks much more survivable than IRL. In other words, “give them HP”. But if you’re committed to a semi-realistic damage model, that’s just a no go and it echoes that other game. Besides, if every module can be repaired, which effectively means that your tank literally cannot be physically destroyed, what is a death?

Easy solution: a death is when you run out of crew.

And this is why we spend so much time talking about post pen damage, and why everything with low post pen damage defaults to playing “crew whack a mole” unless you hit the ammo (and therefore “boost your post pen”).

Of course APHE is popular, it saves you from crew whack-a-mole. And it’s completely broken because it doesn’t matter what trade offs other rounds bring to the table - winning an engagement will still require killing the crew, not the tank as a structure.

Imho for this reason alone, other rounds need a massive buff to their post pen damage. It also neatly bypasses the issue of the APHE votes.

4 Likes

You say Po-tay-to and I say Po-tah-to

Well this is already happening with APHE on many instances - like killing a tank with one APHE shot. (or in the case of the AFV/spaa META… spray and pray kills in 1-3 seconds)

And… that’s good?

When i shoot a tank i want consistent damage. And i get that with APHE. I don’t like being screwed over by missing a module by an inch, destroying the ammorack without triggering explosion or killing all crewmembers aside gunner and driver so the tank just rolls in and kills you like nothing even happened.

When i fire at a tank and penetrate it, i expect to knock it out in 2 shots at most, regardless of whether i have the ammorack shot available or not.

In fact, one can argue APHE damage is actually about just as realistic as being forced to fire like 5 penetrating 17pdr APDS rounds into a T34 just to kill it without hitting the ammo.

1 Like

It was my way of saying we will have to agree to disagree on this subject.

That’s what I’m saying. Buff other shells to be more lethal.

I just want to point how ineffective APHE was.

After the Sherman’s were fitted with Wet ammo racks, and the Large hatches, the crews of those tanks like a like 80% Survival rate of Penetrations to the tank.

and that WITH frontal penetrations from APHE rounds.

Game’s have RUINED the perception of APHE, and how it behaved, it was just AP with slightly better chance to do something. It was a basically useless round, and its why post WW2 it entirely fell out of use except for niche cases like Anti Aircraft work and anti fortification work.

otherwise it was just WORSE than using a SOLID AP, or even a HEAT round.

1 Like

We are talking about a Round type the SOVIETS replaced with some of the worst HEAT-FS and APDS rounds ever developed.

it was THAT useless in actual combat. Oh yeah the idea is GREAT, but unless you can shove battleship levels of HE filler into a Round, its basically going to be a Marginal increase at BEST, not be nuking crews by barely clipping a Cupola.

1 Like

Doesn’t matter. If it’s beneficial for the game - it should stay.

If you want hyper realistic damage models ask devs to implement them for sim only so that this mode is actually something more than RB with no team markers and different PoV.

If tank irl needed as much damage to be destroyed as in WT i can assure you people would continue to work on things similar to APHE and fix them in order to be reliable. But since it isn’t the case there was no reason to do so and solid shot/HEAT shells stuck.

1 Like

“If it’s beneficial for the game - it should stay.”

Did yall say that about the old Economy that actually encouraged people to play the game? and not just one death leave?

Did you say that about the Maus? Or the old APDS that actually worked?

No, you didn’t. So shut it.

1 Like