Challenger 1 MBT - Technical Data and Discussions

Machinery of War Discussion Ground Vehicle
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455

So I had a look at the collision model and the damage model blks for the CR1’s and it seems the damage model blk for the Mk3 uses copy pasted sections from the Mk2.

The Mk2 values match up nicely with its collision model so I wouldn’t expect this bug on the basic CR1.
However the IDs for the colliders of the ammo on the Mk3s are different to that of the Mk2. So, as the damage model is just copy pasted, you end up with incorrect assignments for all the ammo.

It seems most pieces of ammo on the Mk3 have the wrong assignment in the damage model blk as a result.

As an example. The colliders for the HESH shells in the Mk2’s turret have the name “ammo_turret_01” to “ammo_turret_10” and are assigned as explosive in the damage model as you’d expect.

The Mk3 damage model has the same assignments with “ammo_turret_01” to “ammo_turret_10” set to explode when hit. However in the collision model “ammo_turret_01” to “ammo_turret_10” consist of the upper front apds shells in the turret.

As far as a fix it is a case of going through the ammo names in the collision mesh and assigning them properly in the mk3’s damage model blk.

It could be done in 20 minutes with a text editor and the asset viewer.

And i’m sure gaijin have some sort of automated in-house solution to speed things up right? They wouldn’t be spending untold man-hours manually entering the information for the damage model blks. That would create all sorts of issues, for example; someone getting lazy and copy pasting sections from another vehicle without checking that the ids of the ammo haven’t changed.

“Ammo_turret_01” in each collision model:

Spoiler

Same copy paste section for DM:

Spoiler

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456

Love how it takes one of you guys 30 seconds to diagnose the problem while gaijin just sit and dgaf. Well, now we know it’s simple laziness. They probably keep resetting the model every update or so and have to go back and re label the ammo and eventually just got bored of it and stopped doing it. What’s the point of fixing something for a nation they don’t care about. On the same level as the challenger TES side armour. They fixed the lower block to be the actual 40mm rha + air gap + 60mm rha but now it’s back to being “composite” with a ke modifier of 0.12 again……

2 Likes
457

Or and hear me out, there is hundreds of reports a week and somethings get missed. Not to mention work on future updates that also needs Dev time. It’s incredibly reductive to put it down to laziness.

458

Perhaps a better way of describing it would be a dysfunctional prioritisation system. Something is very broken in how issues are prioritised inside gaijin.

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459

Sure from your own perspective. We’ve a saying in IT, the most important issue is MY issue. Taking a step back and looking at the game as a whole, individual changes like this are a drop in the bucket to all the various player demands.

I should add this doesn’t invalidate the need for a fix/change or how important it is to players. Just giving perspective.

460

People’s patience is always limited, so I have not played Challenger for more than a month, full of weaknesses and bugs in the vehicle made me physically and mentally tired, at its tombstone to lay a bunch of flowers and condolences has been the best effort
“When you confidently poke out your strongest turret behind cover, and a 3BM42 penetrates the turret from the front and detonates the armor-piercing bullet placed in front of the loader and then dies, the good mood ends here”

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461

somehow i think they need to change theyr process. lots of bugs get fixed only to return in a major patch.

this was fixed ages ago and it came back, more recently we have the cr3 td turret

462

The copy-pasting of sections for the damage model file from another vehicle implies that they are manually typing up these files, not exactly the best process for something like this.

It seems mad that a company as big as gaijin can’t afford some developer time to creating in-house software that would allow for creation of these files without having to cross reference the names of each collision mesh and type up manually whether each shell in a tank should explode.

I would’ve assumed they had software for editing damage models through a GUI that displays the tank (e.g. select part from a 3D view, set its properties, then export the new damage model), but seemingly they have some poor sod sitting there flipping between notepad and the assetviewer, typing out what of the 100 or so parts in a vehicle should explode, how much health they have and whether they set on fire.

I don’t blame em for resorting to copy paste

1 Like
463

I’ve put forward the Chally DS to get L26. Doubt that will actually happen, but worth a try

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464

I mean Gunjob, this clearly ain’t the hardest fix, as some bloke from the community pulled the files and went “oh that’ll be why” and literally provided a solution. Regardless of what the issue is, I’d say something that’s been sat for 7 months would be reasonably high priority, especially when it impacts a series of vehicles, one of which players pay real money for, and renders them hugely vulnerable.

If that isn’t a priority I don’t know what is.

3 Likes
465

Nah, I’m going to fundamentally disagree on this. I work in tech too, as a developer.

Yes, of course users have their own priorities, that is normal and to be expected, however I do not think users wanting their sole air defence vehicle from 8.3 to 11.7 to actually, you know, work is unreasonable or an unrealistic expectation.

Companies have systems in place to deal with the volume of tickets, mine certainly does. I do not see a ticket to investigate and fix until it’s been through first line, second line and then initial triaging. Probably a good 90%+ of the tickets we never see.

There were several major updates and uncountable “It’s fixed!” updates while we were waiting for a fix or a mitigation to the stormer, so I don’t think the screaming was unreasonable. This wasn’t a cosmetic issue, or an issue of it being too slow or something, this was an issue which totally crippled the vehicle.

Add the stormer and the complete refusal to even attempt to mitigate it while the issue was ongoing, with other long standing bugs, pulling one out of my arse here : Community Bug Reporting System and I’m sure you can see where the impression that stuff is ignored comes from.

To be clear, I am not pointing the finger at the tech moderators, the issue lies further down the chain from the moderators.

If I’m feeling charitable, the only explanation I can think of for why it took so long, was that it went from report → vehicle team → weapon team → server team and even then, there should be project leads, country managers, tooling, something to highlight this.

Gaijin make balancing changes by stats, the stormer breaking should have shown up on the stats like a flare going off as the effectiveness of the vehicle absolutely tanked after a given patch so it should have been spotted and fixed much, much earlier.

So yes, I stand by my statement of something being very, very broken inside Gaijin.

6 Likes
466

I knew that this was wrong since Cen 10 release, but when i tried to talk to one of the staff then they said to me it is because the mantlet is anti shaped charge based.
Some time ago i found this

Someone proved them wrong only 6 years ago with a proper report made 4 years ago.

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467

Oh I wasn’t talking about the Stormer, that is absolutely high priority. I was talking about the CR1 ammo rack.

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468

Gszabi posted this
image

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469

Always difficult when I can see the fix is in progress but can’t say owt haha. Glad to see it’s done.

470

I dont get something. They say that HESH model shells set the tank on fire currently, but they explode when they get hit. I dont get it.
Also some of the Charges lose the ability to explode. Well cool i guess, bag charges are inert and the sabot charge is supposed to burn down slowly with space in the bins used to let the gases expand freely not making them explode, but huh?
I will have to wait for official explanation.

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471

Probably just better off testing it and seeing what behaviour the ammo has now.

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472

Checking the upper turret racks, which are modelled as sabots, and therefore I’m hoping that the cheek racks shouldn’t implode the moment someone dumps a DM33 or Mango round into them at 100 metres range.

473

Realistically if the charges are hit it should destroy the tank in game. I don’t have the documents to hand at the moment, but IIRC the situation was basically:

The APDS charges were designed to burn if penetrated, the crew would have a chance to escape, but the tank was expected to be destroyed by the resulting fire.

When the L23A1 APFSDS round was introduced it came with the new L8 charge, which was much more volatile. After it entered service it was discovered that if the charge was penetrated in any way, even by small pieces of spall, it would “always detonate” instantly killing the crew and resulting in the tank being “completely disintegrated”.

That is why they switched to using armoured charge bins in the later Challengers and Chieftain, instead of the pressurised ones. They concluded there was no way to stop the L8 charge from detonating if penetrated, so decided all they could do was armour the bins to try and stop them being penetrated.

They did eventually develop the less volatile L14 charge to replace the L8, but not until the Gulf War.

So even if we take it as the charges should burn instead of detonate the crew would still be killed or badly burnt if they stayed inside the tank.

3 Likes
474

Yea i know, if the charge was hit the tank was most likely lost either way. I just wonder where are they trying to go with changing some of the charges to fire only.
As for what charges we have in game, dunno, they just blow up and it is fine. Tank would be unusable either way.