As the title implies i have recently felt as though the Challenger 3 Tech Demo is a downgraded version of any of the challenger 2s that are currently in Great Britain’s top tier line up.
I am a semi new player to top tier as Great Britain is my first nation to get a fully maxed out tech tree in, so i know that my opinion may not be similar to others as i am not entirely knowledgeable about how the balance and metas for top tier are, that being said i have had continuous frustration with the challenger 3 and the comparison to its predecessors is that in its current state it is a worse tank due to 3 main reasons. Now to be clear i know of the downsides that the challenger 2 has, the worse gun, the worse ammo, the worse speed and the non existant hull armor, and i know that most of these reasons are due to british tank design and that some of them are due to refusal to estimate on gaijins behalf. however it seems now with the challenger 3 there are even more statistics that gaijin will rather leave out due to refusal to estimate.
The first major statistic and the one that i have seen have the most talk about is that the Challenger’s best feature that being the fastest non auto loaded reload rate. This is now stripped away with the Challenger 3, thus resulting in it having a reload rate similar to other top tier tanks without autoloaders such as the Leopards, Strvs and Merkavas and even a slower reload than the Abrams. This is due to the ammo now being single piece ammo and being in an ammo compartment compared to how it was prior with a rack of sabot rounds in the turret and charges in the hull.
The next issue i have with is the lack of a spall liner, something the previous models did have inside of the turret, this is paired with the turret cheeks having a little less armor have resulted in rare cases of the turret cheeks (the only part of the Challenger 2 and 3 that has actually been modeled to have decent armor) being penned and spalling into the crew in the Challenger 3.
These two issues have come together to lead me to the third issue i have with the Challenger 3, and that is the lack of blow out panels for the ammo stored in the turret. This lack of a blowout panel shielding for the ammo has been combined with the lack of a spall liner and the addition of 1 part ammunition now located in the Challenger 3 turret to allow for cannon breech and breech cheeks shots instantly detonating the ammo located behind the turret crew. This effect has lowered the survivability of the Challenger tank from turret penetrations drastically, and resulted in me no longer wanting to run the Challenger 3 in my lineup for top tier.
I wanted to make this thread to see if others were having doubts about the Challenger 3 as well and if so if there was any way of having a buff for it in the foreseeable future (which i doubt because the snail god refuses to allow Britain and Italy to have a fun time in top tier)