Ignoring the early attempts at anti-tank cluster weapons in WW2, most aircraft which could carry modern anti-tank cluster bombs (BL755 etc.) had ballistics computers to allow for accurate delivery of conventional bombers.
The main advantage is taking out a number of tanks with a single bomb.
not to mention GPS guided ones that have guided submunitions like the CBU-105 and PBK-500U Drel.
they are really cool and i want them ingame
I’m talking about WT and not real life.
Cluster ammunition isn’t lethal enough to be effective, when you can drop bombs the way you can in WT.
Hitting 3 tanks and damaging them isn’t all that amazing when a single bomb can kill a heavy tank or even a group with one drop.
Perhaps, but they’d look sick AF. And they’d have some use in air RB/SIM.
Well, they can add it as a gimmick to make trailer look cool, like dozer blades 😂
And people can make cool looking montages or create footage using cluster bombs for some historical vidoes 😏
The Mark 118 Bomblet (176 grams of Octol w/ an RE factor of about 1.3; so ~230g TNTe) as used by the Rockeye (similar in form factor to the Submunition that used by the BL775 )has enough HE mass to count for Overpressure, and can penetrate up to 4" (~100mm) or so of RHA.
You also get 247 of them per AUR so it will destroy light amour and cause significant issues for most Tanks.
There are barely any open top vehicles at higher BRs. And the explosion isn’t strong enough to penetrate vehicles top armor by blast.
So all it does is make it rain some HEAT shells over a wide area.
Where at most one will hit a tank, kill maybe one crew or disable it temporarely.
That’s good enough in real life but pointless in WT, as long as bombs are overperforming as they are.
Well, I see the clusters as potentially very effective especially e.g. in Sim EC ground battle events, where you have anti tank guns and armor clustered together…
I hope that one day we will be able to shoot these weapons just to add all the French variants possible.
Don’t forget all the APC based Light vehicles and modified Transport Chassis’ that are used as the base for TEL(AR)s. Also Rockeyes for example start with select Korean / Vietnam era aircraft so begin to apear in the 6.X (AD-2) ~9.x (A-4) BR range. So it’s not as if there would not be targets
They each bomblet has about ~3x the mass of the 30mm HE-DP round (M798) on the AH-64 so they really won’t have an issue dealing with most targets or roof armor, and would theoretically have fairly respectable performance.
Depends on how it is modeled, if we get Timed or Barometric fuses and if their variance is modeled. how releases below the safety cutoff are implemented and asorted other bespoke issues related to their implementation that don’t have existing counterparts (outside broader similarities to torpedos)
I’m talking about the damage. The issue is not that the penetration, it’s the damage from a random HEAT shell landing on a vehicle.
Only super light vehicles would get killed by the explosion, but those are the targets that are easily killed by cannons anyway.
But having a random HEAT droped onto any other vehicle isn’t going to kill it unless it’s a lucky hit in the ammo.
overpressure is a possibility
Quantity is key here, so also “random HEAT hits” can cause quite some damage and kills if hit probability is high - which is of course achieved by a) quantity of cluster bombs / submunitions dropped onto and b) how the submunitions are dispersed over that area (which depending on weapon can be controlled or not).
If we take the Bl.755 with it’s 147 parachute retarded HEAT submunitions with frag mantle as an example, which disperses its submunitions over an (assumedly) elliptical area of 300x100m:
1 CBU = 147 submunitions: one per 639 m2, (25x25m)
2 CBU = 294 submunitions: one per 320 m2 (18x18m)
6 CBU = 882 submunitions: one per 107 m2 (10x10m)
12 CBU = 1764 submunitions: one per 53m2 (7x7m)
So yes, a hit of a tank measuring 3x7 m (21 m2) is not assured, and that it hits something vital is even less certain - but still that’s quite a whomp also for well armored targets. And unarmored targets, well they’d get quite shredded.
CBU’s would certainly be no overpowered superweapon in WT, but powerful enough to matter (more so than the incendiaries I would guess) if implemented realistically.
And interesting to use for sure! = )
math be like^
Would also open up a number of runway denial weapons to being added. Suspect without other runway denial weapons we would not get access to the French bap 100s and such.
And we’d finally be able to eat migs with the tornado.
disable them before they can get off the ground?
Eating migs is referring to the Tornado Gr1 that ate a mig with the Jp233 runway denial weapon, for which we have the livery of in game:
It is my crusade that we receive Jp233 in order to be able to attempt to recreate the event this livery is notable for.
personally im looking forward to rockeyes and CBU-105’s
CBU 105 would be so much fun, and prove that unlike what some people say above cluster bombs could be very good in game
Well , THOSE obviously would be a big step in lethality…
