In my messing around in test drive and in custom missions, it seems to me like sabot hugely overperforms against lightly armored targets like BMPs, while HEAT, you know, the shell type you’re actually supposed to use against these targets, barely does anything. You’d think it would be the other way around, but then again, I’m not a game designer.
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HEAT is just unreliable and not very good.
I recently hit a Fox’s turret with the AMX-30s HEAT round and nothing happened, I didn’t even overpressure it.
APFSDS is underperforming against light targets in War Thunder.
Likely not intentionally though.
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heat is just unreliable, honestly the amount of times APDS or APFSDS just does nothing to a wolfpack or bmp is ridiculous when its a precise hit to the crew or ammo
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there is a part on the fox turret that acts as spaced armour making heat do nothing, the cover for the gun sight, on the right of the sight, aim for the driver or commander and it will always kill
Hello again, came just to say I detonated an r3 in my chieftain earlier today. Hit it in the side and the shrapnel managed to hit both the front and back tires somehow lol. Strange to see after doing nothing to every other tank I had faced that day lol.
I think gaijin make sure it doesn’t do much damage to fit their roles. As just looking at what happens to lightly armoured vehicles when shot with apfsds or apds, just molten metal everywhere. Ironically untreated armour (aka a car) creates less spall as the metal tends to deform rather than break and shatter.
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They would need to buff the hell out of HEAT to make this the case as unfortunately currently it does not feel powerful enough to justify using often times.
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Pure KE ammo is most certainly overperforming significantly against targets with very little armor (HMG proof or even less).
The fact that large caliber APFSDS will become a shotgun after going through 25mm of aluminum or 15mm of RHA is ridiculous. With that level of protection, CE ammo (HE, HEAT, HEAT-MP, SAP) or autocannons are preferred. This even extends down to APHE, where all APHE is given a standard fuse (minimum level of armor to detonate the shell) and standard fuse delay (distance traveled by the shell inside the vehicle before detonation).
This was done because hull break was awful, and the snail are afraid of making HE ammo powerful.
You know how shooting CV90s with spall liner in the side with KE ammo is inconsistent if your aim is off? Yeah, now imagine that being even worse because your ammo is literally only dealing damage to things it hits directly. And we aren’t always using things with a coaxial autocannon or top mounted HMG.
I wouldn’t call ke rounds over performing. Is this a mistake or do you really believe a solid shot round or a apds round does damage to targets like rooikat. No armour best armour is used because it’s a thing. Heat should do more damage as it sprays molten metal into the fighting compartment after penetration, so does solid shot along with fragments splintered off from the armour it penetrates. Aphe rounds irl simply set more fires and maybe a bit more shrapnel but only in the forward direction apart from 105mm+ aphe rounds which did have the overall effective of blowing the fuck up.
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you are missing one key detail; pressure.
any round with any sort of explosive function will create immense pressure in a vehicle, whilst KE round will create some pressure yes, but not at all the same amount.
pressure is wildly underestimated as a damaging and killing source for humans because you can’t outwardly see the effects of it.
it takes just as little as around 40psi/2.8 Bar of overpressure (almost 4 times the pressure of the surface of Earth) to start damaging the lungs to the point of fatal injuries (12psi/0.8 Bar for injuries at all to lungs). to put that into perspective: a regular medium bicycle tire has around 50-70 psi of overpressure in it.
Absolutely not. The best armor in the game at the moment is no armor. Light armored vehicles could as well be wielding alien technology considering how little damage they take.
At my current BR of 8.7 with Russia, the TAM, TAM 2IP, BMP’s, Roolikats, Bradley’s, Ikv 91-105’s etc bounce so many shells and rarely take any damage.
I think they should balance the spall of aphe rounds to a similar level to solid shot while slightly buffing solid shot (apds and apfsds should create spall akin to its mum so 17pdr sabot should be almost as good as it’s solid shot as it was irl). But then give aphe rounds a pressure mechanic damaging the crew, with bigger aphe rounds doing more damage u till you get to rounds such as the Russian 120, where if you pen it’s an instant kill for anything within the compartment it detonates in. This would give the big aphe rounds the needed buff while making anything with solid shot worth taking over aphe. Big he rounds need a rework as well, as any hit to a tank should realistically stun the crew (which they have said they might add on the roadmap) and or damage internal components such as the turret ring if hit in the turret, would make big he not so inconsistent and allow for a playstyle other than hope for the best. Heat needs more damage while over pressure needs to be dialled back a bit.
APHE is basically a small fragmentation grenade after it penetrates, they penetrate armor like a normal round and then 0.1 seconds later explode inside the tank. APHE is the absolute ideal one to use for light armor other than contact fused HE.
you might have used the wrong acronym?
and as far as i know the solid shots spall the way they are supposed to.
already exists. like, exactly this.
this i agree with, right now they very often do absolutely nothing.
i don’t think overpressure is in need of a nerf, as i said before it does not take much to injure och even kill humans with pressure. HEAT however need to be fixed, it does WAY to little pressure damage and “spalling” in the form of molten metal bouncing around.
Tests have been taken against aphe vs solid shot and every time solid shot created just as much spall as aphe all while being more reliable and not shattering on impact. The plus for aphe was the fires it created and probably the pressure it created. Aphe was seamed just not worth it for the most part. Solid shot in game has the uncanny ability to create zero spall if it hits more than one plate or spaced armour just like apds, just without the chance to shatter like apds. Aphe irl created spall in a cone just like solid shot so no aphe is massively over performing simply because the effect can explode backwards (although yes in game gaijin doesn’t model spall ricocheting around the crew compartment but that should happen to any round not just aphe). Big he in game is a tad too inconsistent for the down sides, this change would make it better. Not by alot but it would make it so the long reload isn’t such a massive downside. And over pressure is a bit too powerful, I can over pressure any open top vehicle with as small as a 30mm he round while 155mm he rounds struggle to kill Sherman’s. So yea it needs to be adjusted more than needed.
Underperforming HEAT ≠ over performance of Sabot.
Sabot is definitely going to do enough terminal damage to kill. Heat should definitely be able to kill low or no armor vehicles as well though.
A steel rod through all your crew, the critical components of the tank, or your ammo. It’s going to kill you…
i’m including the shrapnel from the explosion in my evaluation. the pure spall matters WAY less on an APHE shell.
that is just the absolute opposite to my experience. as long as the APHE penetrates its almost an instant kill. are you sure you aren’t confusing it with one of the other variants?
spall is just created from the innermost armor plate of the path and amount depends on what material that specific plate is as well as the speed of the shell, a serries of plates is going to slow down the shell and it will thus produce less spall just like IRL.
i’m curious what tests you have seen/done and if you could link them?
i dont understand the start of this.
is it:
so no (i dont agre with you), the APHE is overperforming
or
so none of the APHE shells are overperforming
?
sure.
that is inconsistency, not overperformance. a 30mm shell explosion would absolutely take out an open topped vehicle crew, perhaps not permanently all of them but i think you underestimate explosions effects on humans in general.
the fact that an APHE shell does not instantly kill crew in tanks is a bit of a concern though, if it penetrates and explodes there is very little chance of survival for any crew in any vehicle that isn’t compartmentalised.
what do you mean?
also, please write in paragraphs or quote my posts, its really hard to keep track of a wall of text.
Auto correct has fucked me a bit. But I’m confused what you’re not getting. Irl even with the aphe effect the cone of fragmentation was basically all in a forward cone. It’s why I’m saying that solid shot was deemed good enough compared to aphe as it shatter less, was easier and cheaper to manufacture and did comparable damage.
Spaced armour does cause rounds to tumble however rounds such as the 17pdr and 20pdr shouldn’t be effected as much from it in game as it does due to how powerful the rounds are. And no, spall is created (or should) by every layer penned. In game it’s a dice role if it does or not.
The bit about the aphe shells blowing back is unrealistic as the explosion effect goes forward due to inertia.
The bit about the ricocheting fragmentation was to say all rounds apart from heat should create spall that bounce round the compartment. This damages internals and crew but this isn’t modelled. So I was saying it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for aphe explosion backwards as it should happen to all rounds apart from heat.
With over pressure it does need a rework, smaller he rounds needing a nerf. But aphe rounds are not a be all end all as only when it starts to get into the big aphe rounds such as the 120mm does it get to the insta kill effect your thinking off.
This is all without mentioning that aphe rounds irl were prone to simply shattering, and yet only the apds rounds have been modelled to have this for some fucking reason. Especially Russian aphe rounds which were known to be heat treated too much (just like their armour) causing it to be brittle and shatter on impact making their aphe rounds useless so they had to use solid shot instead.
Buffing HEAT rounds could cause some serious issues at lower BRs. HEAT would be too OP then. HEAT rounds are already a serious issue at 6.7-7.7 BR
oh, you were writing spall and not fragmentation before. so i was confused because i though you were ONLY talking about the armor spall created from penetration and not the fragments from the shell exploding.
and i will agree that this is the case for tanks, but if i don’t remember wrong then its different with lightly armored vehicles as that armor produces less spall most of the time.
Not only tumble but also slow down and create less spall. but generally you are correct.
Not from what i have seen and heard, i fairly certain that only the last layer produces spall in game. it would not make sense to simulate the spall between the plates as that does nothing in terms of gameplay and damage.
IRL all layers produce spall but that spall is going to get caught by the next layer anyway until the last one.
sure, to some extent, but the shell has also slowed down and as long as the explosion is propagating faster than the shell is still moving forward you are also going to get backwards fragments.
However IRL in light vehicles its absolutely going to move almost exclusively forwards due to the lack of slowdown and this should be the case in game (but isn’t as of now).
makes sense, and i would like to add that the bouncing fragments are probably way to hard to simulate accurately enough without it completely easting up computing power.
why? as it stands its very close to realistic. which is the aim, they don’t nerf rounds for balance that way, they instead take away round completely or change BR. the aim is for it to be close it IRL and then to use other things as balance.
i would have to disagree, it depends less on the size of the shell and more on the amount and type of filler used. a 120mm shell with 0.1kg explosives isn’t going to do nearly as much pressure damage as a 105mm with 0.5kg explosives. the physical size is more about penetration and spalling whereas the explosives are about overpressure-ing the crew.
that can be brought up as a suggestion to change. i would like things to be as close to IRL as possible so if you have sources for that i would love to see a report :)
I am all with you for more realism over janky nerfs and buffs. However gaijin have proven time and time again they fit bug reports and bug fixes to suit their “balance” case and point being the recent challenger 2 breach changes, the ones on the dev (despite all the bugs) were more actuate than the ones we have now. As they realised we would have something that doesn’t fit their breach meta.
Although the principle is correct, the rounds still retain a huge amount of forward momentum even after penetration. The cone may vary but for the most part it will always be forwards. Light tanks in game should be affected by solid shot more as they still use treater metal meaning it creates shrapnel and flakes rather than deforming which is what happens to basic cars when shot. But yea rounds like beat, aphe and hesh are meant for apc and the such.
When I say rounds like 120mm I’m referring to their he filler, as only when you get to those millimetres can you fit enough explosive mass into a shell without it being an he round or without shattering on impact. The 75mm on the Sherman would certainly one shot most things irl as all it would have to do is mobility kill or turret kill but in game , as we require crew kills, it should take more than one.
And sorry about mis spellings or wrong use of words as I type this all on my phone and end up just getting annoyed trying to spell half the time. Plus auto correct fucks me over quite a bit.
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