The new Israeli Eitan is a vehicle designed and renowned for its durability in real life. Despite being an 8x8 wheeled vehicle, an emphasis was placed on its protection against CE-type munitions like HEAT-FS and ATGM.
So my question is, why is the vehicle so underwhelmingly unprotected against those weapons?
- To start, the Eitan is vulnerable to overpressure from relatively small guns for its BR, like the ARES 75mm and 57mm Bofors HE-VT, against its tires. To make this even worse, it’s entirely possible for the 40mm CTC cannon with 4.9mm of overpressure penetration to do so. This means that any explosion with around 4.9mm of HE overpressure penetration in the vicinity of the Eitan will easily result in immediate death, even if the explosion is distant.
- When it comes to CE weapons such as ATGMs and HEAT-FS, the ERA blocks are highly underperforming and also randomly named “Integrated ERA”. As an AFV made as recently as the last few years, and even combat-proven, it would be natural that this vehicle with such thick “ERA” blocks would outperform older, much thinner blocks, right? Not in-game.
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Kontakt 5, a second-generation ERA made by the Soviet Union around 1985, outperforms a significantly thicker “ERA” block made in the last decade in Kinetic and barely lags behind the Israeli one by 50mm chemically. There is nearly a 40-year gap between these two blocks, yet I’m here having to explain that these shouldn’t even be remotely close in protection.
Even worse, the vehicle is frontally susceptible to munitions as old as the 9M14 Malyutka, which first entered service in 1963, despite being designed with composites explicitly to stop this.
For the model itself, I have some questions for Gaijin.
Why is this called Integrated ERA? This should be called SLERA, if anything, and it’s very much half-baked. Furthermore, why is this modelled differently than SLERA found on the Namer and Merkava, which is represented as NERA on all other vehicles in-game?
The only conclusion I can give to this question on my own is that ERA doesn’t last as long as the Merkava’s NERA, which was an intentional nerf to make it easier to kill.
Secondly, why is the “Integrated ERA” armor clearly missing half of itself? It isn’t supposed to be half empty. That’s beyond ridiculous to assume and blatantly wrong as per an official time-lapse of Eitan construction.
Even if we ignore the colossal armor advancements in the last 40 years, the “Integrated ERA” found on the Eitan is still comprised of 26 blocks at its thickest part, while Kontakt 5 is comprised of just two. If we go off of “thickness = effectiveness” for CE protection and completely forget technological advancements, shouldn’t that make the “Integrated ERA” about 13 times more effective?
While it’s obvious there’s a LOT more math and physics to take into account here, it’s ridiculously apparent that the Eitan’s “ERA” being 50mm better in CE protection compared to Kontakt 5, despite being 30 to 40 years newer, is wrong.
Gaijin. You need to reevaluate the quality you put into these vehicles. With vehicles like the Terminator completely ruining the 11.3 bracket, it’s genuinely sickening to see the Eitan being placed anywhere near its BR. I had hope that the dev-server CE values would at least save it in the short-term, but you couldn’t even bother to let a non-Russian vehicle have good ERA for once.
This is an open letter from a long-term player hoping that you’ll wise up and stop treating minor nations as lesser than the Big 3. The Terminator continues to ruin the game for everyone, regardless of whether you are at 10.3 or even 12.7.