But how would you buff them? In game, All tanks are, by default, buttoned up unless theyre open top. There isnt any opening for flames to slip through, and if you want to sit in front of enemy tank and grill it with your flamethrower for several minutes to cause some internal damage, be my guest.
What i would be willing to admit as a buff would be disabling engines, but this prbably will never be implemented as it would be massive waste of resources for what little it brings.
Not all tanks have engine decks vulnerable to flames, and we dont have that many flamethrower tanks in the game in the first place. You would need to add entirely new feature (engine vulnerable to flame) on case by case basis to every vehicle in the game to buff two flamethrower tanks. Yeah sure lol. Can see gaijin dedicating all of their resources towards this.
I know this might come across as me being ass but like, cmon. Its gaijin were talking about.
Back when napalm was added there was similiar post to this one where people were trying to get napalm buffed, and someone posted video (i currently do not have at hand) from some swedish trials where there was Strv103 sitting in flames for several minutes before it drove away without any issue nor damage.
What i am pointing at is that flamethrowers might suck but as i see it theres currently not enough reasons to buff them whatsoever. Theyre gimmick, and should stay gimmick.
This is a separate question from “would it be plausible to buff them?”. Whatever you decide to do with them, the point was that you could buff them without breaking realism.
I think good and relatively moderate suggestions have already been made in this thread, like disabling tyres on wheeled vehicles. I think in terms of development resources probably the simplest thing would be to give them a dmg profile not dissimilar from low calibre HE. So if you fire the flamethrower at a heavily armoured “buttoned up” tank, maybe the commander’s MG gets damaged/needs to be repaired before you can use it again, stuff like that.
Tbh while this point is reasonable (and the reason why I think making it behave similarly to low calibre HE would be a good compromise) I do want to point out that with the addition of infantry into the game, I actually suspect we’ll see a lot more flamethrower vehicles and weapons in that game mode in the future. It is certainly possible they’ve been waiting until now before focusing more on flamethrower vehicles for precisely that reason, who knows? Only time will tell.
More likely external rubber, oil and grease in the tracks and running gear ignited, the engine choked out and stopped due to lack of oxygen and the likely inexperienced crews that Germany was using by that point of the war panicked and bailed (not that I can say I blame them if they did).
Of course flames may have also made it through gaps in the armour and started internal fires, it’s not like tanks where sealed for NBC at that point.
Personally I would like them to fix all the issues with autocannon spam and HE before we have to deal with flamethrowers en masse, not that I’m hard opposed to the idea, just lets fix existing problems before adding new ones… Yeah I know, this is Gaijin…
You dont need to buff flamethrower tanks to do well against infantry in infantry mode.
Current implementation is sufficient.
Is it? You need to consider viability of such buff as well, hence my example with gaijin implementation. But I digress.
But as we estabilished beforehand, we only know for sure that the panther kill is attributed to flamethrower, not how it was killed. Thats the issue. We dont know if we could buff them without breaking realism, at least not for sure.
I’m rating it as unlikely, especially with OCD German engineering, but not so unlikely I would be willing to climb into a Panther and let you hit it with a tank mounted flamethrower.
T-34s? defiantly, especially early ones, I’ve seen reports that you could stick a knife through the gaps in their armour.
Japanese tanks too, the ANZACs had an actual procedure on where to bayonet the tanks to jam the turrets.
No, but that does not preclude them being worked on for them to also be more useful either in other modes (such as GRB) or against PVE objectives that may eventually appear in big combined modes akin to what they’re exploring for air (bunkers, strongpoints etc).
You are overrating the Germans. WW2 Germany was not the Germany we know today, and their production was all but OCD. In fact, tolerances and standardisation were much worse than in the Western Allies or even in the industry of the late war Soviet Union. Different thicknesses for armour plates that should have been identical were common, for example, as were construction/assembly flaws. I would not consider the Panther to show any sign of OCD engineering frankly.
There is a few factors to consider here, and to be clear this isn’t intended as a “you are wrong, how dare you question German technical supremacy” post, but there are a number of factors that degraded the quality of German engineering during the war:
*Constant carpet bombing by the RAF and USAAF.
*Extensive use of slave labor, both in the forms of POWs and political prisoners, both of which where more than happy to sabotage production at any chance they got.
*Critical shortages of materials such as chromium needed to produce high hardness armour.
*Also the fact that Hitler was highly unstable and kept changing requirements and redirecting resources.
So yes I agree that the end products where flawed as you say, but not due to the German engineers designing the equipment not being a precise as their modern counter parts, but due to the realities of the situation not allowing those designs to reach their full potential.
Thicker armour for example was not due to quality control, it was thicker to compensate for being softer due to shortages of the trace minerals to harden it properly etc.
aerial bomb napalm temperature peaks at the blast and then temperature naturally dissipates into the environment while flamethrower focus fire keeps the temperature on the same level spreading into the metal rapidly, if you put a steel fork in a gas stove it will take just a few seconds to make it red-hot, on a tank which is almost entirely made of metal this effect would proc the flammable materials inside at some point specially fuel how is this against logic? just the depletion of oxygen could suffocate the crew possibly even before the tank itself explodes
fire is not just a gimmick in real life it actually does damage and propagates through metal so i dont see why it should not be portrayed somewhat realistically
the lack of records between flamethrowers vs tank is not because it never happened or never worked but simply because it was too risky for a tank crew to go with this weapon against a cannon however tanks being destroyed by fire is not uncommon hence why there are fire extinguishers requiered in the first place
off topic: it would be cool if at some point in the future when infantry is well merged into the combat there was a possibility for a support role of neutral firefighting vehicles equipped with water turrets or specialized infantry capable of using hoses, extinguishers and chainsaw to cut trees, recharging the vehicle on fire hydrants around the map or combat fire spreading through woods, houses, from causing fps lag and smoke to help both ally and enemy if fire gets a buff lol