I’m aware that i’m 15 hours out but I feel the need to make the point that that is more because the only Fox 3 missile we do have, the AIM-54 Phoenix, can be defeated by outpulling it. Maximum overload on it is… 18Gs or so, and are very easy to detect (I mean, they leave the world’s largest smoke trail)
The simple reason as as an anti bomber weapon, Phoenixes didn’t need large amounts of pull. They’re designed to hit and kill bombers, hence the hilariously large warhead (for a fighter)
Irl of course, we have such things as R-77, AIM-120, and so on.
We do not have those in game. If we did, their capability would probably have significantly more impact on the meta. It doesn’t help that Gaijin hasn’t really modelled Multipathing, and also how Gaijin has arbitrarily imposed a floor on SARH missile effectiveness.
That is why IR missiles are the meta, and not Fox 1s or 3s.
Then again, I am not really contributing to the topic of armour, last I checked AIM-54s weren’t anti armour weapons haha.
I’m just pointing out that hugging the deck and the way SARH missiles are implemented negates FOX-1’s and FOX-3’s and makes FOX-2’s the META.
That doesn’t represent reality very well, and the commenter above strangely implied that just because something doesn’t work in War Thunder, the designers of the real-life counterpart would’ve been at fault.
I personally see the issue as mostly that of the fact that NATO tanks tend, not to have access to shells of the similar relative performance, let alone their service ammo in most cases. It doesn’t help that the formula gaijin uses to set round performance, doesn’t take into account finer details and tends to understate performance while armor retains performance as listed in documents.
Further things like ammo fire chance being low, various peculiar choices for non-spalling thickness cutoffs and and charge, shell & booster not being delineated (1/2/3 piece ammo) from one another, autoloaders not being modeled, HEAT / HESH being trash, and various other things really highlight the issue.
I don’t think that Russia stands out that much in this regard, especially because we’re not taking into account reload rates here.
The M1A1 at 11.0 probably has the best overall firepower of any MBT in the game relative to it’s BR, and I also think these Russian vehicles need something to make up for their lack of gun handling, survivability, mobility and reload rate.
I personally think those sneaky buffs are a result of the years where Russia got absolutely hammered at top-tier, whether it was the T-64A, T-64B, T-80B, T-80U, T-72B3 or T-90A, those vehicles got truly dominated and for some strange reason, Gaijin was consistently terrible at picking the right Soviet/Russian MBT as a counterpart to whatever NATO tank they were adding.
Now that the T-80BVM was added, these benefits weren’t ‘‘needed’’ any longer but they kept them anyways, perhaps because they’re afraid it’ll just result in another long stretch of Russian tanks being abysmal (which is a nonsense reason IMO, just remove these artificial buffs and use the BR system to place these vehicles where they belong).
HEAT-FS seems relatively fine to me, it’s also important to keep in mind that HESH was MASSIVELY overperforming back in those days, it was essentially APHE that didn’t care about sloped armor.
And yet they manage to do so while coming in significantly lighter and smaller, and as such somehow have much more efficient armor, something is up.
It’s more how HEAT / HESH (doesn’t) interact with the overpressure mechanic, having deliberately been hard capped to 20mm RHAe of penetration (30mm for Tandem designs), meaning that any warheads with an explosive weight of more than 10.2kg TnTe don’t do anything (and with most roof being at least an inch[25.4mm], basically disables the mechanic for tanks MBTs entirely, and it doesn’t help that Eastern designs just so happen to have ~32mm RHAe so its near impossible without finding a hole in the armor). this is especially a problem for the Maverick (86lb[39kg] of Comp B.) and other assorted ATGMs.
As it should, it’s practically the perfect design to counter the technology of the time (monolithic / Face hardened steel), and is easily countered by designs that limit the use of monolithic layouts (e.g. composite, NERA, ERA, Spaced, etc.), which rapidly proliferated in response.
They’ve got superior armour because they’re lighter and smaller.
But I also went into detail how it’s overperforming in a different post:
No, it shouldn’t.
HESH back then wasn’t modelled in a way where the spalling generated is perpendicular to the plate being struck, the amount of spalling was also ridiculous.
Some of my British HESH slingers are still on a 75% winrate from those days, that’s how ludicrously overpowered it was.
i specifically remember the Merkava roof was rated to being able to stop High penetrative RPGs, because thats how the Israelis designed it. Then i remember a day or so later i shot a arty strike at a merkava, and blew it up.
Yes, we both agree that their protection is better than it should be, and doesn’t not reflect their actual performance rating. Further if Bakelite and other Resins were so effective in the role why aren’t other nations using similar designs to achieve something approximating their performance. and instead go the other way and include dense metals like Uranium in their arrays if such an obvious answer is known about.
The smaller protected volume cannot be solely responsible for the discrepancy in protective efficacy as otherwise we would see arrays of similar thickness across the board, and hypothetically it would be directly proportional to the protective value. Of which I can assure you is not the case, we have sufficiently detailed internal cross sections of pretty much all of the relevant tanks.
And fragments from APHE are in strange ratios, and fragments ignoring inherited velocity of the shell is not an issue that is unique to HESH, most types of CE shell are impacted by improper / questionable fragmentation modeling (heavy fragments are slower, but should retain damage over a longer distance and deviate less, due to greater mass making equivalent impulse result in reduced imparted speed.)
The issue with HESH is that its operating principle depends on the shock front(s) converging and as the actual performance of the round should depend on its spread(post impact, so velocity and impact angle has an impact), speed of sound though the armor medium, and the thickness (and how homogeneous the plate in question is, including if and how it was heat treated and annealed ) of the plate. This is of course simplified in game and a level that I wouldn’t expect to be replicated
This seems to be all you can do and it’s not very productive. All vehicles in this game should be treated equally and not like crap. The Merkava barely has anymore armor than the Ariete despite being nearly 70 tons. There’s plenty of evidence that this vehicle should stop roughly 700-1200mm of Kinetic Protection alone and yet it’s armor can’t stop DM13.
What point given? This is entirely about over-estimation of Russian equipment and under-estimation of most NATO equipment. Israel may not be NATO, but they still fit in this discussion regardless.
The 6th best round and one of the largest targets. An APS that can’t stop the Russian Tandem Missiles consistently such as the Khrizantema and loses out to the Iron Fist on the Challenger in effectiveness. A vehicle with no backup and mediocre performance.
Saying Israel’s top tier needs to be treated better doesn’t take away from anyone else. The Abrams, Challenger, Leclerc, Ariete, Merkava, etc all have issues that can be fixed and need to be fixed and can all get fixed at the same time. We aren’t playing picky choosey by asking for our favorite vehicles to not get neglected.
The Merkava has had mislabeled armor for 3 years and it cannot stop an AP round from 8.7, which punches straight through it frontally. That’s a pretty big issue when it doesn’t have any backup. Not to mention until a few weeks ago it could barely out reload a T-72.
And Gaijin knows it is wrong. They’ve acknowledged the issue for almost a year now.
what are you yapping about all day? are u saying that USA can stand a chance against a BVM, an abrams shooting it to the side and the BVM doing the same, who would win?
talking about the strongest APFDS? it doesn’t matter when your side armor and front armor can stand those shots, it’s crazy how yall mention uhhh mobility, uhhhh it’s turret cheeks, while abrams getting killed daily (not talking about squadron nor premium abrams) and winrates on the ground, and here alvis yapping too about skill, it doesn’t matter when a russian or sweden holding W towards and u shoot them and it says non pen, or critical hit but u actually hit the engine no crew got damaged
Skill do not matter, while a t80uk with 3bm46 holding W and sees a sep v2 and one shot it while moving and penned it’s hull, while russians and other nations hold W, USA gotta use skills to get a few kills, and when a USA main start talking about giving it fair armor and model their tank correctly, these trolls jump arround and start yapping about uhhhh it got a remote control machine gun, uhhhhh strongest APFDS, this forum is dooomed.
To clarify my stance: I think the majority of Russian MBT’s are currently fine for their respective BR’s, the Object 292 could probably go to 10.3 and that the T-90A is still pretty bad at 10.7, but aside from that the BR’s are okay.
However, if the armour were to be changed in the way I described in the thread I linked to, there’d need to be a massive amount of BR changes, with many of these MBTs being lowered in BR’s.
Just because one composite design is effective doesn’t mean other designs can’t be effective too.
It just depends on what you prioritize.
The denser composite arrays the Soviets used had superior KE protection but inferior CE protection (massive generalization, I know).
It’s clear that both sides used methods that satisfied their needs, the Soviet designs just had the benefit of using much smaller designs.
I’m not so sure that the resulting correction would be so large, impact a lot of vehicles sure, yes it would require a drastic change to the playstyle and mean that the ability to brawl by baiting shots and relying on armor to allow for the follow up would be curtailed(thus a dip in relative performance).
Map offerings and matchmaking may not be great for them either, but the comparative performance at range , and sheer depth and flexibility available to their lineups makes individual vehicle performance less of a deal breaker , since the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. tanks aren’t that much of a downgrade, especially in comparison to some other nations.
They are designed to protect form their expected high risk threats, and if anything force the opponent to commit, expend and exhaust their limited resources to defeat them. further the on the balance of probability a tank is far more likely run into Man portable / vehicle mounted AT, for them to openly engage one another is rare. But it is absolutely what you would expect them to design a few high cards into the various systems or hold in reserve to ensure success.
Then again The current tranche of box tanks and Eastern derived designs are older, and a holdover(s) from back when it was expected that like vs like engagements were going to happen with some frequency so arrays not optimizing for KE threats seems backwards, and things like ARAT and assorted add on kits practically focus on extending CE protection, probably tips their hand slightly to the fact that they were not CE focused, and would otherwise rely on the KE performance of the underlying Array(s) for protection.
And its not like KE Ammo has gotten that much better, or a caliber increase precipitated necessitating revising the Armor schema to ensure sufficient protection was present.