…and I can find plenty of open source stuff on Western tanks they refuse to accept. If it can be found online and has no issues, why don’t they share or source it? Yes, they should share the data for all of the tanks if they want us to trust that they are being as accurate and legit as they claim.
Especially when we know they use bad information or deny reality when it suits them.
If Gaijin faithfully reproduced the current M1 would it be in the same BR as any avalible Russian tank? Would Gaijin need to introduce a fictional or semi fictional Amata T14 to balance it out?
SepV3 and M829A4 exist then or maybe KF51 panther and Abrams X T-14 are not a top dog anymore (or never been)
Not all nations have tanks at every BR. Look at Israel. They can’t play the entire field. Plenty of gaps in other trees.
It’d be mostly trade-offs to be frank.
Abrams in theory would have a better LFP and turret cheeks, T-80BVM/T-90M would have a better UFP and no turret ring vulnerability as well as it’s side armor ERA being effective vs KE (especially if they opt to forego M829A3 in favor of said armor buff or choose not to model anti-ERA tips on it)
Yes, it would be the same BR.
First off, they already mess around with load times to balance just that.
Second off, they limit what rounds USA gets.
Third off, not really the point of the argument. The point is that they say they don’t have information to do what is asked. Which is just a lie at this point.
Wow. If only they had a Wiki just for this purpose. And if only they could staff it with volunteers paid in in game currency to help out. Oh wait. They do. The reason they don’t share is so people don’t question their arbitrary decisions.
Literally nobody is talking about anything related to this comment. This is just whataboutism and a red herring.
It amuses me how everyone howls for the authenticity of the Abrams when it is profitable, but no one is going to bring helicopters to realism.
I think it’s overkill. This is a game, not a collection of documents with a hint of military secrecy. We should just keep it simple, or go by the rules.
None of it is real. It’s about having balanced gameplay. Which we don’t have. Besides, who ever said people didn’t want other vehicles to be fixed. However, this thread is about NATO armor.
Yeah…they seem to ignore that Gaijin has only revealed their completely flawed and untrue rationalization for artificially nerfing the Abrams. I imagine when they try to lie and make incorrect claims about the other tanks in their related devblogs, plenty of people will be upset and ready to tear them apart for their intentional dishonesty and unfair decisions as they won’t even follow their own supposed standards and policies.
It’s wild to me how you people confess your ideology so openly yet fail to reflect even a little on if it might have some weight on your judgement. You speak line upon line of politics in a discussion of technical detail. Find a better place. I’m sure NAFO twitter, NCD, and a dozen other corners of the internet would love to hear, but it’s not what this forum is for.
Jane’s International Defence Review 7/1997, pg. 15:
“Pentagon correspondent Leland Ness explained that US Army tests involving firing trials on 25 T-72A1 and 12 T-72B1 tanks (each fitted with Kontakt-5 explosive reactive armour [ERA]) had confirmed NATO tests done on other former Soviet tanks left behind in Germany after the end of the Cold War. The tests showed that the ERA and composite Armour of the T-72s was incredibly resilient to 1980s NATO anti-tank weapons”
“During the tests we used only the weapons which existed with NATO armies during the last decade of the Cold War to determine how effective such weapons would have been against these examples of modern Soviet tank design. Our results were completely unexpected. When fitted to the T-72A1 and B1 the ‘heavy’ ERA made them immune to the DU (Depleted Uranium) penetrators of the M829A1 APFSDS (used by the 120 mm guns of the Cold War era US M1 Abrams tanks), which are among the most formidable of current tank gun projectiles. We also tested the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger (the gun of the A-10 Thunderbolt II Strike Plane), the 30mm M320 (the gun of the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter) and a range of standard NATO Anti Tank Guided Missiles – all with the same result of no penetration or effective destruction of the test vehicles. The combined protection of the standard armour and the ERA gives the Tanks a level of protection equal to our own”
How about the US? I could’ve sworn I heard someone in this thread say the US doesn’t lie
Plenty of ATGMs and man-portable launchers have yeeted these tanks coated in K-5. Probs just some “Bomber Gap” scare from the MIC, cuz Russian tanks haven’t proven well protected on any battlefield since the 80s.
On a related note. In the historical record all NATO equipment vastly outperforms Russia and ergo Chinese equipment. It isn’t even close.
This in particular really, really irks me to see said so confidently. This isn’t the case. It’s just patently false.
Tanks have, in all cold war era conflicts, performed strictly in manners defined by their local material conditions; the quality of training provided to tank crews, the condition of those tanks, the suitability of those tanks to local conditions, and the the quality of opposition they faced. Taking your words at face value, only the last of these has tended to matter if one tank is red and the other’s blue, and that’s just not been the case. Invariably, the other three factors take preeminence over who’s using what.
In the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq’s supposed ‘monkey model’ T-72Ms, alongside T-62s, slaughtered by the dozen in Desert Storm, pulled appalling kill ratios against the literal best equipment any NATO power was willing to export to anyone at the time; a thousand Chieftain Mk.3/5s equipped with LRF and a very modern FCS, as well as legacy M60s. The Chieftains are especially noteworthy for the time as the best armored and armed tanks anyone in NATO fielded prior to the advent of the boxy monsters of the 80s.
We had many delegations after the war, the largest one was American. I do not
have any information about delegations that visited during the war. The press reported comparisons between Russian and British weapons. British weapons were not very good.
The 90th Iranian Armored Division had Chieftain tanks; they had a lot of problems and
did not fight effectively. The 16th Iranian Armored Division, which was equipped with
Chieftain tanks, lost a battle against the 10th Iraqi Armored Brigade with T-72 tanks. It
is hard for an armored brigade to destroy a division in 12 hours but it happened; it was a
disaster for the Iranians. Kuwait was another disaster. It is hard to compare the Kuwaitis
with us, but the result was that the British weapons quickly lost the war. There was a
problem with British manufacturing. An order was issued that every tank had to carry
two types of ammunition: the first was effective against heavy armor and the second was
used against infantry and light armor. We were ordered not to inflict heavy casualties
when we entered Kuwait, so we armed our tanks with the less effective ammunition, so
the Kuwaiti tanks would be knocked out when we fired on their tanks, but their soldiers
would survive. When we fired upon them using this less effective ammunition, I realized
that even this ammunition destroyed the Kuwaiti Chieftains.
But you don’t want to think about that. You want to think about Desert Storm. But Desert Storm wasn’t all of history. NATO equipment has tasted blood plenty of times from peer opponents, from US Shermans in Korea to Pattons and Bulldogs in South Vietnam. You don’t like think about Jijiga, Badr, or Basantar, and so you just don’t, and you pretend the entire historical record is just Desert Storm after Desert Storm, 6 Day War upon 6 Day War, and nothing else. But that fails as genuine historical analysis. It’s wrong and you should stop saying it.
Yeah, in the modern day, after everyone got to do range trials against K-5 and make their own cheap and easy solutions to it. Just like a Kornet would go through an 80’s spec Abrams or Leo 2. Regardless, K-5 is kind of infamous for its dogshit coverage. But you can literally do the math to verify its performance in independent firing trials yourself. The math to calculate the performance of ERA is publicly and easily available, and so are the exact components of K-5. There is absolutely, positively no good reason to doubt its performance. Shit, the Russians and Ukrainians both agree on it pretty well, that should tell you something.
This quotation is incorrect. Here is the actual page:
Here is also what the Germans found about Kontakt-5:
Whether the T-80U could actually withstand the 140mm cannon I have doubts about. Here is estimates for the penetration of said cannon I found in a Russian military scientific journal (refer to the 1997 prototype):
That said, @The_Generic_Guy is correct. Russian armour isn’t overperforming in any way. It just comes down to the fact that information about Russian armour is way more accessible.
I’m all for NATO tanks getting their correct armour, but chalking everything down to Russian propaganda is not a hill you want to die on. There’s a massive difference between a state media press release intended for public consumption and an official document that’s only intended to be read by the relevant people. This goes for every country.
I still have my doubts. RedEffect removed his video where he talked about the roof ERA tiles of K-5 and later making Javelins and other top-attack missiles basically worthless.
Claims like “impenetrable” and “immune” according to old tests cited in Janes and word-of-mouth from German tank experts in the 90s really hasn’t shown itself on the battlefield. UVZ used the failures in Chechnya to cast doubt on the T-80 platform as a whole, but plenty of T-72s have been fragged since then as well. The Syrian experience against an insurgency in the Middle East has been much more destructive to Russian armor than any NATO tanks in foreign services facing similar elements and threats.
ERA in this game is overperforming in a factor not intentionally modeled, but because of spaghetti code and server side shenanigans, ERA can cause rounds to completely vanish with no effect whatsoever. Reducing the effectiveness of KE penetrators on side shots is not the same as making them disappear entirely.
Russian ammo storage also seems to be less of a risk in game than what’s been repeatedly demonstrated to be a fatal flaw.