I recently watched guides regarding this tank (T 80 U, BR 11.3) after reading replies under my previous topic, that this tank is going to be good. I noticed it often fights against TURMS-T and Obj.292, and Russia in general. Particularly those do not concern me much, either pretty weak premium or a destructor-2, though Obj.292’s T-80BV base is a part of concern, too.
What concerns me the most is Soviet T-90A and T-80U. Indeed, Soviet T-80U has a bit higher 11.7 BR thanks to having 3BM46, and 11.0 T-90A has awful mobility, but…
I’m not gonna talk much about protection, we all know T-72 series have better UFP ERA coverage than T-80. What I wanna talk about is that, thanks to Russian armor overperforming (see https://forum.warthunder.com/t/making-russian-tank-protection-more-realistic and notice how later in the text I say 233mm instead of T-80U’s 150mm steel and 70mm textolite, the latter being nearly useless against APFSDS IRL), T 80 U is not able to penetrate it’s direct Soviet counterpart T-80U frontally once it’s out of ERA, but vice versa can happen (233mm/68° is around 620mm frontal protection, with in-game 68° normalization I divide that by 1.24 and get around 503mm LOS. That can be effectively penetrated by T-80U’s 3BM46 (~530mm pen) and wonderfully by T-90A’s 3BM60 (~580mm pen). Meanwhile, on Swede, with ~450mm pen of your top shell, 3BM42, you will have to aim for T-80U’s and T-90A’s weakspots, which are indeed pretty massive like the LFP, but are much smaller than your entire UFP, which is the “butter” for 3BM46/60 “knives” (again, once they shot off your ERA).
I know that Gaijin cannot give Swedes 3BM46, as it’s a rare shell and never was exported, and cannot give 3BM60, as the old Soviet autoloader doesn’t fit it, though I heard of 3BM42-2, I don’t know if this one would be suitable.
Making the tank 11.0 and lower is absurd, as with K-5 ERA and 1250hp engine, it still is much better than T-80B, but I think it really needs a more powerful shell to be equal with Russian 11.0-11.7 tanks. 3BM42-2 sounds like the only working option. I do not consider giving a Swede an unique shell a problem, as there is a Leopard 2PL with DM43 shell, unique to this tank, squadron one too.
Of course, penetration isn’t a problem on high tier, even 300mm pen APFSDS is enough to reliably penetrate weakspots even of Strv122 and T-90M, I tried that myself with my 122-1, but Soviets still have major penetration advantage over the Swede, which can still enhance their battle experience greatly.