I spaded it already and Ive actually taken it to top tier and gotten a few kills (no godmode though just skill maters) its not the best thing at 11.7 but it can still do something
Into the turret ring, maybe.
Fair, although they’re not in the center of the hull armor so it’s mainly poorly-aimed shots that will hit them.
They do have worse armor, but basically the only real difference is the turret cheeks and some parts of the UFP (the parts that don’t just bounce APFSDS into the inaccurate turret ring).
These tanks don’t have their ammo at the front of the hull, though, and as long as you’re not bringing a ludicrous amount of ammo very little of the turret basket with have ammo in it.
The question was how often and the answer was yes.
Into turret cheeks, totally stopping the round with zero damage taken. Only a small portion of the area that bounces will redirect the round into the turret ring, rest is safe.
Turret cheeks, most of the UFP and parts of LFP. This is a sizeable portion of the frontal armor that’s better.
This is how they look like with 16 ammo (couldn’t test the 12.0 Merkavas since I don’t have them). If you shoot one side, you’ll get 3 crew members and kill the tank, if you shoot at the other side you’ll get ammo and kill the tank. There’s not a thing as bad choice when you aim at those tanks.
Except it does damage to more than just the turret cheeks, as the angle lets APFSDS go into the crew compartment.
Only small portions of the UFP actually bounce APFSDS into areas that don’t do damage, and the LFP of the Abrams is barely better than either the Ariete or Challenger 2/3 iirc.
With the Ariete you can just bring 11 rounds, but for the Challenger 2 that’s my bad since the propellants are farther down into the hull than I thought.
Rounds bounced won’t penetrate the turret cheek.
As I said, it’s the only small part of the UFP than bounces rounds into the turret ring.
I’ve tested it out for another thread a few days ago. Any shot aimed below x-axis “line” on the scope will be a ricochet without any damage taken. If you go up, you’ll risk bouncing into the turret ring but even then it’s not a guarantee every round will do damage.
LFP isn’t strong on it’s own, it’s those two massive fuel tanks that will make it more sturdier on average than the LFP on Arietes or Challengers.
This is how it looks with only 11 rounds, which is in my opinion too low especially considering the reload rate.
There’s the driver’s hatch as well, but imo even the area you show here isn’t that massive.
Of course they put the first rounds in the middle, lol. The same setup is on some earlier Italian MBTs (the OF-40 I think, maybe the 1A5?) and the side rack is filled first iirc.
this is definitely not a hill worth fighting for my dude, the ariete is def worse than the abrams but that hardly even matters since italy has a 2a7 now anyway
Yeah the Ariete is worse, but the Abrams isn’t massively better. The Abrams is probably one of the best non-2A7/T-90M tanks, but that’s not really saying much.
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true at the end of the day those top tanks are kinda the real problem here and having a team of abrams, mercava and challys vs 2a7, t90m and 122 feels kinda unfair
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I’ve had driver’s hatch bounce rounds and making turret ring orange and that’s it. Also the models here are super low quality and look janky, take a look at the x-ray view in the top right, that impact point is pretty high up on the UFP.
The beauty of Italian tanks, isn’t it ?
You simply can’t win with those, doesn’t matter how many rounds you take it’s going be super easy to hit that ammo rack lol.
I do believe Abrams comes right after Leopards and T-tanks when it comes to overall performance.
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that in itself is the problem here as a major nation most of your team will be made up of that nations tanks when you spawn in so if your entire team is made up of a tank thats worse than the entire enemy team you are already set up for a loss.
At the end of the day if A major nation isnt competitive against the others you end up in a situation like we have now, sure it sucks that minor nations sometimes have to use worse tanks for a long time but at the end of the day that minor nations winrate depends heavily on the major nation its teamed up with since thats what most of your team is made up of so them having a good tank is not only better for that nations winrate but the minor nations around it.
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It honestly depends on what nations you get in your team. If you get GER/RU you should be kind of okay. It’s only when GER/RU/SWE gets to play together that curb stomping occurs.
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problem is its not that rare to see that team comp, where as your much less likely to be paired up with another major nation as the US.
just ger/ru is already a pretty big mtb advantage
This probably changes from person to person, so we can’t know how accurate that claim is.
More like vastly less -,-
810mm KE out of a 960mm LoS turret means a KE modifer of 0.84375, hull’s LoS is ~700mm, so 700*0.84375 = ~590mm RHAe KE head-on (so I’m really not sure where you took the “810mm KE hull” from).
Regardless, it’s physically impossible for the hull & turret to offer the same amount of protection due to difference in how much armor they physically have, under the assumption that they use the exact same armor, of course (which, for the sake of making it simpler to produce, would likely be the case).
The only MBT that I can think of to have similar protection on its hull as it does on the turret (IRL), atm, would be the 2A7V, but that’s purely because the physical amount of armor it has is nearly identical on both.
I mean that’s still not saying much.
The current armor values for the turret cheeks are 600mm KE at a 30 degree angle, and going off of the BRL’s hull proposal which increased the KE protection by 35%, then the turret cheeks would have ~810mm of KE protection at 30 degrees. Seeing how there were likely non-DU hull upgrades before the DU ones, it wouldn’t be surprising for the non-DU hulls of the M1A2s to be within the ballpark of the non-DU turret cheeks.
That’s… not how it works? The BRL document is talking about improvements over the existing NERA hull armor composite, which at the time offered ~350mm RHAe KE within a 25 degree arc (British and Swedish documents confirm this).
That’s 350*1.35 = ~473mm RHAe KE within a 25 degree arc for the hull with new armor.
Said document, which was talking about the Tandem Ceramic Armor meant to replace the NERA based armor of the hull, did not mention that the turret armor was the point of reference, so by trying to tie the two together, you’re effectively grasping at straws to peddle forward an agenda that somehow, a hull with significantly more limited armor space, can somehow match vehicles who used equally heavy armor sandwiches, and match them mm for mm, that had +/- 300mm more of space to work with, lol.
Case in point:
Seeing how there were likely non-DU hull upgrades before the DU ones
And which document is meant to confirm this, exactly?
Plus, a hull with DU would not offer the same level of protection as the turret, because of the available space, this can be easily calculated:
Turret’s offering ~600mm RHAe KE within the 30 degree arc means it’s 600mm KE out of a ~830mm LoS thick turret, thus the KE modifier is 0.72289156626, knowing the hull’s LoS, 700*0.72289156626 = ~506mm RHAe KE. Nowhere near to the turret.
Here’s some food for thought, TCA was pretty similar to HAP-1/2 series of armor in terms of KE protection pound for pound, how do we know that? Simply, since it has to offer 35% more KE over the existing “BRL-2” armor of the M1A1, and knowing that M1A1s turret protection was worth 400mm RHAe KE/60 degree arc, TCA equipped turret would be worth 540mm RHAe KE, a 60mm difference from a DU turret, meaning 1mm of DU armor was equal to 1.11mm of the TCA armor, as such, if a TCA hull offered ~473mm RHAe KE, a DU hull would have offered ~525mm RHAe KE.
Still nowhere near a DU’s turret level of protection.
Honestly your whole post is just mumbo jumbo of wishful thinking and absurd beliefs.
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Yes, the export packages did have a 350mm KE protection hull, but those are export packages (of which we know are weaker than the domestic packages due to the lack of DU, so it isn’t unlikely that there are other protection differences elsewhere).
Which is exactly my point. In terms of protection, it would be: M1 hull < M1A1 hull < M1A2 (DU) hull. Sure, if you want to say that the hull of the M1A1 isn’t the same protection as the non-DU M1A2 turret cheeks going off of the amount of volume then sure that’s fine, but it’s not like hull armor improvements didn’t happen before the DU hulls (from what I’ve seen).
From what I remember, it’s the pre-FY2004/2005 budget reports which mention an improved frontal armor upgrade in combination with the 5 hull limit until August of 2006, and then some stuff from this bug report showing that the SEPs were approved for improved hull protection (without specifying DU).
I like how the possibility that the 5 DU hull M1s qualifier being removed from official documents can only be because more M1s received DU hulls
and not that the DU in those hulls could just have been disposed of
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