The Conqueror is fun to play but it’s so situational that I don’t get it out often since I spaded it sadly.
The gun does too little damage when it pens, because shell shattering happens way too often.
The armor is great but everybody knows to shoot at the mantlet so it negates it completely since it’s a massive weak spot beside the lower front plate but that’s a flaw on most tanks.
It’s sad cause it’s very fun to play and fits my playstyle the most as I love to snipe but man this mantlet is so stupid.
Does anyone here have any information regarding the actual weight of the APDS shell?
Online I only found numbers between 9.6 and 12KG, but not if that is just the projectile or the whole round minus propellant.
Because I feel like 6.37Kg is far too low for a 120mm APDS shell.
If the 9.6-12KG is the weight of the shell that would mean that ~35%-45% of the weight are just in the sabots. Which is insanely high even for gen 1 APDS.
For comparison, the 20 pounder Shot mk. 1 APDS has 25% of its weight in the sabots, the replacement mk 3 had only 20% (Gaijin somehow missed that point and simply kept it at 25% ingame)
This would explain how the gun deals less damage than a 17 pounder as its shell is over 1Kg lighter while being significantly larger, faster and denser.
This shot will go through the UFP as if it did not exist and happens actually quite frequently as it is at the angle you want to be at in the Conq to not expose your weak side while maximising the front armour. Died to this at least 20 times now in the past 150ish games.
201mm for the shell shown, but it works with all shells, even those that have the “bad” angle pen. It also works with other guns of a similar calibre, and the russian 100mm but I have not been able to replicate that in the hangra, so it might have been just volumetric at that time.
You can also “side pen” the UFP from a steeper angle in which case it appears to offer exactly 0mm of armour. Shots through the fenders also seem to magically gain thousands of milimeters of pen, but those usually hit the tracks anyways so while bugged its not really detrimental.
It shattered because the UFP is actually three plates layered on top of each other, not one uniform plate. I don’t know exactly how a projectile is determined to shatter, but I do know they don’t like spaced armour.
It doesn’t matter in the end. This game mechanic is a cheap nerf and renders british tanks useless against any type of armored vehicle that uses more than one layer of armor. At least those of the conqueror/centurion APDS era.
It’s pretty realistic in this case, but shell shatter should be added to all rounds imo, thought apds and hvap are more prone to it. At least in this case the armor is actually spaced, it adds the same debuffs when you shoot stuff with two metal plates welded together like the Porsche Tiger, in reality it would just act like one 200 mm plate though
Edit* most rounds, I don’t want HE, HEAT, and such to shatter
Shell shatter is still like hull break levels of poorly implemented, the idea is great, extreme angles causing shatter or destabilising it’s flight etc but in game if a 5mm plate gets in the way of a shot all it’s energy apparently disappears from a 300mm+ round. It’s far! too inconsistent to be a choice off ammunition. You could literally give all of them 500000mm of pen… It wouldn’t matter because once the shell shatters it’s gone.
My case rests mostly on the L1 APDS from the Conqueror. It has a 15sec reload just to put out that 120mm apds tank tickler round and then it even shatters on double layerd armor 95% of the time.
Some tanks are just nerfed beyond believe and it is sad because war thunder for years now is such a meta infested game because of such nerf mechanism which create meta gameplay.
That’s one of Gaijin’s biggest problems: they take something realistic and exaggerate it to the extreme. APHE bullets dealt slightly more damage than Full AP bullets, but in the game, they were made into a sphere of death. In the case of the initial APCR and APDS, hitting a spaced plate would cause the bullet to fragment, but of course, it would have to hit a plate of a certain thickness, inclination, and a certain space. Gaijin, on the other hand, modeled it so that it always passes through wherever it hits. The initial APCR and APDS should cause you to lose a certain amount of penetration when hitting spaced armor, losing little penetration if it is 5mm armor and more if it is 10mm or higher, and losing very little penetration if it hits armor together. For example, in the game, if you shoot an IS-3 with the Conqueror in the front of the hull where it has the spare tracks, the bullet literally disappears, just as if you shoot the Ferdinand with its 100mm + 100mm armor without any spaces,between the armor, this bullet should pierce them without any problem and lose very little penetration.
For real, I came back after 3 or more years to that game and it is just the exact same nonsense as before. But at least we now have experimental ray tracing. I guess that is something xD
Actually the designs of these APDS are somewhat different. The DM13 is the German version of the L28A1, which has a tungsten carbide core, but in front it has a tungsten alloy cap, so that cap would somewhat prevent the core from breaking. In the case of the 3BM8 the core would have the outer structure of the bullet in front, which is larger and means that upon impact there is steel in front as a cap, which would also somewhat prevent the bullet from fragmenting, but in any case it should suffer more bullet fragmentation than the DM13.
The first image is a comparison between the L28 and its variants, and the L52, where some small differences in the design can be seen, the biggest difference being the fact that the L52 has a tungsten alloy core.
The second image is of the 100mm 3BM8, where you can see that in front of the core there is steel from the same bullet acting as a cap, and protecting the tungsten core a little from fragmenting.
The third image shows a 20Pdr APDS-T Mk. 3, which uses the same design as the 120mm L1G. It can be seen that in front of the tungsten carbide core there is a steel cap to protect the core at the time of impact, but it is relatively small, so if the bullet were to hit against spaced armor of a certain thickness it would not fully protect the core at the time of impact, causing it to lose some penetration after passing through the first armor plate.
the thing is, I’m not interested in this matter of it being realistic or not. This game always tries to do this totally weird split between the demand of being realistic and artificial nerfing for the sake of balance.
Conqueror APDS being realistic while aPHE still is the sphere of death since 2015. heat-fs was an up and down, nowadays being okay. HESH got completly destroyed, it is far more useless than apds. Especially the 183mm which has no HE splash damage.
Lets take these two vehicles for example. Conqueror and fv4005. Two vehicles that have a ton of handicaps. The only upside they have is their cannon. Yet their ammo became renderes a joke because the few people that dared to play them, did quite well.
