Some NATO tanks, like the Abrams and Leopard 2, have what’s called the NATO “hump” — an elevated engine area that prevents the gun from aiming at targets behind the tank.
In the Leopard 2 series — the main tank line for Sweden and Germany in ranks 7 and 8, and a secondary for Italy and France — Gaijin accepted a bug report that worsened the gun depression angle. As a result, nearly 160 degrees behind the tank is now a blind spot.
This means if someone hits your engine or transmission or driver from the side, you can’t shoot back like other tanks. Your gun will aim too high.
What I want is to revert this change and restore the original gun depression angle:
1 because it was a bad nerf that negatively affected gameplay.
2 Another reason that overly realistic mechanics don’t always translate well into the game.
For example, modern NATO tanks raise their guns automatically after firing to help with manual loading. Similarly, auto-loader tanks (mostly Russian and Chinese) require the gun to elevate to a specific angle. These features might exist in real life, but in-game they can be frustrating — especially with slow gun elevation speeds.
The advantage the leopard has over the abrams is the designers didnt put a massive gaping turret neck that turned into a massive weakspot that everyone abuses in a video game just so the gun can depress over the engine deck.
Russian tanks can depress at 180 but they have like half the turret rotation of NATO tanks.
I agree with you that the addition is super annoying and kinda random since so many other tidbits that would be realistic are not in the game. However its not like it makes the Leos incredibly worse and maybe even balances them a tad more but i agree that its a super random addition to the game
It’s not related to balance reason but realistic bug report issues
The Abrams has a big advantages by itself
Faster reload (Wich how gaijin balanced your Abrams)
50cal to take down tracks and light armor targets
Multipurpose shell
Engine smoke
Any leopard but the 2a7 have bigger or as big weak spots as Abrams so any leopard that ain’t a 2a7 is worse than the Abrams compined with the resons above
And the Russian tanks at top tier have much faster gun elevation and turning the most NATO tanks
Yes, the total reload cycle time (from firing to being ready to fire again) can vary depending on the gun’s elevation angle if the system requires the gun to return to a fixed loading angle.
According to the MZ autoloader cyclogram, the gun needs to move to a specific elevation angle for loading, then return to the previous aiming position. This means:
The autoloader cycle itself (e.g., 7.1 seconds) doesn’t change.
But the additional time needed to move the gun down to the loading angle and back up to the original aim adds to the total time before you’re ready to fire again.
So in real life, if you’re aiming at a high target and the gun needs to lower significantly to load, then come back up, it will take longer than just the base 7.1seconds.
Games like War Thunder often ignore this and treat the autoloader time as a flat value, which makes reloads unrealistically consistent regardless of gun position.
When they go so far with such annoying thing we can say no stop right there
There’s no mechanical obstacle preventing the cannon from descending because there’s nothing in the way.
But the reason for this is a safety system so the barrel doesn’t hit the engine cover. This happens with a tank like the Abrams, and I have a video of it.
Compared to tanks equipped with an automatic loading system, the cannon must move in order to reload. There’s a mechanical obstacle
If someone bug reported such a thing this will be annoying
