Good evening all,
I’ve really gotten back into playing my Lorraine 155 and loving it! (I’ve had it since 2018, but not really played it much; the 0 degrees of gun depression made it very hard to play!!) It hit me though, I was doing some comparisons between it and the newish M44 in the tech tree. The M44 is mostly better in every single way:
- The M44 is a lower BR, 4.0 as opposed to the Lorraine at 4.3.
- It fires the same ammunition; both use the M107 shell.
- It reloads faster, 15 seconds as opposed to the Lorraine’s 20-second reload.
- It has better firing arcs (+/- 30 degrees; the Lorraine has +/- 20) and has better gun handling with traverse speeds exceeding the Lorraine’s. The horizontal speed is ~50% faster with an ace crew, and the vertical speed is up to 12 degrees a second! 3x faster than the Lorraines!
- The Lorraine is slower than the M44 (by 1.4 kph), and reverses much slower at 7.1 kph. The M44 reverses at 14.9 kph
- The coaxial MG151 is arguably worse than the M2 Browning. It has less penetration and half the ammunition, overheats faster, and has only 45 degrees of elevation. I will admit the HE is very nice against soft targets!
- The M44 is a smaller vehicle; the Lorraine is huge, and it’s nearly impossible to hide! This usually results in being machine-gunned to death from the other side of the map :(
- The commander of the M44 can also fire the gun, the Lorraine can’t do that :(
- Even though the Lorraine has one more crew member, it has two machine gunners. Having 6 crew though, doesn’t really do much… (The M55 gets two loaders and 6 total crew though at 4.0!)
After all this, I don’t know how the Lorraine can be placed at 4.3? Have I missed something? It should at least be 4.0 and be in line with the better M44. I’m not saying at all the Lorraine is bad though! I’ve had a blast with it, but it does seem to have been forgotten by Gaijin a bit :( and is now overshadowed by newer HE flingers!