M163 VADS lacks MK149 APDS round

true. I wonder how good it’s 20mm will be

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About as good as the R3 gun, but now with DM63

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so other words it is going to be a anti air only pretty much right?

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No. It’s going to be 7.7 which means it should face plenty of IFVs and MBTs with weaker side armor. Could it be used as SPAA? Absolutely, depending on the elevation angles. DM63 on the live server has about 73mm~ of penetration, so it should be pretty funny.

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Nice! That will be interesting

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Wait, I thought it was only 66mm?

Edit:

Yeah, it’s 66mm on live, and in the Dev server (as of yesterday)

Unless they changed it recently, and I haven’t heard?

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meh close enough. not enough to go through front but can mess up ifvs and mbt sides

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Aw man, I apologize if I sound like I’m being overly nitpicky about this.

The reason why I care is that me and a couple of guys are trying to get low-caliber HVAP/APDS corrected, as they perform significantly worse than real life sources indicate. I suspect there’s something wrong with Gaijin’s calculator for this type of projectile.

A couple extra millimeters is meaningful, especially when you’re working with so few to begin with.

Also, the penetration drop-off over range on these 20mm projectiles is insane, much worse than IRL. It falls off as quickly as a .50 cal. A few extra mm to work with could result in a pen at a longer range or at an angle you couldn’t successfully penetrate before.

Here’s the topic if you’re interested

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66mm? didn’t the M163 use to pen close to that? I feel like it used to have 63mm pen or 53mm pen. I don’t remember though

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Ooooh, I can’t remember… it’s been so long. You might be thinking of LAV-AD?

Anyway, here’s a screenshot from a 7 year old Phlydaily video.

Screenshot_20240604-002232_Firefox|1000x556

Case closed? Unless they added a higher pen round at some point between then and now. Not that I know of.

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welp that’s pretty hard evidence that I pulled a Mark Twain “the easiest things to remember are the things that never happened” xD

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It seems the AP-I had 53mm pen back in 2022, so you were on to something

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Yes sir!

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Yep, the GAU-8 rounds used to have 102mm of flat penetration as well, and now it sits at a sad 79mm of flat pen.

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Look How They Massacred My Boy Meme GIF - Look How They Massacred My Boy Meme Massacre GIFs

Seriously the aerial cannon nerfs were and still are horrible imo. The GAU-8 being relegated to using a crappy WW2 era HVAP for it’s rounds is just sad.

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sad-yea

Also, don’t forget the Gau-12 on LAV-AD, from 91mm to 66mm 💀

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I feel like the devs already though about this by putting it to 7.7 specifically where M163 is already not very useful even against early jets. So m163 stuck in some kind of tech tree purgatory where it doesn’t really fit but moving it elsewhere as it is feels wrong.

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Yeah…64mm pen is pre-nerf Whirbelwind-level. That won’t be doing much.

Does it need such rounds? Yes, but as a Tier 1 Module unlock at most. All of its belts should be Tier 1 Modules because none fundamentally alter how it works (or rather doesn’t).

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Non soviet autocannons will forever be punished. Definitely want APDS added to the sad M163, but most importantly, I would love to see all the 20mm cannons (specifically HVAP and APDS shells) corrected to their well documented historical values. As they are, they are incredibly sad.

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