Medium caliber solid APC is artificially nerfed

Machinery of War Discussion Ground Vehicle
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In our game, there are many types of armor-piercing shells at low and mid tiers, and they all got their own differences coded into 'em. Today I discovered that medium caliber APCs do not perform as they should, and it seems I know why, luckily Tank Encyclopedia community and gszabi provided me enough information to judge.

This talk is about APC’s flat armor penetration capabilities. Not gonna make it too large, just gonna say that the soft penetrator cap prevents the shell from deforming while contacting the enemy tank’s armor (for some reason Gaijin thinks it’s purpose is to decrease ricochet chance and denormalize the shell even more for some reason, but that’s another topic). However, they chose some capped shells not being able to do that. It means they have artificially degraded flat penetration, higher denormalization, but at least smaller ricochet chance, those being:

  • 47mm Mle1935 (tanks such as S.35, B1 bis/B1 ter, AMD.35 SA35, AMC.35)
  • 57mm Shot Mk.8 (tanks such as Cromwell I, Churchill III, Ram II, SARC MkVI 6-pdr, AEC Mk II)
  • 76mm Shot Mk.4 (tanks such as Achilles, A.C.IV, Avenger, Challenger, Comet)

(their incosistency of what to put after “Mk”, lmao)
And who knows if I skipped some more, I hope not. Anyways, if you compare them to smaller caliber APC shells, such as 25mm, 37mm, or APC-HE shells, such as 50mm and 128mm, you will notice that they do not have such debuff, compared to calculator:
image50mm APC-HE (Germany, SdKfz234/2 Puma)
image37mm APC (France, H.39)

It only comes to the shell I talked above (or those I’ve noticed, to say the least), which affect a damn good amount of vehicles:
image47mm APC (France, S.35)
image57mm APC (Britain, Cromwell I)

It’s because those shells have “bullet type” named “apc solid medium caliber tank”, which makes their penetration behave like normal AP/APBC.

Now, I may know why they had to do it, though it’s really stupid. Someone from TE community provided me this document, firing test of 17-pdr APC and APCBC. Maybe it’s not the case, but, Gaijin really broke the APC penetration instead of making correct, lower velocity for APC, being much lower than APCBC…
So here we are.
image
(funny how IRl it was 8mm difference and in-game its 14-15mm difference, lol

Anyway, have a full list of affected vehicles. It's all those who have miscalculated APC penetration value, not just the ones I mentioned above (shortly - full research):

America:

  • M15 CGMC (this one’s ironic, as French 37mm apparently went beyond “medium caliber” limitation)
  • M4A5

Italy:

  • Sherman Ic
  • Sherman Vc

France:

  • S.35
  • ACG-1
  • D2
  • B1 bis
  • AMD.35 SA35
  • B1 ter

Britain:

  • Crusader III
  • Cromwell I
  • Churchill III
  • SARC 6-pdr
  • AEC Mk.II
  • Ram II
  • A.C.IV
  • Sherman Firefly (& Overlord, Trzyniec)
  • Challenger
  • Comet (& Iron Duke)
  • Centurion Mk.1 (& Mk.2)
  • Avenger (& Overlord)
  • Concept 3

If you want to bring more attention to this problem, please, submit more reports, especially if it affects your gameplay! Also, post comments on those following reports, they lasted for years and we have no results from Gaijin so far!

2 Likes
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In-game values:
image47mm APC (France, S.35)
image57mm APC (Britain, Cromwell I)

(open pictures in new tab is the text is too small)

2 Likes
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Like I’ve told you on discord as well (which you have seemingly ignored), the wiki calculator is not as nuanced as the in-game one, hasn’t been for years. The wiki calculator only knows 0.9 or 1.0 multipliers (the APCBC checkbox), while the game works with a multitude of values, for instance.

Generally speaking your observation is largely correct, apc_tank uses 1.0, apc_solid_medium_caliber_tank uses 0.9, but there are exceptions, such as:

  • slpprj m/42 APC (it.psv. m/41 (“L-62 ANTI II”), tdgb m/40 (lvakan m/36)): apc_tank, 0.9
  • Mk. VIII APC (LCS (L) 257): apc_solid_medium_caliber_tank, 1.0

The bulletType does not directly affect penetration the way you think it does. It gives default parameters for normalisation, ricochet, shrapnel, and slope modifiers, but these can and often are overwritten by the shells. Penetration parameters are only found in the shells. Yes, they often correlate with the bulletType, but it’s not a rule that two shells with the same bulletType have to have the same type of penetration parameters.

4 Likes
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I see more and more inconsistency examples like this. And due to this, whatever criteria the devs use for all vehicles in the game is really breaking the community’s work to try and fix the game using some logical explanations like mine