This is a great idea. War thunder needs to decide if it’s a simulator or a game with cool ballistic mechanics.
Right now it’s not even close to a simulator at least on the ground side.
There are so many of these “hidden statistics” that dumb the game down. That would effect actual performance so much. It’s way more important than ray tracing. WT does such a great job with airplane models. But with ground as cool as war thunder is, it’s a very incomplete.
I’ve been asking for torque curves, BHN and material hardness and quality calculations, firecontrol pulse update times, thermal flir power and a huge huge thing, ping times and fcs throuput numbers. Generally a real life equipment quality check.
As cool as torque is, they shouldn’t use any engine statistics for tracked vehicle. There’s just too big of a gap in performance waste between the varied approaches.
How many drive lines? How many gears? How efficient is the torque converter not just It’s a ratio. Does it have limited slip? Does it have traction control? Does the computer slow one track up when it detects track speed alignment issues?
Also, temperature play a massive roll. In cold air, the engine that has the most boost will create more power.
DU acts the same as tungsten ingame for god sakes, and very similar to steel in game. Which is insane. DU self sharpens, reacts and pre-melts armor while the molecules hold onto to each other and keep their shape 15% better. Darts are all about length, material and velocity vs what materials and what order at what angle they are going through.
Stabilizers are all treated the same, which is hilarious. Gyros and ballistic computers are not made equal.
The US for a long time and now Germany and France use independent co-processors each with their own designated memory. So the laser rangefinder., the barrel bend sensor, the windage and elevation and tracking and GPS and thermals are not running through the same processor… leopard 2a4 down and every t80 72 ingame used a single processor to deal with all of those inputs…
For God sake’s our gaming routers and smart tvs nowadays use tons of co prosessors because shading and lighting and the smart function is too much.
Now imagine you’re tracking a moving target and eighth the size of your pinky nail, firing at 2000 yards with two changes of wind, from a moving platform and need to hit it with a dart… do you see why 500 ms lag spikes could be a problem?
And when do spikes occur? Oh that’s right, when you’re actually sighting and ranging your target. Essentially the other fire controls have to do one job at a time didn’t pass the data to the other. Us and now nato do it at once.
Thermal scopes are pretty much treated the same and don’t use actual heat levels. It’s just a fancy filter and they get a certain resolution. What generation one thermals are not created equally. The Hughes has 18 top quality thermal cameras all going to a processor.
Many other gen ones are going to 4 and we’re piped in to the fire control.
Without these mechanics actually flushed out, countries that lie or overstate can claim whatever they want and it doesn’t match reality at all. Then it’s not a simulator. It’s a fun tank game. Gaijin can use its bias to prop up their favorite ew premium or country with these vague systems in plac. It’s actually a major problem.
When it becomes a real issue is when they artificially nerf or buff certain tech and then the country, knowing it was an issue actually changed the design for the better or it was such a good technology multiple vehicle vehicles then got it.
When they do things like over buff a single dart for their new premium tank because it’s in between tiers or it wasn’t that great in real life, or they don’t have the subsystems and micro gameplay to make it good in game. Then the over buffed dart comes out on the next tank in which the country added a ton of resources to up its armor or its reload to make up for it.
Now you have an overpowered or underpowered piece of technology that gets worse and worse and worse.
When a steel, short Dart that is machined 3 times looser that has been RL tested using NATO standards comes in 30% different than WT numbers… that’s an issue.
It’s already bad enough when they remove things that they said was a test round like the 40mm on the m247
Making it go from 130/90 pen to 36. Meanwhile, the SU 57 that never carried APHE in rl is better at killing than anything. Or when the 45 mm Russian APHE payload gets buffed in tanks, which fixes a small problem in a mainly unused tank. But it creates planes that carry these that now one click anything from the sky.
If it’s a simulator, please show me where the Russians were getting thousands of heavy kills with 45 mm. If real life was anywhere close to war thunder, the US and Britain and France would’ve all bought yak 9s and not run any other plane. It could kill fighters and bombers and King Tigers while being fast and completely stable.
When they simply accept RHA estimates, (vs actually modeling the layers) add weight and velocity, that leaves out about 1000 different factors. It allows manufacturers or countries to not invest in tons of real life, quality control, testing, and pad their numbers as much as possible.
The perfect example of the problems ingame is Abrams, DU and composite in General.
Gaijin did dmg control during the leaks, and they were very clever. Rather than addressing the fact that 99% of sources on earth agreed the m1 had 350-400mm lower hull protection which was increased to 550 to 600 with m1a1. They instead focused on a small part of claiming DU was in the lower hull and proved it wasn’t.
The reason they fought back so hard and won’t just make it the listed stats, it’s because they’re NERA in X-ray
Has a single value. US, German, French Brit’s all just say Nera and thickness and it’s all the same. On the Russian tanks, they add plates and smaller Nera so they are much stronger.
The point is, the US has never sold its composite armor scheme. They do not use the same materials as other countries. Most the other countries simply license Chobham armor and buy composite screens.
But Chobham is simply the sandwich of whatever ceramic, rubber and fiberglass you use and the order to put them in.
The US used simple high bhn armor with chobham blocks on the xm1. But the Abrams and especially the m1a1 used US high hardened steel with vulcanized, rubber and fiberglassdipped in 1 inch ceramic coating for both the front of the sandwich that was 4 inches thick and the back plate which was 2 4 inch plates back to back. All the plates are opposed to each other.
Now the nera block come in units and they do look like what’s modeled in game but each 4 inch block has a 3.8mm plate.
This is not what the other NATO countries do. They use old school Chobham design with various thickness and materials. They don’t do this because it’s much more expensive to do ceramic coatings, high hardened steel and opposed plate positions.
I tested weapons for six years. All kinds of composite armors in different variations. Simply switching your hardest material from the back to the front (if the armor is comparable) will defeat 15% more often. If you take 5 inches of RHA vs 1 inch face hardened 3inches in 3 plates each facing 15 degrees different, Putting fiberglass, vulcanizedrubber and tile between each layer you save 15% weight and defeat 25% more, have 0 spall and is basically immune to HEAT up to a reasonable point.
RHA with a 600 bhn at 60 degrees acts completely differently than its equivalent 1200 bhn FHA at 60.
The steeper the angle the higher, the BHN the more drastic.
There was a test with 25 mm of armor at 65 degrees. The cast steel at 450 bhn was penned 100%. It’s soft so it catches the round.
They changed it to 1200 BHN and it deflected 85% and only took slight damage 15%.
They went to 18 mm and went to 68 degrees and once again the cast steel was penetrated. The 1200 BHN was immune all the way to 15mm.
The high hardness would simply not allow the round to gain any traction.
So when you see a 38 mm plate on the Abrams at 83 degrees It would be possible to penetrate it if it was soft RHA. It’s not. It’s high hardened and it’s so hard the frontal plates sits on small solid bushings so it won’t crack. But the Abrams has never been penetrated there after they shot it 5000 times with darts.
All these things, they were doing in 1954 in the American Silacious Core Armor experiments. They used every combination we had. Some people confuse this with the chobham armor. But it’s not the same thing.
Chobham simply ceramic rubber and fiberglass in precast blocks. Nera blocks.
The conclusion of the salacious, core armor test was, materials are not all created equal, the order in which you put those materials can completely change what you’re facing and it cost a ton of money to make plates that are good against most situations.
The US Army learned to spend a lot of money on its armor materials and QC. It’s all fracture and stress tested under electron scan microscopes, it’s all triple CNCd to make sure it’s uniform so it won’t take loads unequally.
More importantly we make our own plates.
We learned it would be very easy for a country to sell us bad armor.
When you see 1500 hp or horsepower per ton, it really means very little. At what RPM? Is that a reasonable RPM to be running at? (car companies often times Dyno test 20% over red line to advertise way more horsepower) how fast the engine revs based on stroke length piston and crank materials, cam profiles etc.
Horsepower is actually a very lazy way to measure speed. I can show you 1000 hp import that will get crushed every single time by a 800 hp muscle car unless they have 5 miles to race. Torque is king. Horsepower is just torque divided by RPM. So if you can make a car, do double the RPMs or over rev or outside it’s useful power band, you can appear fast.