At this point, I think the only way to save HESH is to make it trigger overpressure if it penetrates armor, be it through its unique internal spalling effect or through actual explosive force.
Real instances of even 90mm HESH hitting Korean T-54s left crews completely incapacitated with bleeding eardrums, where in War Thunder it would at most scratch their paint.
It would then become functionally-speaking a better HE, which is what it was meant to be.
Such a buff would also be very easy to implement, I’d imagine.
4 Likes
I suspect, though I can’t claim to be an expert on shell behaviour, I suspect the explosive would go off after penetration of armour, in the way APHE behaves, and of course, if a round fails to penetrate the armour, it essentially behaves like a round that penetrates anyway, because it throws out spall (only difference being is the actual round doesn’t enter the fighting compartments, rather it detonates on the plate impacted.
Didnt realise this until recently but gaijin really thinks a shell under half the weight of the FV4005s shell only has 1kg less of TNT. going off of the 165mm it ought to have in excess of 30kg TNT 
The muzzle velocity is vastly different. So the shells are probably built differently.
The 183mm is probably much sturdier to handle the high pressure and acceleration. while the 165mm is probably built like a Mineshell.
For demolition purposes it makes perfect sense to fire a shell with the highest ammount of explosive possible.
But something doesn’t add up. The German 150mm I.Gr. 38 is practically a Mineshell but weighs 38kg with 8.6kg filler.
So the 165mm weighing a mere 30kg seems unlikely.
No Mineshell for aircraft guns has 50% of it’s weighs explosives, and those have paper thin shell casings.
Here’s the 120mm HESH for the Chieftain:
According to the game it has 17kg with 4kg explosive, which seems plausible.
So how would a 165mm shell only weigh twice but carry four times the filler?
If we somehow cram 16kg explosives into the 120mm shell it would weigh 29kg, except there is no space and more space means more weight.
ChatGPT says the shell weighs 64kg. But of course we can’t be sure about that.
Here it says 64lb. My guess that 64kg is correct but somehow it was turned into pound, kinda like the how the Churchills 29mm Spigot Mortor got turned into 290mm.
1 Like
However according to this:
https://www.bulletpicker.com/pdf/TM-43-0001-28-1994.pdf#page=186
It’s in fact correct.
We have a 30,64kg shell with 15.86kg of explosives.
Just to make sure I made this little painting:
Spoiler
So forget my rambling and gas lighting ChatGPT into thinking it was twice the weight.
Funnily enough, that’s data for the US M123 that matches the British L33A1 in-game, while the in-game M123 has different values.
I imagine that the 183mm HESH shell has much thicker shell walls, thus resulting in a much heavier shell.
i doubt the shellcasing would be that much heavier, it still needs to squash out, even with significantly thicker walls only a tiny amount more explosives doesn’t add up with the sheer magnitude of the shell, not to mention the difference in destructive capabilities from testings
But you can see the difference with the Chieftain 120mm HESH.
It’s pretty thin shell casing but it’s not a dawn construction like the 165mm HESH, which would have a very thin shell casing like a Mineshell.
From the weight of the 120mm HESH you can easily upscale the round and see that the weight would match.
Just doing some simple volumetric upscaling from 120mm to 183mm results in a shell that would weigh 60kg.
So it’s completely plausible that the 183mm shell has a weight of 72kg with around 17kg of explosives.