Hey everyone! We’ve just finished looking over all of the feedback gathered during the dev server and wanted to address some of the points raised regarding the Abrams and Leopard turret basket and its effect on horizontal aiming.
Why we’re introducing turret baskets
First to the point of why we’re introducing the baskets to the horizontal aiming drives. From a gameplay and design standpoint, the current damage model (without the basket, with more empty space under the turret) penalizes players who hit the center of mass area where there is nothing to damage, even though they did everything right and landed a shot in this area.
As you may be aware, we’ve been adding more modules to SPAAs, light vehicles and modern MBTs for the same reasons for some time now. Some lighter vehicles already have turret baskets in them, which do the exact same thing — affect turret rotation since they are a part of horizontal drive.
From our perspective, we want to avoid penalizing the player who managed to land a shot on the enemy first, reducing those frustrating moments of penetrating a vehicle without doing any meaningful damage — even though the round passed through a significant amount of the interior.
What turret baskets contain
We want to note that important elements such as electrics and hydraulics are all located in and around the basket area and all provide some power to the drives and turret in different ways. These and other elements fill almost the entirety of a tank’s interior outside of the crew operating areas. The floor of the turret basket is not just a metal sheet to walk on, but instead houses all kinds of electrics and hydraulics with means to connect them to the hull.
In addition to the point above about why baskets affect turret rotation, damage to the basket can physically deform its elements and prevent normal functioning of the turret drives or damage everything around them if the turret was rotated.
The Damage Model vs X-Ray
The turret baskets in the X-ray and in the Damage Model are different. Their DM is smaller than their X-ray representation, as X-ray baskets have fine details, like mesh and some purely structural struts which are not present in the actual Damage Model.
On the dev server, we modelled several electrical parts in the basket as part of the damage model. However since then, we’ve removed most of them and now only the turret basket floor will be part of the horizontal aiming drive (see below). Below is a comparison between the updated damage model and x-ray of the turret drive for the Leopard. The DM of the Abrams turret drive will also be updated in the similar way, we’re working on it right now.
The damage model is not technically shown in-game, however it’s still possible to see. If you hover over the smaller components within the basket, they’ll not highlight the horizontal drive, meaning they’re just aesthetic and not part of the damage model.
To put it basically, the parts of the Leopard turret drive that can be damaged can be seen here, in the “New Leopard 2 turret drive damage model” screenshot. The Abrams one will also be very similar.
Why they can’t all come at once
As mentioned quite a while ago, implementing new modules takes a lot of time. Whenever there is a change to a vehicle, modules like this are also affected in some way and need to be updated. The issue we’d face here if we modelled them and then left them aside while working on other baskets, is that when the time would come to add everything there would likely be significant changes to the vehicles. This would require additional time to make the modules work again, as they’d be months out of date (this is also why regularly a vehicle will receive several changes in one go). As vehicles are updated frequently it is not feasible to ‘park’ features like this for very long.
Rounding off
These reworks are not exclusive to the Abrams and Leopard and are just the first tanks we’re working on, and over the year we’ll be adding more. We’ll still be implementing baskets for the Abrams and Leopard in the Hornet’s Sting major update, with the damage model and x-ray discussed above. And as mentioned, more will come over time.
