A few weeks ago, I obtained the FV4005. I think it’s a good vehicle, but the performance of its cannon disappointed me. In fact:
It struggles to damage the Tiger H1 from the sides and from the rear. It has happened to me several times that when shooting a Tiger I from the side, the shot only damaged the track. Today, I shot a Tiger I 2 times and didn’t get the kill. First shot: from the side: I only destroyed its track. Second shot: I destroyed it’s breech. Than it fixed its tracks and managed to escape while is breech was still disabled.
It’s difficult to damage the Jagdpanther from the front.
It’s very difficult to even damage soviet tank destroyers as the SU-100 from the front. It happened to me that a head-on hit to a SU-100 didn’t even kill one of its crew.
Sometimes, the damage caused by its shell is completely incoherent. For example, I hit a Ferdinand from the rear and didn’t manage to kill it. I want to point out that in all these cases I shot at the central mass of the tank.
All the vehicles which I mentioned have a lower or equal BR (except for the Ferdinand), and can easily pen the FV4005 frontally.
I expected the FV4005 to be a “one shot, one kill” tank destroyer: after all, its armour is very thin, its profile is very high, its turret rotation is limited and its reloading time is very long.
So, I think there must be something wrong with his cannon (after all, historically it was the answer of Great Britain to the soviet heavies as the IS-3). Otherwise, it should move to a lower BR: 6.0 or 5.7 instead of 6.3.
P.S I’m not British or American, so this topic may contain some grammatical mistakes. In case you don’t understand something I have written, ask me for explanations.
Unfortunately, gaijin’s implementation of HESH is… well… absolutely anysmal and they either aren’t capable or aren’t interested in fixing it. Once upon a time it was excellent, then it was nerfed into the ground sadly.
Couple of tips :
Try to go for a cupola if you can. It’s ridiculous that you have to, but it really helps to get kills with it.
Never, ever, ever under any circumstances hit something attached to the tank. Track links, logs, anything apart from the steel of the tank will make your round do pretty much sod all.
It often feels like the HESH implementation is missing the High Explosive part as overpressure is rare.
From my experience playing both the FV4005 and Centurion AVRE, it can help to aim at road wheels as the floor armor is generally very thin.
The one advantage of the FV4005 is that it has over 20kg of explosive mass so you’re pretty much firing a small bomb. So I think that’s a good way to visualize where to aim; if you were a bomb, where would you want to land on a tank to do the most damage?
Road wheel shots are by far the most consistent, just make sure you don’t hit the track.
Lets just say HESH is not acting as a HESH shell in game, the 183mm shell behaves as a worse HE in a way that an accurate 105mm hesh shell would beat out easily.
These shells used explosions to create a shockwave to break apart the very structure of whatever it hit, welds would shatter, armour plate cracking and large chunks of armour would break off internally and pulverise the unfortunate crews. the 76mm HESH shell from a saladin scout car would be capable of knocking out a Tiger 1 so imagine what a shell that weighs the same as a teenager should do.
for reference this is what the 165mm shell which was later used on centurion AVRE does to a tiger 2, bear in mind this shell is not armour piercing, more of an explosive mallet smacking the target
here’s the armour hole that got punched out of the turret too, lets just say there would be no survivors
This thing is too inconsistent and it does different thing every time, it’s like you roll a dice to deal a random damage value of 10%-100%, sometimes the smaller 152/155mm HE has more consistent OHKO power especially if you aim at the lower turret cheek, but this HESH behaving more like an inferior HEAT that has more penetrating power to kill some crews but lacks the explosive to overpressure
