The problems with that Challenger 3 Prototype

Gaijin, the Challenger 3 is a tank that does not really exist yet. You know full well you’ll have to guess its stats. But that’s where the problem is; you already do that too much on British tanks.

The Challenger 2 armour is considered a meme in top-tier War Thunder. The 76mm lower plate in particular. Now, why did Gaijin select that as the armour amount? The answer is no one knows, because there is no documentation in the world to indicate that. The only public source is the Ministry of Defense in the UK which stated the Challenger 2 lower plate could survive shots from shells of 105mm calibre from soviet/Russian vehicles. Last I checked, 105mm Soviet guns do not pen sub-76mm at that angle.

The armour in general is complete guesswork. Challenger 2 is a fat beast of a tank, and uses Britain’s Dorchester/Chobham Armour that the Abrams licenses. It’s completely classified as to how much we put on it, but Gaijin guessed it’s weak enough that most rounds go right through it anyway. If Challenger 3 is going to retain this complete guesswork of “we always guess it’s terrible.” then it’s going be the worst possible Rank 8 tank in the game, simple as.

On top of this, there are public sections of NATO documents showing that during testing the CHARM (Challenger Armament) project, Challenger 2 can penetrate well over 700mm of armour since it’s using Depleted Uranium rounds. Yet again, Challenger 2 has been guessed to be much worse by Gaijin. How can we trust that you won’t take this opportunity to guess that Challenger 3 has terrible ammo pen all over again?

A quick honourable mention that you’re removing HESH from The Challenger 3, but Britain actually tested fin-stabilized HESH for smoothbore guns back on the MBT-80 project. But as usual, Gaijin seems to have done either no research or found facts it dislikes and ignored them. This is without even mentioning that it’s being listed as a prototype and thus missing things like its APS system.

Top-tier Britain is a brutal victim of Gaijin’s opportunistic guesswork, where the, albeit limited, public data completely refutes anything close to what gaijin gives us.

Why should we grind for however long Chally 3 will take just to get something you are almost definitely going to intentionaly make sub-par on purpose?

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Cause its NOT chellenger 3 (p)
Its chellenger 2 LEP
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Press X to doubt. What round it was? What conditions? Cause 700mm is way bigger than the highest pen we have now ingame (Rh120 on Leo2A6 with DM53).

As I recall, it was against RHA in standard NATO test-firing conditions, though I’d have to go spelunking to find the ranges where it achieved it. It will have been L26 or L27 since they were additions of the project to enhance Challenger 2 lethality.

I don’t understand what you mean, every top BR tank is mostly invented by gaijn,Because such tanks don’t stay in a museum and you can’t examine them just like that, you have to come up with statistics for them, Of course, another matter is that if someone actually has evidence for something, gaijn ignores it or closes the report.

So if its L26 or L27 - i higly doubt, cause its basically impossible, that this rounds can be better, than DM53 by quite huge numbers

Doubt away to your little heart’s content.

L27 and CHARM3 was specifically designed to deal with T-80U and beyond - which oddly enough it struggles to do in War Thunder. Wonder why that might be?

It is underperforming (like most NATO top tier rounds) because Gaijin devs can’t seem to get their heads around the West actually developing weaponry and armour technology past 1989.

Guess what Ivan, we did. It works too. There are a couple of thousand wrecks of T-series tanks littering the battlefields of Eastern Europe and the Middle East providing ample testament to that fact.

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It has L55A1 which can take D73 in game most likely only DM53

Do you have any source on that? Would be interesting as it would say something about other NATO rounds too.

I do have my doubts about the >700mm pen claim, because according to Willi Odermatt calculator L26A1 is 543.6mm, L27A1 is 669.7mm and L28A1 is 661.9mm against steel with BHN of 237. So I doubt that a rifled barrel would be equal to DM73 in the same calculator (785.8mm same target).

Thanks for that amount of text.

Here’s the source:

It does specify RHAe rather than RHA, like he claimed though.

Edit: here’s another report stating the 700 mm requirement was exceeded during testing.

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Thanks for the reference - very interesting. Bearing in mind that the 700mm threshold appears to be that of the strongest frontal armour of most modern (for the time) T-80/72 variants - it further illustrates that L27 should be a damn sight more potent than it is portrayed in-game… something pretty much every British Main has suspected since CR2 was first added.

Now we just need to find some unclassified stuff that helps correct the armour…

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LOL another secret documents leak

they’re 1992 documents and aren’t classified anymore in UK afaik.

Nope. It’s declassified: Replacement for Chieftain tanks | The National Archives

Thank you for the clarification! I thought I had caught my first WT Leak in the wild.

How the British test APFSDS penetration in this time period is by shooting 130mm or 150mm plate at high angles which pads the LOS penetration figure
If the requirement was to penetrate 150mm at 77.6 degrees at 2000m (aka 700mm LOS), the equivalent protection of 60 degree is 578mm LOS (or 289mm thick plate) and 495mm at 0 degrees
e.g.
image

The document posted with comparisons of M1A1, Leopard and expected Soviet tank ammunition performance doesn’t state the methodology used. Unless you can provide evidence of your different metric being used to provide those figures for CR1, M1A1 and Leopard - then I would go with the document’s figures.

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Yeah. There’s no basis at all for Gaijin’s interpretation of Challenger 2 (or even the L26 that it shares with Challenger 1 / Vickers Mk7) . The big problem here is Gaijin are basing their stats on complete fiction and terrible fiction at that. It’s like how they just guess the Chally 2 has the 76mm lower plate with no data to back it up. They need to fix the CHARM-project ammunitions.

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You’re not allowed to have a nato tank to compete with Russian tanks.

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