Yup, while WoT is all over the place with certain things, this whole “haha, Panther 45mm side stops your 100mm AP shell with 230 penetration” thing in WT is absolutely infuriating.
Do you even imagine the opposite scenario, shell hits at the sponson height, goes through and someone gets angry it penetrated, because uf stars align, there can be this 1 in a billion occurance where it stops the shell?
I bet this would have never happened, because “well, shell with 230 pen went through 45mm of armor, what did I expect to happen?”.
No, better one: “haha panther’s 5mm sideskirt sheet and 20mm track shelf that was hit to welding connection to 45mm vertical armor stopped my 122mm 230mm pen capped APHE”
Shells hitting horizontal plates in WT are doomed, this has always been the case at least since I’ve been in the game.
It is incredibly dumb, but no less dumb than the post pen of APHE, or HEAT-FS fuzing on a leaf, or using a BKan like a TD, or fighting on with 2 surviving crew, or reloading the gun while jumping off a cliff. You can fire through some containers on Cargo Port but god forbid you try and fire through the metal grid next to the B hangar on Fields Of Normandy. Etc etc.
It is the sort of arcadey behaviour I have learned to accept. After all, while it screwed you this time, many other times it must have saved you (lost count of how many T-34-85s have eaten JT shells the same way).
For the record, with BKan always best to shoot the ammo box behind the gun. If he was peeking it might not have been visible to you, then again bro’s got to turn all the way to face you if he wants to shoot you anyway, so he’s going to expose the ammo box regardless. If you were in a position where you couldn’t wait for him to turn the corner, from that angle I would probably say shooting the barrel and chasing him is the way to go. I have basically stopped shooting these guys anywhere else because shells seem to disappear into the void very easily.
ah but somehow NOT ALWAYS!
Them side shelf horizontal panels make a huge amount of armor, but somehow the Jumbo`s frontal plate gets WEAKER in the roof connection point!
THats just stupid, like for real stupid.
I mean, that was the penetration failure mechanism I was referring to.
But surprisingly, the failure region seems to be wildly inconsistent and in protectio analysis it seems a lot harder to get than in game, where maybe 1 in 15 shots vs Tiger/Panther side fails because reasons (by 1/15 I mean, pretty often).
On the other hand, Tiger II upper side at 45 degrees vs 85mm? Surely man, easy pen every time. I mean, it’s 80 mm at 30 + 45 (or more) additional angle yet it goes through like butter.
I seem to greatly enjoy my T-34-85 STP.
Tiger II also at the turret front to side connection has a magical weakspot that makes no sense. My 85mm shell went through that spot while guy barely turned his turret. Everywhere around it’s like 180mm+, but that one spot is 120mm, even though the shell initially hits the turret front armor slab side.
It’s extremely poor executio of volumetric. Great example is T-34 41 from my 1st post, it’s caoable of stopping Jagdtiger’s shell if you hit mantlet’s edge just right.
270 penetration giant shell at 900m/s vs 45mm armor. The momentum alone would have ripped the turret off its ring.
In game it deals absolutely 0 damage.
I mean this is, and has been, a massive issue for a core part of how War Thunder works for some time now. You would hope that Gaijin have someone working on a replacement or a revamp of the system and how it works; or at least working on a fix for some of these issues.
However this is Gaijin we’re talking about so I’m not holding my breath
Fundamentally: a game where OHKs are so feasible, and that is also greatly vulnerable to desync, needs the damage model to be predictable and reliable. Right now, it is not. You can try the same action twice and get wildly different results.
I do think it’s important to keep in mind that we’re all in the same boat, sometimes as the beneficiary and sometimes as the party getting Gaijin’d. It helps to not see it as something that only happens to you/the vehicles you play.
I do hope they find a fix eventually, but until they do, I just roll with it. It’s part of the chaos of GRB right now, for better or worse.
BTW best times for WOT were the ones where weakspots were often relatively big, and the whole trick was to judge the angles correctly and work with the probability. Yes, if you were unlucky, you were getting shafted, but generally, it was a game of “calculated risk”.
In WT there’s this “arificially introduced risk”, where the target moves by 5cm and you’re hitting some magical hardspot in the middle of a weakspot. A hardspot that makes no sense from any realistic point of view, as it doesn’t need to be explained in detail that edge of 45mm mantlet of T-34-41’s turret front should not be resistant 100 or even 200+ penetration guns. The shell may get deflected by the edge, the shell will continue to plow through 45mm armor and destroy the tank.
And that’s just extremely frustrating.
Similar thing with using big HE, including bombs and rockets - it is fun but sometimes infuriating, because even the slightest curve of the turret can stop the explosion starting from a goddamn POINT (whyyyy???) to reach hull top.
Same reason why you can sometimes hit cupola’s edge with 250kg bomb and fail to do anything. Because you hit a spot where only a softball can fit where there’s no LOS to turret top, despite the bomb clearly exploding above said turret top, and cupola itself at that spot is 100mm thick, GL, HF.
It is. Both the KV-1E and ZiS-5 are absolutely ridiculous right now.
It’s almost impossible to go through the turret of the ZiS-5 even with the Panthers 75mm, while the hull is basically immune against anything it faces, other than a Panther or 17pdr, when angled.
Simply better turret than an IS-1. Find the error.
The worst thing is some plates work like that but the early T-34 can be penetrated frontally through the front side of the roof hatch by an ostwind. At leat make it make sense.
