people have been complaining about Abrams’ poor armor. But whenever it comes to the 99A, there are always people who come out and say that its armor performs very well and doesn’t require any BUFF. Is this really the case?
this image compares the protection area of M1 and 99A.
can clearly see that the armor of the 99A in the game is worse than that of the M1
the chassis of M1 even has a significant portion that will not cause fatal damage after being penetrated, and still has combat capability.
In the next version update, hitting the 99A chassis in any area will cause damage to the automatic loading machine
so，gaijin， please fix these issues. and accelerate the loading speed of 99A, as well as the penetration power of shells
That image is great at showing the actual armor of these vehicles.
Additionally:
The ZTZ-99A has a fixed 7.1 second reload, the slowest in the game at top tier, while the Abrams has a 5 second reload (5.3 experted), which is one of the fastest at top tier.
The ZTZ-99A only has -5 degrees of gun depression and the angled turret ring isn’t modeled properly so it doesn’t have an actual -8 degrees of gun depression as it should, while the Abrams has -10 degrees.
The ZTZ-99A has worse side armor of 50mm + rubber skirts, with a 20mm lower side weakspot for any IFV to kill it, while the Abrams is at ~60mm + 80mm composite screen.
The ZTZ-99A’s top tier shell penetrates 577mm while the Abrams penetrates 629mm with the 2nd best shell in the game (this combined with the reload makes the ZTZ-99A one of the worst, while the Abrams one of the best firepower tanks at top tier.)
The ZTZ-99A has a carousel that explodes instantly when shot in the large LFP (and will get worse after the update drops), while the Abrams mostly likely won’t die when shot in the LFP, and it has a blowout panel turret rack (the best possible arrangement for ammunition).
The ZTZ-99A has far worse traverse speeds (vertical) than the Abrams.
Yet the ZTZ-99A has far better stats than the Abrams. I wonder why.
One could say that the flaws of the ZTZ-99A stem from the design itself, but consider that:
1b. The ZTZ-99A should have a 6.6 second reload, not a 7.1 second reload, as their autoloader design was updated. (Additionally, the carousel modeled on the dev server is far larger than the Russian one on tanks like the T-72 for no benefit)
2b. The ZTZ-99A should have roughly -8 degrees of gun depression with its angled turret ring, but comparing a test drive between it and a vehicle with -8 degrees of gun depression on paper, it’s considerably worse, so it’s not modeled.
3b. The ZTZ-99A (and other Chinese tanks) should have the same 80mm base side armor as Russian tanks, yet it’s modeled as 50mm for… no reason whatsoever. Keep in mind that they even modeled the ZTZ-88A with 80mm of side armor at the beginning, which is basically the same hull as the ZTZ-96, which had evolved from a T-54 (with 80mm of side armor). And they nerfed it later. Just so they can be worse than Russian tanks.
4b. Not only should the Chinese shell penetrate 600mm+, but there is another shell that has not yet been added that penetrates even more than that. The 577mm figure was taken off of a forum post claiming the DTC shell “should be” a % better than 125-I. Chinese players even leaked documents over this…
6b. The vertical traverse speeds on Chinese tanks are basically made up. They don’t know the exact number, but you can be sure they’ll give them worse values than other vehicles.
The fact that Chinese players, just like Italian players - have been able to perform with a tank that’s easily one of the worst at its BR, does not mean they should be forsaken.
A lot of the time when I’ve seen modern real life penetration figures, they are against 60 degree angled armor and accounting for line of sight thickness, meaning that a 600+ mm figure is actually 300+ mm at 60 degrees, and not necessarily 600+ mm against flat armor, since modern long rod APFSDS actually defeats more line of sight armor when hitting at high angles than flat.
This is the case with DTC10-125. It penetrates 577 mm of line of sight thicknesss at 0 degrees, but at 60 degrees it penetrates 666 mm of line of sight thickness (take 333 mm of penetration, divide that by cos(60), which is 1/2 , and you get 666 mm).
Are you sure the penetration figures you’re using are against flat armor?
I personally have the leaked document downloaded, and you can find it yourself on the internet. I won’t be posting it here for obvious reasons - but it states 680mm at 0 degrees. Not LOS. 0 degrees.
perhaps it’s those from top tier competitions, M1A2, M1A1HC… I always see people complaining that Abrams’ armor is at a disadvantage when fighting against Russian tanks
The M1A2s and m1a1 HCs are missing about 250mm of protection on the LFP and its turret ring is missing the armor it should have and should be volumetric, then the M1A2 Seps are missing atleast 400mm of armor on the turrets 200mm on the sides of the turrets and another 300mm of armor on the LFP, but gaijin will be gaijin, and all of this is just Kinetic protection. the Chemical protection value s are so low i don’t even expect gaijin to ever fix it. They somehow think the BMP 2Ms missile is able to penetrate the M1A2s turret armor, let alone the S.E.Ps
None of this is true.
You are also directly talking about the Abrams alone in the Chinese Armor Performance thread.
For starters - none of the Abrams tanks until the SEP V3 had any upgraded hull armor outside of armor kits like TUSK. Therefore, they’re not missing anything.
The turret ring, if it were made volumetric - would actually be weaker. You seem to misunderstand volumetric shells and volumetric armor. Volumetric shells hitting non volumetric armor is what causes the “volumetric” bugs and infinite armor areas. Volumetric armor actually removes many hard spots created by non-volumetric armor hitting volumetric shells, and is far weaker.
Additionally, the turret armor on the Abrams tanks, starting from the M1A1 HC - has modeled DU and is one of the toughest turret cheeks in the game. They’re not missing anything either. Your tank is literally the 2nd best tank in the entire game, only being directly weaker than the Leopard 2A7/Strv122B+.
This is a conversation regarding Chinese armor values, which have actual issues, as mentioned. The Abrams armor is almost entirely accurate, and is more than accurate enough within the confines of this videogame.
No, but that figure was at 2000m, which according to War thunder should be 736mm of equivalence at 0m and 0 degrees. Accounting the high angle efficiency, the armour should be 572mm equivalence (I used the E100 which is the closest I can get to 220mm ). I used DTC-10-125 at 71 degrees and it shows a armour equivalence of 520mm, 220mm is 1.1 times of 200 so I times the 520 by 1.1 and it gives 572. 572/533*577 which gives the pen at 10m, this shows that it should have approximately 620mm of armour using WT equations.
From some sources I heard Gaijin use the scale model from Trumpeter to make in-game model…
And I heard this scale model have lots of incorrect particulars lmao
