It has been years of bugs reports. Entire Tanks that can only shoot HESH are completely unusable.
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If Russian vehicles used HESH, it’d been fixed years ago.
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Gaijin hates BESH.
So probably wont ever be fixed
Though HESH likely has it’s issues compared to it’s IRL counterpart, many of the complaints i see come from not understanding how it functions in-game and not using it correctly (with how it currently works in-game).
The round shoots out spall at 90 degrees from the inner plate of where the shell hits, so if you shoot the outer most side of the turret from a head on angle the spall goes 90 deg to the side and takes out the crew.
Screenshots to show what i mean, shots hit side of turret and are fired from head on like 1'st image
It’s an odd shell where you have to aim very counter intuitive to where you otherwise would want to aim.
This doesn’t mean that i think the shell is correct and how it should be, There likely are issues with it that might need to get looked into. Just some tips on how to use it the way it currently functions.
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they day a russian tank uses HESH it will start working
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After they fixed HESH not damaging modules directly behind the plate of impact, it’s actually not bad. While it still has goofy volumetric moments that make any chemical round frustrating in WT, I’ve found that HESH works quite well, especially in smaller light tanks and flankers like the AUBL 74 with the Cockerill 90mm.
It has and almost 90° ricochet angle, and as @Necronomica mentioned, it projects the spall at a perpendicular angle from the plate of impact.
In practice, this means any vehicle with any angle to it at all, or with a visible roof (like the Tiger II H’s sloped roof) is easy pickings. As long as you land your HESH shell on one of these highly angled surfaces, you can absolutely devastate a crew compartment, either rendering them useless for a follow up shot, or outright destroying them (especially if you know where the ammo rack is).
Once you basically relearn the almost counterintuitive way of aiming HESH (at the most highly angled parts of a turret or casemate) you end up seeing the full potential. I’ve gotten to the point where I only use 90mm HESH on the Italian light tanks, save for limited HEAT for very hairy situations where I simply can’t get a good shot on a thin but highly angled surface.
Could it always be better? Of course! But HESH is currently better than many players give it credit for. Honestly just needs a more consistent overpressure quality to it.
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Only HESH that is usable is 165mm and above. I don’t even bother with 105mm or 120mm (which you would think would be powerful).
I regularly bring the cent mk.5 AVRE into top tier, and it actually performs really well if you know what you are doing. On maps with hills, due to the low bullet velocity you can literally just become an unkillable mortar.
Though it can be annoying sometimes when Kontakt 1 or 5 on the roof somehow completely stops a literal nuke from the AVRE.
Would be interested see how HESH performs against ERA IRL
basically doesn’t, the big thing with HESH is the fuse is at the base of the shell, so if something happens to the pat before the fuse triggers the performance is seriously degraded. Let alone anything to introduce stand-off distance between the pat and armour.
While there could be an argument made about 165mm HESH being too large to be fully disrupted by ERA, there were tests with 165mm HESH against a Tiger II in the late 40s that demonstrated that even a minor impairment of pat to armour contact basically nullifies the round.
One question i have here is weather the squishing of the padding and explosive is enough force in of itself to trigger the ERA due to the wide area it’s spread over compared to the concentrated point of an APFSDS or a HEAT round. The explosion of the HESH itself will trigger the ERA but i wonder it it’s to late at that point for the ERA to effectively counter the HESH or if it still degrades the effect enough. It will have some effect of course due to the added standoff distance in it itself though.
If there is some documentation out there with tests on this then that would be interesting to see :)
I’m not entirely sure to be honest, would depend on how the ERA is fused, iirc very early ERA was triggered by the HEAT’s well heat, so HESH probably wouldn’t trigger it, but for later ERA I’m unsure. Either way the added standoff distance is probably enough to nullify the HESH anyway, so I doubt the mechanism matters too much.
I’ve been meaning on grabbing a copy of a report on T-34 vs HEAT, 17pdr APDS, 17pdr APCBC, & 76mm HESH from the UK’s national archives, so I’ll see if they have anything on ERA-HESH interactions (that’s declassified of course).
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That’s not quite true - it has to strike something solid enough to cause it to “splat” and set it off - at htat point any air gap to hte main armour nullifies it.
It would likey smash straight through schurzen for example, detonating on teh armour behind, based on teh tests done vs a Dailmer armoured car where it wasn’t set off by the hull and turret plate but just smashed through it - the plates had been reinforced to 25mm thick but the surrounding 14-19mm plate was too weak and failed mechanically.
