The British one gets a better hull and a track armor upgrade, it’s even 1mph faster. I can understand why the Italian Firefly (Sherman Vc) gets upped to 5.0 because of its APDS shell, but the Ic is a straight downgrade to the Firefly. It should be 4.3 instead of 4.7.
Gaijin: Armor of Sherman hull is meaningless anyway if you face Tiger
:|
But it does matter for facing a lot of other things. There’s no harm in putting the Sherman Ic at 4.3, we already have the 17 pounder on tanks as low as 2.7 (Archer) and even on tanks that face the right direction as low as 3.3 (Achilles).
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The cast hull is superior to the crew-hatch bubble hulls.
I disagree on premise but even if you think that, the British Firefly gets a track armor upgrade which helps with the bubbles.
Well, Gaijin don’t give much attention to minors.
:/
They must’ve thought all those were just sidegrade.
JGSDF M4A3E8, Italian StuG 3G and Finnish PzIV J also lack of track addon armor.
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such a small difference that a BR decrease wouldn’t be right
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Having recently spaded both the Italian Fireflies, I have a couple things to say.
The armor really doesn’t matter much. Sure, the cast hull presents the corner weakspots, but there are also locations where the armor is far more effective than the welded hull (for example, right between the driver and machinegunner), and the welded hull still has the very prominent hatch weakspots. Keep in mind that the Sherman IC’s cast front is 63.5 mm all around, not 50.8 mm. Another thing to take into consideration is that track armor is hard capped to provide a maximum of 15 mm effectiveness, even when angled.
Beyond that, the IC is noticeably better to drive around for two reasons:
- It is lighter by almost 4 tonnes, from 35.3 to 31.5. Even though the engine is slightly weaker (425 vs 400 horsepower), it still has a noticeably higher power to weight ratio, at 12.70 horsepower/ton compared to 12.04. The additional track armor of the British Sherman VC gives it an extra 1805 kg, bringing the total weight to 37.105 tonnes, and a horrendous 11.45 horsepower/ton, making it the Sherman with the worst hp/ton in the entire game if track armor is equipped.
- Shorter chassis. Sherman Vs are M4A4s, and this specific version of the Sherman had its chassis lengthened to accomodate the Chrystler A57 multibank engine, which can be noticed by looking at the spacing between the VVSS bogies as the tracks are longer and so is the spacing. The Sherman IC is an M4 hybrid/composite, meaning it is the normal M4 welded hull except with a cast front, and is therefore shorter in length which means less resistance when turning, giving it lower speed loss when turning on top of the already better acceleration.
Compared to this, the extra 1 km/h of top speed that the Sherman VC has simply doesn’t matter. The IC gets up to speed faster and keeps its speed while turning better, meaning that on the great majority of situations it will simply be ahead of the VC.
The Premium Polish Sherman IC on the UK tech tree is even lighter (30.6 tons) while having the welded hull, but it’s also premium so it is inherently going to be better.
They aren’t protected by the extra track armor.
And like I’ve pointed out, track armor provides a maximum of 15 mm effectiveness. So this is basically 50.8 mm at 56 degrees, with an additional 15 mm flat where the track armor sits, meaning it is not that much more effective than if you just didn’t have the track armor there, specially not at this BR where you start finding quite powerful guns.
All Finnish T34 have the add on armor weight despite not having the upgrade so they are both heavier than a standard T34 1941 or the T34-85
Also same weight problem i think is there on the japanese M36 but i dont remember