Why Do Smoke Rounds Have Such a High Dud Rate?

Having been away from the game for some time, I recently started again. I’m finding smoke rounds seem to have about a 30 to 40 percent dud rate now. Why?

Is this from some update? I fired many, many hexachloroethane and WP rounds in my career (and tossed lots of hex smoke grenades) and never encountered a dud, even in the snow. I mention snow, because HESH rounds sometimes failed to explode when they hit deep snow.

Thanks for any comment on this subject.

EDIT: Just played a game and fired 5 out of the 12 rounds I was carrying. Only one generated smoke. Sorry, but that is kind of nuts.

Is it due to the fact sometimes they bounce before setting off the round?

Might be part of it but not all ofc. I’ve seen someone mention this before (Flakdancer I think originally brought it up but never had feedback).

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Thanks for replying. 🙂

I don’t know, I never had the problem on live exercises or on the range.

Another thing, in WW2 SV Radley-Walters had his squadron’s (company) Shermans advance with a smoke round up the spout, or at least the lead tanks. The idea was to fire these off on initial contact. There’s no way he would have made this an SOP if smoke rounds were as unreliable as they are now in WT!

I knew him in the 80s - he was the honorary commandant of the Armour School and he frequently came to our mess dinners when I was based in Petawawa - he had a farm near by. He liked me because I was from Newfoundland and one of his crew during the war was from here. Anyway, we often fondly referred to him as “General Smoke” because of his frequent advice on having smoke loaded on advance to contact. 🙂

I would say this is most likely a bug, its worth bug reporting it and seeing what they come back with, if they say it isnt they might explain what is actually going on, but there were no changes to smoke shells that should cause this as far as i know.

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Ghost shell maybe?You should do a bug report

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Well I went to report it and found a similar report at Community Bug Reporting System I did the “I have the same problem”. There is at least one other similar report.

What mode are you playing ? I use smoke fairly regular in Arcade and haven’t had an issue with dud’s so far.

I actually like the way they act now lol… It is buggy, but damn funny bouncing shots off terrain and ending up with smoke plumes in the air.

Oh, I should edit; realistic battles. 🙂

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Rounds now tend to bounce when they hit the ground at an oblique angle. This includes smokes and HE rounds, counterintuitively. Try firing your smokes at things you can hit at a flatter angle, it should prevent them bouncing away.

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It has been like this since the past few updates

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Not quite… Before they were genuinely not firing, now they are reliably, but all over the place.

Not really, no, not in my real life experience. 🙂 The only deflections I remember were off what we called hard targets i.e. actual tanks used as targets and off ponds of water. Firing at water was a very dangerous thing to do as you never knew where the round was going to go. 😯

But there’s no deflection in what I see happening. The round hits and there’s a tiny puff of smoke for an instant then nothing.

Won’t let me edit my original post - this happens in realistic battles.

Thanks Miraz, that would make sense given my absence from playing for a while.

i dont know about that but it is happening to me for a long time

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