Why is HESH still in this horrific state

[TwitchyNGL]

So now ammunition stat cards have a new thing added to be very clear!!!
“Armor penetration by high-energy action”
This means how much penetration you have with raw HE power. It does highlight how useless HESH is of course because these numbers are not indicative of how useless your rounds are as HE weapons at all.

The Ammunition details between M1 and L33A1. Note the nearly double amount of HE included in L33 and that L33 does allegedly have a greater amount of penetration “by high energy action”

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The issue: This penetration does not kick in unless you’re really really up against the plate, whereas any other HE type can overpressure via HE from a serious distance, (including HEAT!)

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155mm M1 overpressure killing via HE hitting the roof at a serious distance:

165mm L33A1 (with greater penetration in HE terms and nearly double the HE quantity) doing no damage at the same spot:

In fact look how far down you have to go for HESH to do any kind of HE damage:

You have to be essentially touching the roof to do any kind of HE damage.

And in spite of this information, rounds like HEAT and APHE don’t seem to have the same issue, they will overpressure via HEAT at fairly impressive distances considering their purpose and HE quantity.

Examples here are 122mm HEAT-FS and 125mm HEAT-FS.
Now these aren’t quite the same distances as with 155mm M1 but considering these are HEAT type rounds with less than 3kg of TNTe it is a bit impressive.

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Or like here with KV-1 SAP and 120mm L31, the latter of which has much more HE and “energy penetration” but clearly cannot HE kill at the same range.

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[БЕИ]

@SwingfireOP

This says it all really

I can confirm that the APFSDS behave the same against all lightly armored vehicles, like you are killing one crew at a time its not a specific problem only the British face, but the HESH is definitely BS, if I loaded the HE then that same truck is 100% getting send back to the hangar.

[KillaKiwi]

@TwitchyNGL

Examples here are 122mm HEAT-FS and 125mm HEAT-FS.
Now these aren’t quite the same distances as with 155mm M1 but considering these are HEAT type rounds with less than 3kg of TNTe it is a bit impressive.

Not particular. The issue is that the game uses a simple system where the penetration drop-off depends on the weight of the shell.

The 105mm HE has more armor penetration than 122mm HEAT-FS, but it’s also 4kg lighter.
The result is that the 122mm HEAT-FS can penetrate less armor by the explosion but the distance from the roof where the round will penetrate, against a Panther G, is still the same.

Technical HESH shells shouldn’t even work the same way as HEAT-FS or HE, since the explosive gets spread over a wide area on contact, instead of staying in one place and being detonated by the impact fuze.

It seems there is infact some system in play, which reduced the effective range of HE penetration by HESH shells, which actually makes sense.

L7 105mm HESH needs to be much closer to the Panther roof to cause overpressure compared to the Swedish Sav m/43s 105mm HE round, which has a similiar weight.

HEAT-FS also shouldn’t pen that much and it doesn’t really make sense to use the shell weight for penetration distance the same way as HE shells do, since the construction is also completely different.

[Ghost_Rider12]

@XxBLAZEFIRExX

Ever since ive only brought APFSDS

I’ve not used HESH for years because of how utterly useless it is. Heck I wont even play tanks that only have HESH available to them.

[Henge11220]

Yeah it’s pretty accurate, and if it fuses over 68 it’s overperforming

[Tea_consumer]

definitely overperforming, nerf it more

[AndreLaga]

the hesh was just a shit shell PLEASE GAJIN GO REMAKE THE HESH LIKE 3 ANS

[AndreLaga]

Gajin should put the Hesh back like it was 3 years ago, it was just perfect. For example, the FV4005 was capable in real life of annihilating IS3s and even all types of tanks from the front because from the moment your shell weighs 72kg at 716m per second, I think that physically nothing resists. Anyway, in the game we can’t even one-shot the poor Panther/Tiger, so great realism. And for the FV4005, only 21.76kg of explosive? It seems a bit shameful to me.

[AndreLaga]

https://youtu.be/NKGmK7j01uc?si=Mx9RKFDBwfdlt6Td look just this video. before the hesh was just as it should be. On war thunder mobile the hesh works very well why doesn’t gajin take the same mechanic which is nevertheless the good one.

[KillaKiwi]

I‘m always amazed how different Mobile is from actual WT, despite looking like the same game.

Maybe I’ll have to check out a video on the game to see how it’s set up.

Obviously different devs that went: Yeah no tank is going to survive a 72kg explosive shell.

Maybe they simply fixed the bug that had HESH have like no splash damage when it hits a thick armor plates.

Looks like it operates mainly on overpressure damage. Like the hit on the Ferdinand, where the shell hit the tracks from the front but still managed to destroy the tank in one shot.

In WT they just should just introduce hull break.
Like imagine you hit a Jagdtigers superstructure with that round. 250mm of armor and it only kills like two crews and the tank is fine, despite a 70kg armor scab being dislodged from the armor plate on the inside.

HESH should be a one shot machine.
It already suffers from low velocity and the fact it’s defeated by most composite armor arrays or simply spaced armor.

[BeautifulTai_wan]

@KillaKiwi

In WT they just should just introduce hull break

No, please no.

Not again. Hull break was terrible. Darts sailing through empty space and instantly killing light armor was neither accurate nor fun.

I get that you want HESH to work, but punishing all light armored vehicles with the return of the objective worst mechanic to ever make it to the live server is not the way.

[KillaKiwi]

Making HESH cause hullbreak has nothing to do with an ancient, badly implemented mechanic.

[BeautifulTai_wan]

If you return hull break for hesh, people will ask for it to apply to HE, and then HEAT, and then APHE, and then it just gets applied globally and we’re back to the worst mechanic in the game.

The shell just needs a pure rework with a new mechanic to better simulate the effects, full stop. Hull break is dead and needs to stay that way.

[KillaKiwi]

Or you just ignore any complaints and just make HESH actually an effective round.

„Oh no, we can not have people complain, at lesser not more than 50%.“
But when one group complaints, it’s totally fine.

Really curious how APHE, which explodes in a fantasy sphere but the nose still continues onward, has any right to be more effective.

Same with HEAT-FS, which can already overpressure light armor and makes tiny holes into thick plates.
How is that supposed to „hull break“?

HE already completed destroys light vehicles and most heavies, if you hit the right spot, but when HESH dislodges an armor piece the size of a frisbee, then how is that not reason for the vehicle to be destroyed.

HE overpressure makes like no sense, the way it is implemented.

Nobody complains because now you either kill or not kill a vehicle.

But HESH is practically weaponized HE for destroying even heavy armor.

152mm HE can not damage a Tiger IIs 150mm front plate and not even the 100mm lower plate, 120mm HESH can and that’s like half the weight of a 152mm HE round.

Now why would a 152mm HESH round not destroy the tank in one shot, when a 152mm HE to the turret face can?

Overpressure affects all explosive rounds but none deal catastrophic damage to an armor plate, unless the explosive force was able to penetrate it.

HE rounds could also get hull break, even though it will hardly make any difference, since 95% a penetrating hit is going to take out the vehicle anyway.

[BeautifulTai_wan]

@KillaKiwi

Or you just ignore any complaints and just make HESH actually an effective round.

That’s a great way to kill the game, by reviving hull break that will inevitably end up being applied globally due to complaints that go “oh why cant my HE/AP do that it makes more boom/has more energy than hesh”.

You give an inch and they will always take a mile.

[KillaKiwi]

Dude stop with that straw man argument.

This mechanic is just about making HESH an actual effective round against the targets it should be effective at.

And for all I care every round should be a one shot, if it disables the tank.
All it does is make armor penetration and mobility more important than armor and survivability based on crew hit points.

AP should kill tanks just as easily as APHE.
And if it did it wouldn’t break the game it would make it fair.

[poopooo]

@KillaKiwi

Really curious how APHE, which explodes in a fantasy sphere but the nose still continues onward, has any right to be more effective.

Haha, that’s what I love about the community. You say the APHE damage is wrong, a fantasy, and exaggerated, and then you get people telling you it can’t be changed because it would break the game’s balance and other excuses like that. The only thing missing is for them to say that a black hole would open up and swallow the entire universe if anything in the damage model is changed.
I think this is a pointless struggle. We’ll never have a correct damage model for all bullets and proper tank balance.

[BeautifulTai_wan]

@KillaKiwi

This mechanic is just about making HESH an actual effective round against the targets it should be effective at.

Hull break is not the way to do that.

[poopooo]

Well, possibly it is, since both HESH and HE, and even to a lesser extent HEAT, use explosive that acts directly on the armor, generating a shock wave on that armor, causing it to break or form a large crack in the armor if it is thin enough. The main difference is that HE generates that shock wave and fragments mainly to the sides, causing some penetration damage due to the mass of the projectile but less wave since it dissipates on the sides, while HESH generates practically all of its damage forward, which makes them extremely effective against light armor and quite damaging against thicker armor since that shock wave, when projected forward, causes the inner face of the armor to jump into pieces. For this reason it would be fairly correct to add the hull brake for relatively thin armor plates, mainly for HESH and HE, especially those of quite a caliber, apart from giving the HESH their real spalling damage, while the HEAT would have less possibilities of doing hull brake although in very light armor it would still be possible, since nowadays HEAT ammunition is used as multipurpose ammunition to combat infantry and light vehicles, leaving the APDS-FS for heavier vehicles.

[AndreLaga]

i have the impression that thanks to the update the hesh is a little better but still seriously lacks damage and also overpressure because there are times when I shoot in tiger 2 or tiger 1 turrets I only do it from the breech. but it’s just an impression it happens to be the same hesh as before I’ll let you try but for the moment we are still not on the real expectations of a quality hesh.