In other words, the issue where shooting at a tank results in nothing more than a “hit” is still there, just like before—with practically the same probability, especially against Russian tanks.
What HESH simply needs is to overpressure kill whatever it penetrates, be it from the explosion effect OR the HESH scabbing effect.
Thus for example an L7 HESH with 127mm penetration would overpressure-kill any tank it hits in the crew compartment on a plate with less than 127mm thickness. HESH is just fancy HE.
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I’m going to file a bug report soon; I’ll give you the link so you can support the cause.
Awful idea. 127mm pen OHK round would be so broke every tank with HESH would be massively upteired. Every light and every med around that teir wouldn’t survive a hit.
No, HESH in real life isn’t exactly like HE; while overpressure is a factor, applying its penetration value directly might not be the best idea. The thing that 80% of people on this forum don’t grasp is that HE and HESH explosions work very differently—so, theoretically, overpressure wouldn’t apply in the same way. You have to understand that an HE shell creates a spherical explosion, whereas HESH concentrates the entire blast onto a single point on the armor plate. Still, the idea isn’t wrong in principle; Gaijin would just need to rework the overpressure trigger threshold, especially for small-caliber rounds that simply don’t generate overpressure. However, I don’t think it should be tied to the maximum penetration value.
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Dude, HESH is known to make such an intense sound blast upon acting on armor that it can deafen tank crews to the point where they cannot hope to continue operating the tank. 90mm HESH did that to T-54s in Korea, a round that doesn’t scratch them ingame.
If that sound blast ain’t overpressure, I don’t know what is at that point.
I proposed it because it would give HESH its true uncompromising lethality in a simple manner.
Most of the ones with fast reload speeds already are uptiered very significantly. No L7 HESH exists below 8.0 except maybe the Italian M47 105/55 AFAIK. Only the 106mm Recoilless Rifle vehicles which have HESH would have to go up, but those are horrifically low velocity glass cannons already so I’d wager they wouldn’t go up very much.
Every HESH below 8.0 other than that one M47 uses 90mm sizes, which only pen 102mm. That would not be broken either because HESH is worse in most practical utility than other shell types in terms of fuse sensitivity and velocity. The Lancia 3Ro in low tiers has a 100mm gun but pens only 75mm.
THAT’S THE POINT OF HESH! It’s supposed to immolate all of those!
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You have this wild fantasy about how strong hesh should be.
the pen value is the shockwave created for SPALLING. not an explosion penetrating that far.
HESH is supposed to be a successor to HE with light AT potential. Its not that much better than HE otherwise every nation would use them. Its not killing whole crews in single shots. Thats a WT fantasy. Its spalling the inside of the tank, causing shrapnel inside the tank on the opposite side of the impact. Localized. Not some sort of sonic blast.
8.0 OHKing nearly every non-russian vehicle at the br is going to upteir it into oblivion. Thats beyond early APFSDS levels.
Also, sound!= overpressure. The idea you conflate the two just shows how bad your argument is. And are you actually advocating that a 90mm hesh should be knocking out T54s? Just absurd.
If the real round did just that, why shouldn’t the same round ingame do the same?
It ain’t a fantasy, man. If giant HE rounds could kill tanks via spalling despite not literally breaking through armor plates, why wouldn’t smaller HESH rounds optimized for maximum spalling?
And HESH should obliterate any sort of thin, highly-sloped armor. Only really the IS-4M and maybe Maus should be semi-immune to L7 and Chieftain HESH, and the Barn/AVRE should definitely crack that even.
HESH was strong enough to become one of NATO’s standard ammunitions across all of Europe, and it only fell out of use once composite armor and spall liners rendered it ineffective. It damn well should OHKO tanks it penetrates the crew compartment of. Otherwise what’s even the point of ever using it?
What I personally want is HESH to work consistently. There are two ways to accomplish this in WT game terms - either you make the spalling such a wide arc that hits to the front plate of [insert angled Russian bullshit] will spray into and kill the turret crew unless there’s internal plating separating driver from turret crew OR you just make HESH overpressure-kill whatever it penetrates.
And what would be easier for Gaijin to code in if they wanted to “set and forget” HESH? The overpressure option.
Again, you don’t seem to understand. Deafening a tank crew isn’t knocking out the tank. Any tank round hit is going to deafen the crew.
there is a very good reason that tanks aren’t firing large HE rounds as primary ammo. Its not effective. As much as you want to claim or cite very limited anecdones, HE rounds rarely knock out vehicles. 98% of MBTs firing PIERCING rounds as their primary weapon should give you a good indication of effectiveness.
The only vehicles across Europe firing HESH were those using joint developed/licensed guns and the brits. Just like in game. The point of using it was that it was a slightly more effective HE. SLIGHTLY. At the cost of requiring a rifled barrel and slightly lower payload.
Also, you really don’t seem to understand the mechanics you are talking about. HESH gets MORE effective on angled plates, not less. As the shelll squashes across more of the plate, more of the energy fo the explosion is transfered to the plate causing more spalling.
This shows how bad HESH is 🤣: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPceyJksDU
“Gotta love that the shell fired by this tank is so large and powerful, it appears to produce a black hole initially upon detonation (no doubt the result of the game’s code freaking out about the size and power variables it was given and struggling to render it in the target hit preview).” -GreyWolfLeaderTW
Guys, is there really not enough feedback on the new complaint? How do you expect Gaijin to react? Everyone following this issue—or really, everyone—needs to speak up; it’s not going to change with just two or three people, otherwise Gaijin won’t give a damn. So go for it.
Large-caliber artillery begs to differ.
HESH annihilated relatively thin highly sloped homogenous plating found on the likes of T-44s, T-54s, IS-3/4/6, and T-10A/M.
If it doesn’t kill via an overpressure-sort of effect, then it simply needs to spall enough to reliably one-tap cripple or kill any Russian tank with a center mass shot exactly like it was designed to do.
I never said it gets less effective against sloped plating. At most when I was describing the armor penetration formula I’ve been working on in my own time I said:
- All HE and HESH rounds get a substantial kinetic penetration effect to represent the reality of a sometimes 72-kg steel block hitting like a sledgehammer at well beyond Mach 1. This kinetic portion decreases with sloping like any kinetic round would.
- HE explosion is omnidirectional and doesn’t care about the sloping.
- HESH spreads out over a larger surface area when hitting sloped plate, and thus creates more spall against sloped plate.
I do in fact know what I am talking about here. I will admit my idea of “sound blast overpressure” is incorrect - I only proposed it as a gameplay abstraction to make HESH work in a way that is simple to code into the game.
Guys, go leave comments on the complaint, because talking in this forum is pointless, by the way.
I tried replicating a few shots from the 165 mm HESH trials against a Tiger II (with straw dummy crew), as seen in an Armored Archives video.
Shot #1: UFP
Modules damaged in trial:
- Scab destroyed the transmission
- Spalling caused sufficient damage to the barrel of the main gun to render it unusable
- Spalling destroyed the machine gun and machine gunner’s optics
- Driver killed
Shot #3: Turret Front
Modules damaged in trial:
- Machine gun destroyed
- Breech destroyed
- All turret crew killed
*If you hit slightly lower in-game, it overpressures the whole vehicle.
Shots #1 and #2 against the hull are pretty accurate to the tests, and illustrate that the damage from internal spalling stays relatively localized, such that it doesn’t affect the turret crew.
Shot #3 strays more from reality. It seems the breech saves the crew on the other side of the turret from spalling without even taking much damage itself.
You should include this kind of information in the complaint, as it might come in handy. Posting on this forum is pointless. Hesh do weak damage ! // Gaijin.net // Issues
I have a question: was the damage—and I’m not talking about overpressure, but the actual HESH damage—the same back in November 2022–February 2023 as it is today? And was the damage in 2021 or 2022 the same as it is now? From what I recall, the 183mm HESH still had proper overpressure in 2022–2023, but it lost that effect around mid-2023, only to get it back with the new “Sky Odyssey” update. So, the question is: was the damage the same as it is today during those periods I mentioned?
You mean the system that only direct impacts like at best 5-10% of the time is made better by using an ordinance that has an Area of Effect instead of only on direct impact?
Obviously HE better for artillery. But i fail to see what that has anything to do with Main Battle Tanks that shoot direct fire. Why do you think practically all main used rounds by tanks in history have been made to penetrate the target before exploding or just penetrating and not exploding?
HESH is a round designed as multi purpose, It was originally designed to shoot down fortifications (concrete and brick) but they realized during development that it could also be used against tanks.
Doesn’t it do this in game already? Unless the target has protection specifically designed to hinder the propagating shockwave from reaching the inside of the armor and crating the spall it was designed to create.
“Steel block”? HESH is made of explosive filler specifically designed to “splat” out over the armor before exploding. Sort of like tosing a lump of clay at a wall. HESH does practically nothing kinetically due to the energy from the speed being used to “splat” the round instead. It’s the explosion and wave propagation through the armor that does the damage.
The armor is barely even dented at the outside.
This part does however sound somewhat reasonable depending on the slope and how HESH behaves in that situation. I don’t have enough info to have a direct opinion here but at first glance it does sound reasonable that hitting a slope would create more spalling compared to hitting the exact same spot flat on.
I’m very uncertain but i think this might already be a thing in the game?
Big HE is physically very heavy. The impact force alone is enough to dislodge turret rings when used in a direct fire mode against tanks, the explosion adds to that. Even on a modern MBT a direct HE impact from a 150mm or bigger artillery piece will totally fry all external modules and render the tank a dead brick even if the crew is technically alive. Plus likely the crew would be thrown around enough from the impact force to be at least dazed if not knocked unconscious from that, too.
I thought it was developed specifically to defeat relatively thin, highly-sloped plate? Currently ingame it “penetrates” but does absolutely fuck all for postpen damage to the point where its not worth using at all.
No it does not. It “penetrates” but the damage is so poor you kill one crewmember if you’re lucky. It’s not worth using most times.
We need 1.69-era HESH postpen back. If crews are Terminators, we need all rounds to do frankly more postpen than reality (like APHE already is) to compensate.
The FV4005’s 183mm shell weighs 72kg. The filling amount is just 17kg. The rest of that mass is solid steel. It doesn’t just go “poof” upon impact.
I do not know what size HESH rounds those are but I would guess those are 105mm impacts you have pictured, right?
Currently HESH penetration is identical at every angle. The postpen spalling is terrible and makes the round so unreliable that few people bother using it. The postpen was once upon a time very good all the way back in Update 1.69, but then it got utterly butchered to protect the whales and their then-new IS-6s who were rolling around like they owned the place. Same new tank also was used to butcher all HEAT mid-1.67, too.
The old nerfs need total reversion. That damn simple. Who cares if either “overperforms” when the crew in our tanks simultaneously act like robots that don’t care the guy next to them was turned to red mist?
I do not recall - all I know is about the pre-1.71 times where HESH had a hemispherical postpen spall pattern upon impact and reliably oneshot or twoshot anything it penetrated. But the whales in their then-new IS-6 screamed endlessly that something could kill their History Channel Sloped Armor, and Snail left HESH like how it currently is ever since. Same folks’ whining also ruined HEAT.
Already did.