not to mention having to withstand the impact enough to get a solid pancake against the target without plastic explosive spewing out everywhere.
the shell is underperforming significantly, but this is war thunders calculations being extreme lowballs.
T152 HESH shell we have ingame is based on T152E5, one of the few T152 shells that was tested.
A test report said T152E5 is better than T152E6 and a dev server bug report suggested to base the T152 ingame using T152E5 specs (after all it is the best of the T152 series according to said test report).
Gaijin later updated the shell to T152E5 specs (since the dev placeholder used CEV’s M123 shell), but didn’t rename the shell.
Thank you for this.
When using the calculator I’ve developed thus far, it spits out approximately 110mm from the HESH effect itself plus 23mm from the kinetic impact force denting the plate, for a total of 133mm.
And using the same calculator on the FV4005’s Shell L1, the result is 267mm from the HESH effect plus 76mm from the kinetic force of the shell denting the plate, for a total of 343mm point blank.
Really the main problem with all HESH is that War Thunder doesn’t model HE and HESH as fundamentally the same thing. They both took large wads of high explosive, they both gave serious amounts of scabbing behind armor, just one was purposely optimized for scabbing later on. Yet ingame, HE will one-tap anything it penetrates, but HESH won’t. Thus the simplest way to make HESH work is to simply let it one-tap anything it penetrates.
That is right where my prediction for the 76mm HESH limits to be. Appears that we are on the same train of thought for that.
For this calculator I’ll take a guess and it’s based on TNT mass per cm^2? As I do want to design my own calculation for hesh based on that as it seems like the most logical starting point to me.
It would be really nice if armour protection started to account for metal flex/crumple when under large amount of force.
If I remember correctly from the WOT days they had an shell overmatch mechanic where if the shells bore was wider than the armour, it would just go clean though no questions asked about angle. Wouldn’t want it to be that extreme but it would finally end tank barrels eating a full uranium dart
The overmatch mechanic in WoT gives bonuses to guns firing shells that are >2x or >3x the caliber vs armor thickness.
85mm vs 40mm just gets additional shell normalization. So a plate angled at 50 degrees ends up being angled at 35 for a gun with 2x the caliber, rather than the default normalization of only 5 degrees.
122mm vs 40mm gives significantly higher normalization and remotes automatic bounce chance. So a plate angled at 70 degrees becomes effectively a plate angled at 55 or less.
However this doesn’t mean you can always go through some plates just because of high caliber. If your gun has really bad penetration, it can just fail to penetrate the armor even with the normalization increases. There is a 70mm gun in the game with 30mm of penetration, and even though it gets 3x overmatch bonus against a 20mm plate it can still fail to penetrate a highly angled 20mm plate.
Actually, no. This is what it is:
Explosion Penetration = 45 * Explosion Scalar * ((Explosive Mass * TNT equivalency * (1 - EXP(-4 * (Explosive Mass / Projectile Mass)))) ^ (1/3))
For HE, the Explosion Scalar is simply 1.0. For HESH, its 2.5.
The exponential term is basically meant to represent how much explosive force is left after the blast breaks the round’s own casing. Thereby not giving APHE rounds with their microscopic fillers erroneous results.
Indeed it would be, but modeling that might be pretty computationally expensive.
Very interesting. My idea went down a rather different mathematic path with a multiplier added to account for larger shells causing more steel to be affected around the central point (as well as the scabs size setting for a damage simulation). I had never taken it past napkin maths levels of figuring it out tho, probably would have shown some annoying complexity.
I believe it could be added by adding a check to see if what the shell is hitting is armour or a module. Even in the weird scenario that a gun barrel deflected a shell it’s being knocked out of zero, I’d like that to be reflected as if it was penetrated.
Same thing for tracks, I’ve had tracks be volumetric black holes when shooting a tank as well as being shot in ways that make zero sense
Truth be told, the formula came up from a lot of lengthy conversations with Google Search AI asking it “how under-modeled is large HE in War Thunder and how could it be modeled more accurately?” plus my own ideas as the conversation progressed.
The kinetic part is much more complex. I have managed to come up with something that works well for all but the most modern of APFSDS, surprisingly enough. It’s a DeMarre-Lanz-Odermatt hybrid of sorts. Still fiddling with it to have it spit out correct (enough) results for the top-tier round types.
Another comparison is the KV-2, which is strictly better than the shitbarn at the moment in terms of in game implementation while being at a much lower BR
Truth be told, would HESH even be all that “overpowered” if the simple act of it penetrating something led to that something being “overpressured”?
I suspect not based on my personal experiences, given HESH has 1) extremely high fuse sensitivity (flying in the face of reality, it is a derivative of base-fuse HE) 2) low velocity for the BR ranges it is seen at and 3) still relatively low pen vs flat armor for all but the biggest and derpiest rounds of the type.
If HESH simply overpressure-killed anything it penetrated, it would do its intended job well. If some platforms become strong enough to go up in BR massively, oh well, so be it.
Alright guys, I tested HESH in a real match with the new update. So, it’s great that we have overpressure now—but what’s the point? Honestly, the addition of overpressure is only useful against German tanks and the like, not the Russian ones. Let me explain: just because we have overpressure doesn’t mean we can one-shot the IS-2, IS-1, or—even worse—the Russian T-34. Yes, even now, you can clearly land hits on the turrets of all Russian tanks without getting a kill. Basically, the hype around overpressure is disproportionate to its actual impact. Gaijin just needs to finish the job and add real damage mechanics.
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.
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.
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!
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.