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.
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.
*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.
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.
Do you have any source for this? This to me spontaneously doesn’t sound plausible. The amount of energy such a round has when impacting would (I’m “guesstimating” here) likely be comparable to the energy the turret feels when firing it’s own gun. The energy taken by the recoil mechanism when firing would probably be comparable to the energy loss of the round due to drag.
As i understand it the development name was “wall busters” before they got the designation HESH. Why would you need to design a round that relies on wave propagation through armor to defeat thin plates when a normal HE round with a more sensitive and wider fuse would work just as well and be much easier to design and produce.
Do you have examples from protection analysis for this? With the tanks you mentioned in your post i looked and had no issues as you described them. You just have to know where to aim, in the same way you have to know where to aim with a APFSDS round for it to do reasonable damage.
“the rest is solid steel” , source for that? The walls of HESH are relatively thin to facilitate the “Squashing” of the round on impact, the nose also tend to have an inert filler that is designed to make the spreading of the HE filler better and more effective. Most of the steel weight is at the back to “push” the filler out like taking a hammer to a lump of clay, it gets decelerated by the filler as that is the entire purpose of it. That is at least how the 120mm HESH is designed. Here is a generalized example:
I currently have not thus far. But until it has 1.69 postpen again I will not be satisfied with it.
Mainly using 90-155mm HESH in test drive and deliberately aiming at parts of tanks where overpressure is not possible, to measure how effective the actual scabbing component is. At best on the T-54 the driver dies, maybe with a fire, but that’s it. It’s not supposed to be anywhere near that weak.
Mainly its just Google Searching, lots of Reddit posts made by other folks showing plates caving in from hits by artillery-sized HE, or even the records of the FV4005 itself where the impact and explosion ripped the turret off of a Centurion and completely caved in the mantlet of a Conqueror, splitting it down the middle. Ingame the round does neither as far as I remember.
All big HE has its kinetic impact portion badly under-modeled or outright missing.
At higher angles, the explosive is being spread more thin across a wider area. Would that not at least slightly reduce the maximum penetration since its less concentrated?
Check in protection analysis, seems like spalling is larger pieces with more damage and pen instead of many small ones.
Hull front isn’t the best option as the spalling then goes “down” and not into the rest of the tanks compartments. I find that turret sides give the best result so far.
All of this includes the explosion and wouldn’t be from just impact.
And when you are aiming at turret sides usually that’s just overpressure talking.
HESH was literally designed to punch through T-54s and other sloped Russian crap in center-mass shots. The issue is the size of the spall pattern and how many pieces it makes. Unlike real life where a single penetration causes crews to bail if they aren’t dead or maimed, we have Terminator crews.
Therefore for simple gameplay reasons HESH should probably do even more postpen than reality to compensate, as should APCR, APDS, HEAT, and small APFSDS.
