test post, ive never really had a bad time when using hesh yet.
Against light targets it tends to be absolutely fine, especially since they fixed the instant fuze time. This is because large HESH is somewhat capable of overpressuring targets, they just have to be quite thinly armoured and you have to hit close to thin areas. For example a TAM you will usually always overpressure unless you hit the engine side, a Leopard 1 not so much.
As a rule hitting weld seams, hitting multiple plates etc, turret ring, anywhere that is realistically a weak spot will nullify your damage. This is also goes for hitting spare track as can be seen in my previous IS-3 example.
Against heavy targets it’s got almost no HE power to go through rooftops now so it’s no longer got a backup way of functioning so you have to purely rely on having a very good hit. Before they nerfed HESH’s HE power this example would have blown through the hull roof and OHK’d the tank, now that will not happen unless you hit very very low in the turret face. This is most noticable on Panther and King Tiger.
Which is VERY frustrating because regular HE has no such trouble whatsoever (as seen in this example), this M107 HE shell manages to blow through the hull roof very easily despite being SIGNIFICANTLY weaker in HE terms. An M107 has about 9kg TNTe, the L33A1 HESH shell has over 20kg TNTe.
So now I’ve explained how HESH can have issues with overpressure and doesn’t really work as HE at all lets get to how Gaijin try to model HESH damage. Assuming you get HESH damage to actually kick in, it has extremely short range and each particle of spalling can be easily stopped by objects (such as in this screenshot with the ammo). It’s likely this ammo would have detonated anyway but I have been recently quite shocked how hitting Tiger II ammunition bustle has very rarely detonated the ammunition, any other round type in the game would have detonated it.
And also due to the range issue and the fact spalling doesn’t bounce in game, angled armour is extremely effective at negating the damage done by HESH as all your spalling is directed downward in to the floor it will only likely kill the driver, sometimes not even that.
5 Likes
Epic Hesh moment vs crew behind light armor.
reported this issue like 3 years ago HESH rework is rather overdue and will probably never happen at this rate. Yes this happened to me in game 3 years ago in fv4005 very skill issued.
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Can confirm, have hit scorpion directly with AVRE HESH before and watched in awe as only the radiator turned yellow.
Wow that issue is not related to the ones I even listed but I have seen it before once or twice. How ridiculous.
tldr of the bug is that if the plate HESH hits isnt enough to fuze it, it wont interact with crew after the plate at all. not a very common bug notably M56 and helis are affected. This with 4mm fuze makes hesh vs lighter armored helicopters worst choice of a shell u can make. Probably even smoke shell gives better damage than it.
HESH cannot overpressure. It literally does not have the mechanic. Its really easy to see with open topped vehicles. A 500g HE shell can overpressure them, a 7kg HESH will not.
Many of the newer vehicles have engine compartments modeled. This means they have 5mm walls inside the vehicle which will stop all spalling from HESH shells. Older vehicles do not have this (look at centurions or the tiger 2 vs a C13 T90).
As I recall with one of the changes big HESH can still overpressure but small HESH cannot. Though even small HESH I think can since a more recent patch. It’s just a lot trickier to do than regular HE as it seems HESH needs to almost entirely connecting with a thin plate to overpressure so no hitting the ground etc.
Like example here:
A square on hit does HESH type damage doing very unimpressive results. A roof hit where armour is thin does overpressure damage and is killing people much furhter than HESH spall actually does in game.
Incidently most of those old vehicles DO have internal plates they’re just not visible. There’s definitly internal plates on Centurion and I’m 90% sure King Tiger has an engine firewall at least.
See this is all interesting because this all happened whilst I was playing but before I was “In the know”.
When I think of HESH nerf I now think of the more recent ones. This one which happened about 5 months ago. There was another I cannot find now
This says it all really
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Or they start selling American premiums with HEP.
I own the M728 - American AVRE - that fires HESH and unfortunately it’s a rough time just like with the AVRE.
I tried doing that and the HESH round didnt do anything other than destroy the radar. Ever since ive only brought APFSDS
Today I learned that you cannot do any damage to either maus barrel with 120mm HESH.
Very cool.
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Yeah I did some testing some weeks ago and some HESH shells were simply unable to damage or destroy gun barrels.
But the damage mechanics in WT never made much sense. AP shells will instantly track vehicles, or knock out the drive sprocket from a grazing hit while HE rounds are much less effective in comparison, when it should be the other way around.
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”
Spoiler
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!)
Spoiler
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Yeah it’s pretty accurate, and if it fuses over 68 it’s overperforming