As for me the thing is exactly how players that have never played the fox describe the fox.
Its really fast (faster than the fastest production tank, Scimitar) to the point that it keeps up with the fox and can easily overtake on worse terrain.
Its also more agile when the fox just understeers into the nearest wall.
Its engine is quiet while the fox is one of the loudest in game (I’ve put a but report in for how overly loud the fox is, the thing can be heard from 600m away)
its fully stabilised so you don’t need to sacrifice much speed to get perfect shots on target
its fire rate not only compensates for its lower pen as you just dismantle everything before they even see through the tracer spam
its only 0.3 BR higher than the fox and its closest counterpart, Scimitar. Scimitar has unfinished gearing, overly bouncy and soft suspension and its Aluminium alloy is underperforming and there’s armour holes that let you die to small arms calibres frontally. Scimitar should handle similarly to the VFM5 but faster yet you are slower than a centurion unless you’re downhill.
I don’t like calling nation bias buuuut this is very blatant
I play a lot of italy, so many not well protected tanks, I have many memories of dying to people rushing in gepards or other 35mm AA, often just using the normal AP belt instead of the apds, while my own AA at the same br as the gepard has no radar, is significantly slower, does not get an AP belt (only getting limited APDS or HE), gets less APDS per gun and gets less pen with the APDS. all while for about 2 years the gepard was at a lower BR than the sidam 25 (last year when the controversial economy changes that they reverted came out I was quite happy as the gepard had finally been put up to the same BR as the sidam 25)
yeah absolutely but anything was better than nothing. the gepard has gone up by like 0.3 step while everything else at that BR has been decompressed multiple times and gone up like 0.7 to 1 br steps
Made a big announcement, added them for a few 9.0+ aircraft and everyone forgot about them at mid/low BR. Usual Gaijin practice when it comes to new additions to the game.
And the worst offenders like the Pe-8, Ar-234, Ju-288, Lancaster or any US fighter bomber are left untouched. Meanwhile they had no problems with uptiering the Kugelblitz or Skink again and again.
None of these critters are going to stop any bombers from dropping their load, at least from my personal experience flying it >1.5km altitude I always get to drop it, I could see bullets start flying but almost never hit by any, only enemy CAP could take me out.
I knew as soon as they announced Fox and later XM800T, that they would be the funnest vehicles to use out of their respective updates. All the focus on top-tier jets, while these little rats are the way to roll.
I’ve gotten shot down like twice but it was my fault for bringing it to 8.3+ and it was Gepard lol and yes I still get to drop the 5 ton like 5/10 times at 8.3+
Though one horrable thing about the XM800T is the pen and the belts, the first belt you get is HVAP and HE-I, which pens 57mm half of the time at best, which most tanks have some angles which HVAP is known to be garbage on and just splatter, the next two belts is either full HVAP or full HE-I, the last belt you get is APDS, which pens 66mm at best, but still isn’t all that good for angles and is very slow to get because of how high it is of modification research
To tell the truth, I don’t know. OP in that topic posted it and I’ve tried to reverse image search but haven’t managed to find it’s origin yet.
I’ve seen a few different ones, but I think they all go back to the same German test/service manual source, as far as I can tell (not sure exactly what the context of it was) that showed that the current 66-68mm (not sure how much it is exactly) penetration at 10m is actually the penetration at 1000m. This seems a bit far fetched to me, but it’s been proven fairly definitively that the current penetration is too low.
To my knowledge, this is because Gaijin bases most of their calculations for APCR and low-calibre rounds like that on their knowledge of Soviet munitions, which tended to have weaker or smaller cores than Western ammunitions of the same type, which tended to have steel or tungsten cores (so harder and denser than the Soviet ones), and the cores tended to make up more of the shell. This means Russian ammunition of those types is probably accurate, but Western ammunition underperforms.
All APCR/HVAP is based on soviet munitions you are correct.
Theres also a couple “formulas” gaijin uses to predict projectile penetration values which is both extremely inaccurate and also ignored when its useful to gaijin. Pretty much every APCR + APDS (and HESH but that’s more from a complete misunderstanding from the devs of what it even is) underperforms greatly and is substantially weaker than its real life & well (publicly) documented counterparts.
turns out, from a bug report, the XM800T is actually not supposed to even have DM63, its crazy to think that people want this thing to be buffed more like america is the only nation that matters