Dear players,

We have another round of questions and answers for you, with War Thunder producer Vyacheslav Bulannikov!

Aviation

The planned Swedish aviation tree list was missing the J 34 (Swedish Hunter modification). This aircraft was quite significant for Swedish jet aviation before the arrival of later domestic designs (Draken and Viggen), is it planned for the tree at some point? There is also a unique Swedish prototype J 34 Hunter with an afterburner.

In the release tree scheme we usually cover aircraft in the update in which this tree comes out and other vehicles in the nearest updates. About the other aircraft - we plan a lot of additions to the Swedish aircraft tree so the Hunter may appear after some time.

Are you already working on the implementation of the air-to-air missiles for medium ranges?

We are developing a missile battle system beyond visual range since the technical implementation of the missiles themselves and the control systems require minor improvements to already existing missiles. But what kind of game assumptions it will require to let players use these missiles comfortably and counteract them - this is a difficult question. From one side we don’t want to make these missiles a weapon of inevitable and sudden death in the case where the target doesn’t even understand that it has been fired on and on the other side there is no point to make them completely useless.

Do you have any plans to add countermeasures for aircraft that had them? According to “Phantom FGR Mk 2 Aircrew Manual - Weapon System Second Edition” the FGR.2 had a Chaff/Flare system introduced with Mod. 855. MiG-21SMT could also have a retrofitted countermeasure system too.

Yes, we plan to add defense systems for aircraft - such as flares and radar warning systems - which were equipped with them in real life.

Do you plan to improve the performance of aircraft sights by bringing their functionality closer to realistic ones?

It isn’t clear what is exactly meant, so it is difficult to answer this question. We can say that gyro sights with radio rangefinders already work more realistically than before. The sights take into account the distance to the target and flight parameters and displays the firing solution by taking into account the limitation of the platform.

Why in combined RB battles can you take a helicopter with ATGM’s equipped at the start of the battle and for aircraft with unguided aircraft rockets you need to get more respawn score? Are there any plans to change it?

There are several reasons for that. One of the main ones is that technically the helicopter is able to capture an enemy point so even in case of strong imbalance in the teams the victory is still possible by kills and by captured points. This isn’t the case for aircraft. The original idea of the respawn score was to limit the possibility of creating a highly unbalanced vehicle preset of the type “one team is in aircraft and second one in tanks”.

Ground Forces

Some tanks are still missing functional hull mounted MGs. In addition, some low-mid tier Japanese and German tanks don't have their AA MGs mounted on the roof, whilst most American and Soviet vehicles do. Are you still working on making MGs functional for all vehicles? Do you plan to bring Japan and German tank mounted Anti-Aircraft MGs more into line with the Allied ones?

When adding machine guns, or rather when “reviving” them - we first of all included the most necessary and useful ones: coaxial with a cannon and anti-aircraft guns. Offensive machine guns also had very low efficiency in real life due to poor visibility and small sectors of fire and in the game they appeared as an exception on the vehicles that don’t have any other machine guns. The latter refers to German SPG’s or Japanese tanks which had a rather strange design without a coaxial machine gun. As for anti-aircraft machine guns of rifle calibre - their efficiency in the game is quite low as well as against aircraft as against ground targets. Therefore the priority of adding them to the game is quite low and we often have higher priority tasks but we will continue to add them when possible.

After “Shilka” we are waiting for ZSU “Yenisei”. Almost all other nations already have such vehicles. Is it still planned to implement this vehicle?

Yes it is still planned.

The Chinese Ground Forces tree could really use some more attention for its low tier SPAAG’s and also its top tier in general. Are there more unique vehicles planned for this tree in the coming year?

Yes, the Chinese ground forces research tree suffers from the lack of decent anti-aircraft guns, at low ranks as well as at high ranks. We understand this and several models of the Chinese SPAA are already in the development and will be added during this year.

Are you working on a laser warning system for ground vehicles which is very necessary for protection against helicopters in the current environment of the game?

Technically it is easy to implement such a system. The problem is that there are still very few vehicles in the game that carried such a warning system.

Why did you not activate kinetic piercing of HE shells which have a delayed fuse for such a lengthy time?

As before the kinetic penetration of armour-piercing shells has been taken from different sources so we temporarily transferred all the HE shells for instant action in the fuse. In other words, the armour will be penetrated only by the explosive action of the explosion. In the future it is planned to select the coefficient for the HE shells for the formula of the penetration of the kinetic action and return the fuse with slight delay. In general this setting doesn’t change much for HE shells.

Helicopters

With the announcement of Swedish Ground Forces, can we expect a Swedish Helicopter tree too? At least a premium helicopter in the meantime for support?

Yes, most likely there will be Swedish helicopters in the game in the future.

Some helicopters could be fitted with Electronic Warfare packages and weapons. This could be a unique way to counter both advanced aircraft and Radar SPAAGs/SAMs. Would this be considered for helicopters perhaps in the future?

Electronic warfare is very complicated but can be interesting. For helicopters we haven’t worked in this area in detail so far but we may do it in the future.

With the advent of the Rooikat being introduced to the UK tree, does this mean we could possibly see unique South African Helicopters? Such as the Mi-24 Superhind and Denel Rooivalk?

We don’t exclude that possibility.

Navy

Naval trees have expanded exponentially in the last year. We still have cases where Rank II ships cost 270,000 RP, yet even Admiral Hipper, Mogami, Broklyn and Capayev only cost 220,000 RP . There is no incentive to research the lower vessels any more as Destroyers and Cruisers are more interesting, attractive and often faster to research. Can you please review the Naval Economy in an upcoming update and make lower tiers more viable to research?

Player’s progress in the fleet is designed on principles different from aircraft and ground vehicles. The research process goes from left to right and from top to bottom so that within each rank is the last ship in the horizontal will be top vehicle. That’s why their price is comparable and sometimes is even higher than the price for ships of larger classes. And for some players who don’t like battles in larger ships these ships are the main purpose of progress.

With update 1.95, we saw the arrival of the Swedish air tree and the start of a Ground Forces tree, but do you have any long term ideas about any form of Swedish/Finnish/Scandinavian Naval tree?

At the moment another nation’s fleet is in the development and it is too early to talk about the Swedish naval tree.

Torpedo warning seems to be very inconsistent even with upgraded crew skills. Are there any plans to improve this system more? Perhaps friendly aircraft could play a role in the spotting mechanics?

We have a different point of view on this. The warning system regarding enemy torpedoes is quite transparent, in RB it is true to say that the range of automatic detection is much much less than in AB due to its lower speed. The foam trace in the water can be detected at greater distances. If we are talking about detection assistance from aircraft then it is possible but not in a mode with automatic detection of the torpedo marker but with a mechanism similar to scouting mechanics in ground battles. This though is a nice idea and perhaps we will implement such functionality in the future.

Will the “inside view” of naval vessels be refined? Can we anticipate bulkheads and separation of compartments?​​​​​​​

Currently the bulkheads and decks are quite detailed. They just don’t show up in X-Ray view, but they are there. You can see them in the hangar when you are using the “protection analyse” feature. This is how the damage model of the ship’s modules  look in 3ds Max:

​​​​​​​Why is the choice between shells in the fleet limited by two types? After all the buttons 3 and 4 are free as opposed to multi-turret tanks etc?​​​​​​​

Buttons 3 and 4 are currently not free. They are responsible for choosing the type of auxiliary calibre shells - this is a technical limitation and perhaps in the future we will be able to remove it. But for that will require specific changes to the game code.

Other

Do you have plans to introduce new Squadron vehicles? Most people have most of them by now.

Yes, we have plans to add squadron vehicles on a regular basis.

The War Thunder Team