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Today, we’ll be talking about changes to the post-pen effects for APHE shells used by ground vehicles that we plan to introduce into the game. We’re ready to show you what we have planned here, and at the end of this news post you can participate in voting for or against — whether there’ll be changes or not all depends on your vote. Let’s take a look!
Preserving fragments in the head part of the shell
First off, we’d like to tell you about a change that we consider necessary and will be implemented into the game without any vote. This change relates to maintaining the integrity of an APHE shell’s head after armor penetration. When an APHE shell explodes, its warhead is not subject to significant fragmentation and can cause substantially greater damage than the scattering fragments of the case and base.
The fragment of the shell’s warhead is significant in mass, can penetrate armor of considerable thickness, and at the same time also form secondary fragments when penetrating armor. This change will allow the warhead to better hit enemy crew members located behind internal partitions, such as the engine compartment bulkhead, as well as other modules along the shell’s flight trajectory that cannot be penetrated by small fragments generated from the shell exploding.
Increasing secondary fragments and high explosive damage
Due to a number of technical reasons, secondary fragments from APHE shells differ and are worse compared to fragments from regular, solid AP shells. When reworking fragmentation fields, we’ll enhance the secondary fragments of APHE shells to the level of solid AP shells.
The high-explosive damage from APHE shells will remain — it causes relatively little damage, affects the crew and modules inside the tank and has a damage zone in the form of a sphere around the detonation point of the shell. The diameter of the damage sphere of high-explosive damage is noticeably smaller than the scattering zone of secondary fragments.
Implementing fragment areas
Here are the changes that we’d like you to vote on, whether they’re introduced or not will be determined by community vote: scattering sectors of fragments from APHE shells.
When a shell explodes, three main fragmentation areas are formed, shown in the image below:
- The remainder of the shell’s head and its fragments.
- Fragments from the base of the shell.
- Fragments from all sides of the shell (the case).
When a shell explodes inside of a tank or armored vehicle, the shell’s head acts as a small solid AP round and may penetrate more internal modules. Alongside this, smaller fragments from the shell casing form a fragmentation cone and hit the crew and modules around the explosion point. We plan to implement both of these to the game.
*Translation (Pic.113): Scattering of the APHE shell fragments on impact
At the moment, we use a simplified fragmentation pattern for APHE shells in the game without segmentation into different areas. If we were to implement the proposed physically reliable sector fragmentation patterns for APHE shells, the post-pen effect of APHE shells will be more realistic. However, when hitting protruding modules, such as the commander’s cupola, the probability of crew damage would be reduced.
Reworking the post-pen effects of APHE shells can change the tactics of the game, making protruding weakened areas less vulnerable. However at the same time, post-pen effects after penetrating the hull of a vehicle due to the preservation of the shell’s head after the shell explodes will be increased.
We’d like to hear your opinion on this — share it in the comment field and vote Yes or No for the changes to post-pen effects in the poll!
In-game examples of the described changes
Here’s some screenshots of how damage to ground vehicles will be altered with the changes implemented.
Post-pen effect when penetrating the center of a tank without preserving the head of the shell (before) vs while preserving the head of the shell (after):
Before
After
Post-pen effect when the commander’s cupola is hit by a spherical spread of fragments from a shell explosion (before) vs hit with a physically reliable sectoral scattering of fragments from the shell explosion (after):
Before
After
We’re planning to give players the opportunity to test these changes in a special game event, as well as the “Protection Analysis” menu, before applying these changes to all APHE shells in the game. However, preparing this testing will require some significant time from the development team, so today we want to collect your opinions on whether you’re interested in switching to a more detailed damage model for APHE shells. So, shall we test it?
If you’re interested in testing, we’ll start preparing it and will host another voting on this change based on its results.
Comments (262)
Comments will be premoderatedI'd really like to see this implemented, but this would hurt any tank with an M3 cannon facing off against mid-tier Germany immensely. If this goes through I'd like to see the hull-break/overpressure mechanic reworked though. I'd like to see something like a "hull" health, in which aiming at certain weak points on the hull (An example being the Panthers UFP, as the armor was known to crack if it received too many hits in one area, and the welds on soviet tanks were notoriously weak)
I can already see that this change is going to be bad and it's going to backfire to the people who are cheering for it now. A good example is that there are vehicles in the game which can only be damaged by some tanks from the front by shooting at a tiny cupola and hoping for the best and now they're basically taking this away so these vehicles will become almost invincible while in turn the weaker tanks at the same BR range will struggle even more.
I voted no because shemans are going to really suffer with this update !!
Yes please, APHE needed a debuff for a long time, especially on the case of bad shots that nuke the tank because of the current unreal fragmentation. Yes, it'll nerf the capabilities of weaker cannons but that should be solved another way. I don't think gaijin can make this right and balanced but it's better than nothing. This video here shows how it should be on real life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtcRMThYZHg. Not saying it needs to be like that, but should be more like it.
No more cupola sniping, learn how to aim
Oh, i really like this change! I honestly hope that the other Shell- Types will also be modelled in a more realistic way.
It would have been better if you tested with some of the infamous nuke shells like Tiger 1s Pzgr or russian 122mm APHE
I like how they try and get all scientific about ballistic effects, when all they are going to do is nerf and buff things anyway. We can all get as nerdy as we want about the armor property stats, or the capabilities of the rounds. Ultimately, Gaijin will move the sliders up and down just like they always have.
While I think some of the changes are decent, I think over all you are going to massively upset the current meta and balance of the game. Shorn of the context and supporting arms that some tanks operated with IRL, they will now not fit the meta at all. Being too heavily armoured to be down tiered and not well armed enough to survive where they are or in an up tier. Over night several vehicles will just cease to be played.
If we are in the business of accurizing the behaviour of APHE rounds then surely its time a failure to fuse mechanic should be introduced to simulate the failure of the bursting charge to detonate correctly or at all and the shell shatter mechanic should be toned down on AP rounds and instead added to APHE. APHE suffered both of those failures quite often, so much so that the British abandoned bursting charges all together as solid shot gave almost the same fragmentation more reliably.
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