Preface: this is not from me, I found this on Reddit and thought I’d share it with you because I think it’s important!!
I’ve been hearing a few posts discussing how Germany needs APHE to compete against the Russians, and I’d just like to sort this all out.
Firstly during WW2 the German main ammunition type was PzGr39 and its successors, this was an Armor Piercing Capped Ballistic Capped munition with a High Explosive bursting charge. Its full acronym would technically be APHECBC. This is highly regarded as being the finest APHE projectiles ever made during WW2 due to its effect on most forms of armor. Later versions were superior against sloped armor at the cost of flat armor penetration.
Russians used a couple of rounds. Firstly APHE, then they moved onto APHEBC. The first was a ‘sharp nosed’ munition which had a habit of shattering on hardened armor plates. The second had a ballistic cap for streamlining and a flat projectile nose to prevent shatters. Neither were very good designs historically and the Soviet Union quickly reverse engineered the PzGr39 design postwar.
It is obvious however that something ingame is going terribly wrong, but it is not related to the APHE or APCBC labels. Rather it is related to fragment generation being wonky in addition to explosive blast being heavily biased once a certain threshold has been reached.
For example German 37mm APCBC has 22 grams of explosives and usually only kills the person it actually hits, Russian 45mm APHE has 29 grams of explosives but seems easily twice as powerful, killing the entire turret crew of a vehicle it hits. Unquestionably it should be a more powerful shell however it is hard to believe that the 37mm’s half a hand grenade’s explosive effect in a turret combined with shrapnel would fail to utterly kill the crew of a compact turret.
The German Short 75mm APCBC performs excellently however, exploding most tanks in a single shot.
In any case for the sake of balance ammunition availability can be altered to ensure a fun experience for all players, APHE can be swapped to historical existing AP solid shot if needed to even the playing field.
But this effect also translates to Berlin, and not very well unfortunately. The Panther’s 75mm gun, one of the most powerful AT guns of WW2, is treated as having post-penetration effects of the Soviet’s 45mm gun due to its 29 gram explosive charge.
On the flipside the Russian 85mm is treated as having an effectively nuclear payload similar to or exceeding the short 75mm German gun from Moscow/Normandy. Anywhere from 75 grams of explosive filler up to 160 grams.
The truth of the matter is explosive filler was to break up the shot to prevent overpenetrations and to increase the chances of internal damage. To a tank crew 29 grams of explosives and 160 grams was identical in ‘lets get out of our tank!’ performance.
In many ways War Thunder depicts a much more equal showing of APHE, where typically they’re all overperforming, it is very unfortunate that in Enlisted one side is surprisingly realistic in performance, while the other has grossly unrealistic parameters.
