This is a slight alteration of another post I made, Char B1 Bis - A French buetepanzer in German service , but is a variant of that vehicle, so please mods, don’t smite this for being a dual post
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Tech Tree
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Event (either as solo vehicle or with a squad)
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Premium
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Shouldn’t be added
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3
The Char B1 Bis was one of France’s most common heavy tanks of WW2 by the time WW2 broke out, with around 370 examples made before France’s capitulation. After France’s capitulation, some surviving examples, 161 in total, were placed into German service for their heavy armor , and some saw modification from their original state.
This tank had 2 primary armaments, in addition to it’s coaxial 7.5mm MAC machine gun, quite similar to the M3 Grant’s layout, which is what I will be comparing it to as it is the closest example in game. This tank was designed at a time when the anti tank capabilities of the Wehrmacht’s panzers were much worse, mostly consisting of 20 and 37mm cannons, making the 60mms of hull armor and 55mms of turret armor invulnerable against most everything front of the time except for dedicated TDs like the Flakbus and Panzerjäger I, which historically were some of the only things that could combat this tank at the time. Comparing this to the Grant, with it’s 51mm hull and 76mm turret armor, it has slightly better hull armor in exchange for a less armored turret. In exchange for the heavy armor though, it lost a lot of speed due to the armor’s weight, only going 28 km/h max, whereas the Grant is decently faster at 39 km/h max speed.
The first cannon on the Char B1 was the 47mm SA35 L/32 cannon, which loads each shell 4 seconds. It’s performance isn’t really that great, loading slower than the 37mm M5 cannon (4 vs 2.9 seconds), and having lower penetration in it’s solid shot AP shell (62mm at 10 meters vs 79 at 10 meters). This would likely not be too much of a big deal if it goes against enemies with average, but could face difficulty with some tanks in the BR 1-3 range.
Shell pen stats
Ammunition Type Armor penetration (mm) at a distance:
10 m 100 m 500 m 1000 m 1500 m 2000 m
Mle1935
APC 62 59 47 36 27 20
Next is the flame projector that replaced the original 75mm howitzer, which was a later modification to 24 of the Char B1s done by Germany in 1941, which used one of the spray heads from the Flammpanzer 2. This flame thrower would be upgraded after initial testing found the range of the flamethrower to be insufficient, and was altered from a nitrogen driven system to a pump driven system, which increased the range to 45 meters. Asides from the range, the only difference from the stats of the Flammpanzer 2’s flamethrower would be the available fuel, which was much larger due to there only being one projector, and the fact that there is a large armored fuel tank on the back of the vehicle to store the flamethrower’s fuel (see bottom image).
I think this would make for a good event vehicle since it’s a buetepanzer with it’s own major modification, but I’ll leave that up to the voters to decide how it will be introduced. As for the BR, I think this version of the B1 could maybe go to BR1, but would be usable at the very least at BR2. Below this, there are some photos of the Char B1 (flamethrower).
