How Historically Accurate is Steel Division 2? A SPECIAL GUEST helps us find out! 

This was a special opportunity to get some deep insight into the IS-2! I hope you enjoyed this unique style of video. Thanks to Peter www.youtube.com/@TankArchives for the collaboration and MHV www.youtube.com/@MilitaryHistoryVisualized for helping set it up!

I'd love if you could get this guy back on for more episodes. This was awesome!

What a great episode, I really like the the in depth look on the IS2 and how it relates to SD2. Vulcan I would like to see more of these history lessons and how it relates to different video games. Thanks Peter was interesting to hear detailed info on the IS2 your book is on my radar to pick up.

As something of a military history nerd, with a particularly obsession on the Second World War, I found this video fantastic. I’d personally love to see more stuff like this, if at all possible. Steel Division 2 really does a great job of staying faithful to the history and being as accurate as it can be. After all, it is only a video game.

A great guest indeed Особая благодарность Петру за написанную книгу. Vulcan, a few notes for you: 5:56 In game Nashhorn, Pak 43 and KT have 180mm penetration at 1600m which means standard 54% chance to pierce IS-2 1944. 11:10 Tanks do take damage from HE in game but it's quite minimal. It takes about 25 152mm shots (not all direct hits) to destroy a KT. Not to mention that for "balance reasons" IS-2 and ISU-122 got HE damage reduced to 50% the damage of Su-122 (38% the damage of Su-152). However, if IS-2 encounters a flakwerling it'll be dead in 5 seconds. Not even speculations but something i've personally seen happening in the game.

Vulcan has popped his military historian cherry! Really cool to have someone like mr Samsonov on a video, he seems very knowledgeable!

oh i like this kind of content. If at all possible, please do more - historical campaigns/missions with the insight from MHV or others (like Peter here) might be amazing

Fantastic, Vulcan. Way to keep the SD2 torch burning by introducing such fascinating topics presented by actual, factual, guests. Please continue. Although I was disappointed, your guest was no doubt relieved that you did not seek a definitive explication of the hit chance probability matrices as modelled in game , as per any example of AtkPwr using or facing an an IS2. This is a burning question, much like the wrecks on ATPs side of the battlefield.

Stuff like this is amazing, I'd love more videos like this. I'd love a whole friggin series like this :D

This was a great episode! Very informative

Loved the video with an expert of the field! Make more Kamerad!

Cool video, thanks to Peter for showing up

Great stuff! Will take a peek at that book.

We definitely need a "nothing happens" crit (aka improved ventilation crit, lowers stress) as well as a "driver survived" crit which makes the tank slowly crawl back to the spawn

9:00 - The tank just driving off is something that COULD happen in the old strategy game Close Combat (which I loved for years on end, before SD).

Intresting, will you do this about other tanks as well?

Very interesting! One important question though was not covered, that of the gun sights and the true firing accuracy & distances . Will this be mentioned in the book? Cheers

9:51 For that mod...what if the tank could drive off map on it's own and, if it makes it, it can be redeployed at no cost?

Where's the driver's hatch on the is-2? Or is it supposed to fit through that small viewport?

Great stuff, soooo next the t34 and after the Sherman?

This was great, you might have a niche here mate! 👌

Very interesting video. I minor issue, the game sound was too loud. I'd go as far as to remove it completely, only keep the footage.

Brother we need more Warno videos.

Thanks for the interesting vid. Would've been nice to hear a discussion of why the 122mm over the 100mm, as the latter had the greater armour penetration and had a higher RoF as well as could have carried more ammo. I believe it came down to HE performance given, as was discussed, targets vulnerable to HE were far more common than armour. Plus I'm not sure when the 100mm started to become available in numbers. All the same, would like to have heard what he might have had to say about it. Cheers

Great video! However I just can never get fully interested in Russian tanks of the mid-late war, they are iconic in their efficiency but it's the stories of the men and women inside them that are way more interesting. The tanks themselves are wondrous feats of brutal industrial design, but are truly built to be part of an overall sledgehammer, and are expendable and the mystique surrounding them a little less remarkable. The late war German armour on the other hand always seems to have an aura around it due to the design ideals even though they were ridiculously over engineered and the philosophy was a losing one. The Soviet early war tanks the KV1 and T34-76 however seem a little more interesting to me personally, due to them representing defense against overwhelming odds, the stories of their success in the early war brings a character and mistique to them, as cutting edge tanks that offered resistance to a fresh and incisive Wehrmacht. Just my $0.02 :D

Im sorry but no the tiger had more penetration than the panther simply because it had a larger diameter shell Muzzle velocity is listed as 810 m/s from the L/56 barrel of the Flak 18 and Flak 36/37. During early 1942, the penetration ability was improved with the introduction of the Pzgr.39 of 10.2 kg weight with a reduced HE filler of 59 grams. Muzzle velocity was 800 m/s. The early Blitzkrieg up to early 1942 saw the use of the large capacity Pzgr. with penetration at less than 100 mm at 30 degrees. The 88 mm Flak APCBC round, which fought the KV and T34 tanks during 1941 and early 1942, was less effective than the round fired by the Tiger's 88 mm KwK 36 L/56. Even the later 88 mm Flak round, with a large capacity high explosive filler (and 9.54 kg weight), penetrated from 8% to 23% less than the 88 mm KwK 36 L/56 APCBC round. Behind the decision to retain the the 88 mm KwK 36 L/56 as the main gun of the Tiger I instead of the Rheinmetall 75 mm KwK 42 L/70, was the fact that at that time, armor penetration was mainly a function of thickness to diameter (T/d) ratio. During World War II, the Armor Piercing (AP) round relied on its own weight (and a 88 mm KwK 36 L/56 gun APCBC shell weighed 10.2 kilograms, as opposed by an 75 mm KwK 42 L/70 gun APCBC shell, which weighed 6.8 kilograms) to penetrate the enemy's armor. Theoretically, the higher the muzzle velocity, the more penetration any kind of AP round would have, all other variables remaining constant. In real World War Two tank combat, however, other important variables intervened, such as the thickness to diameter (T/d) coefficient, which means that the bigger the diameter of any given round relative to the thickness of the armor it is going to strike, the better the probability of achieving a penetration. Furthermore, if the diameter of the armor piercing round overmatches the thickness of the armor plate, the protection given by the inclination of the armor plate diminishes proportionally to the increase in the overmatch of the armor piercing round diameter or, in other words, to the increase in this T/d overmatch. So, when a Tiger hit a T-34, the 88 mm diameter of the Tiger's round overmatched the 45 mm glacis plate of the T-34 by so much that it made no difference that the Russian tank's glacis was inclined at an angle of 60 degrees from vertical. And more: "Armor obliquity-effects decrease as the shot diameter overmatches plate thickness, in part because there is a smaller cylindrical surface area of the displaced slug of armor which can cling to the surrounding plate. If the volume which the shot displaces has lots of area to cling to on the parent plate, it resists penetration better than if that same volume is spread out into a disc with a relatively small area where it joins the undisturbed armor. A plate greatly-overmatching shot involves the projectile digging its own tunnel, as it were, through the thick interior of the plate an overmatched plate will be forced to rely on tensile stresses within the displaced disc, and will tend to break out in front of the attacking projectile, regardless of whether the edges cling to the parent material or not. Plate-obliquity works in defeating projectiles partly because it turns and deflects the projectile before it begins digging in. If there is insufficient material where the side of the nose contacts the plate, stresses will travel all the way through the plate and break out the unsupported back surface. The plate will fail instantaneously, rather than gradually". You can angle the armor any way you want, and beyond a certain point of a shot overmatching the plate, the obliquity will cease to be relevant. In fact, at certain conditions of shots overmatching the plate, the cosine rule is broken and the plate resists less-well than the simple cosine relationship would predict (LOS thickness is greater than effective thickness). The above only applies to WWII era AP and APC/APCBC, and WWII sub-caliber ammunition.

Multiple hits and they keep on trucking,thats why i dont play steel division anymore,once i realized it has no real ballistics model and a two hits your dead policy i gave up.