The Fatal M1 Abrams Armor Flaw In War Thunder 

Having this Weak spot doesn't mean the M1 is bad at all, if you aren't doing well you are having a skill issue :). You don't have to game alone, join my community by signing up on my email list on my website: www.seanfickengaming.com Do you want to game like me? Here is a list of my equipment I use. G502 Hero Mouse: amzn.to/3VSv1I6 SteelSeries Arctis 7P Headphones: amzn.to/3W63IeS

Been playing top tier USA for a bit now and the biggest threat to a M1a2 is Su25sm3 or ka50/52

I tend to find the lower glassis only being a weakspot in the way that it does kill the driver, and that's it. Which in top tier is not "hitting a weakspot" and more "suicide with later assist bonus".

If the weakest spot is under the main gun that means he is looking at you. Balls off steel in real war to take the time to hit that .

Why everyone else needs to have a turret ring weakspot but the abrams is the exception?

died to a T-34 frontally in my M1A2

There are two things that gaijin should fix about Abrams' armor because there is a lot of evidence to prove it: 1. Turret ring: it should be Volumetric, it is true that it is 50mm thick, but it is placed face down so the protection effect should be 200-300mm, which will definitely prevent SPAA and IFV from shooting through it. 2. UFP: this is related to game mechanics, APFSDS does not bounce like a ball.

Yeah, it is a very big drawback on small and narrow maps. In my opinion, on biger maps its not that much of an issue if you are constantly on the move. Still frustrating nonetheless.

the UFP is utterly hilarious as I find that shells will actually ricochet off of it and bounce up underneath the turret to kill the commander and gunner. The Abrams turret ring in game is so bad that some WW2 full caliber shells can punch through

irl the turret ring isn't a weak spot as the ufp is designed to shatter rounds that hit it, And the chances of directly hitting the turret ring are extremely low.

Real tanks aren’t able to so easily target specific parts unless you’re extremely close and the target is unaware of your presence. A battle is 3 Dimensional. Many other anti tank weapons are trying to kill you. It is possible, just not near as much as a game would have you believe. Barrels wear and older barrels don’t have the accuracy. I have been on ranges where one tank would have three rounds touch each other at 1 km but the norm is not quite as beautiful .

You need to address the real elephant in the room. Gaijin has not implemented the turret ring armor correctly and made it larger than it is in real life.

The M1 armor package was designed against what was assumed to be a 115mm tungsten round fired around 1650 m/s. The m744 would probably have defeated it well past normal engagement ranges. That the armor was considered good, had more to do with the fact that the USSR didn't introduce any Monoblock rounds in any real number until around 1987! With the BM-42 not being procured in any real amount until 1989-1990!

Gaijin still thinks that the M1A2 -> SEP V2 have the same armor from the Swedish trials which was an export tank without DU.

the problem is also in how Aiming works in this game, because the gun gun moves as easy as moving the mouse, it follows the mouse movements perfectly, there is no "machine feeling" like without stabilizers in lower tiers ... and because of that players simply can aim at weakspots ... look at other tank games like Squad or GHPC where aiming is more realistic and hitting those weakspots wouldnt be as easy

It boils down to IRL it’s not an issue because tank combat is different and usually Long range, and the usage of tank sights and actually aiming However in War Thunder where most tank combat is under 1km and you have point and click mouse and gun barrel pov it’s A lot easier to exploit the weak spots of vehicles Like the T series of tanks. The drivers optics is basically the same as the Abrams turret ring. Hit there and there’s a good chance the tank dies.

Gaijin also needs to buff the IQ of the players, would help tremendously.

You can tell people who whine about the Abrams never play other nations like Italy or Japan where their MBTs have a weakspot as large as the whole tank

There was a bug report of the turret neck being volumetric and 260 mm + LOS that was acknowledged. In general it shouldn't spall so much when hit.

I got all my 30mm and 57mm auto cannons out these days due to all the Clickbait. The Clickbait is so easy to kill with auto cannons, does matter from front or side. 😂😂

That damned lower glacis is causes headache in every br i think

might have some short comings but i still like the abrams no matter what

imo abrams work well if used at the right range and position the problem is warthunder is full of flat shitty small ass maps even on top tier forcing people to brawl and thats where the other team could easily exploit the turret ring lot of it is skill issue on clickbait players but I think maps really dictates the meta in this fuqqing game could only pray not to get teamed up with US right now until we get more big maps

I remember hearing that the weakspot under the gun is a real thing, it's just that in real life you don't control tanks with a mouse and as such it's a one in a million kind of shot in the engagement range that tanks are at in real life. So they never really did anything about it.

As a Russian main that finally branched off into completing USA, Sweden, France, China and Germany. I've realized that its 100% the players. The US has a great top tier line up but everyone fails to utilize the strengths of the US. About 80% of the time if a US player dies they leave the game, and I can't tell if the majority of them or either blind or bots. Every single time I get teamed up with them even as Russia, I lose. There should be a serious case study opened up for US players on why they preform so poorly. I even saw them lose against a Full British team kek.

LoL I think that russians are way worse when it comes to weakspots. Driver's hatch,lower front armor weak and you can one shot it from side cause of ammo rack. Allmost same weakspots except abrams can sometimes survive from side shots.

Whatever you do the abrams still have useless armor because of this ring also the lower glacias is dead

Even if you made the turret cheeks and lower plate 1000 mm it won’t help, the Abrams has one of the biggest weak spots even if it was realistic I highly doubt the ring and the front plate would stop anything or negate damage

the biggest issue is the comical amount of spalling the turret ring does and the comically large snapshot every top tier mbt has on you, meanwhile t-XX's a dramatically smaller vehicle if you shoot drivers port will most of the time only kill the driver and maybe the breach and their only weakspot that can somewhat reliably kill them is the lower which means there's pretty much 0 places you can snapshot and disable or kill T-XX's

Not so much an issue when peeking over hills. But most other tanks at each abram’s BR generally have a round that can penetrate you from most areas. In some cases, even your turret cheeks aren’t safe (base M1A1 is the biggest offender here, facing DM53 without the upgraded turret cheek armor). It’s kind of sad, really. At the end of the day, the Abrams really is just a mediocre tank at best- a glass cannon, if you will, but only until M900/M829A1

The SEP v3 has increased armor in the turret cheeks. The upper front plate was thickened to 51mm. The edge of the turret cheeks where they meet the mantlet is thicker in images. DU armor would be hard to "model" since Gaijin doesn't know the effectiveness, but I'm sure they could do a bit of math related to density to figure out RHA equivalent. I'm not sure if the LFP got any armor upgrades.

People who complain to Gaijin should forward their complaints to General dynamics because it's their design flaw not gaijin's.

Lower hull plate buff is pointless till they fix ther ring

The list of problems that cause this weak spot is fairly expansive. Least of which is Gaijin's modelling of the tank. Number one is that engagement distances are super short (although so are the pen table distances) leading to being able to pick exactly where on the target you want to hit. But you also have to consider the differences in optics where real world optics, especially thermals, give much less target detail and are harder to see through. And the optics in war thunder realistic battles are located inside the barrel of the gun so you don't need to compensate for parallax. The controls of a tank turret are also less precise in reality. But also even with the reality of the ufp being designed to shatter apfsds (I suspect gaijin treats apfsds rounds the same as any ww2 era solid shot because it was likely easier that way so until they make apfsds degrade it'll be that way) it still wouldn't matter much as long as the tanks can pick their shot as in the real world the round getting rammed between the turret and hull at mach 4+ would still likely weld the turret to the hull or otherwise leave the turret broken.

no my abrams dont suffer from this problem, because I dont play bad tanks

The trouble is real tanks don’t engage from 200m away in 99/100 engagements. Neither does the camera sit on the front of the barrel. Yes sim and options allows for correct sight placement. Furthermore, although accuracy of the shells are great, they are not accurate to say literal inches of dispersion so the armour is amazing when firing from long distances as the “weak spots” are tiny at those distances but not in Warthunder.

Well the biggest problem is the turret ring gives about 1/5 the LOS thickness it should at about 50mm while even measuring using Gaijin's own model shows it's LOS thickness should be about 250mm. Not enough to make it immune to any tank dart but it'd at least keep it from being shredded frobtally by autocannons.

All i know is no Abrams has been lost to that shot under the breach so it shouldn't be a thing

I have had the Abrams for around 3 months now and have only been hit in the ring like 3 times lol... probably just lucky

a 76mm form a m4 can pen the m1 form the front and yes iv done it in rb just to make sure it was not me

If I don’t killed the other person on one shot I turn my turret slightly so they can’t shoot that spot

you can also over pressure from the commander mg

M1 is one of the weakest mbt on wt

Abrams armour is fine as long as you don’t brawl… If you try and brawl you are done for. It’s nice for sniping with the good shell, turret cheek armour and good sights

The way Warthunder aiming model is made is what makes the Abrams really bad the easy mouse aim now if they made it like GHPC style of aiming because thats what IRL tanks are like it would be extremely hard to hit that spot now what I do think should happen is They should add the M829A3 that would make the abrams slightly better

gaijin model the abram with a big ass turret ring also the armor is about 200mm not 50 because the turret has to be fix.

why the turret ring always break in every shot i take when i play m1a1? Dont even need a direct hit on it to break and removes completely the option to fireback... I feel that 80% of the time i die because the ring is broke... I dont have this problem on other nations tanks

I have the opposite problem. I get hit in the lfp more

if the turret ring Is so bad on the Abram’s then the drivers port on t-series tanks should be just as awful, since they seem to just deflect shots despite being a major weak spot irl

laughing in Ariete

Seeing the influx of even more Click Bait players with the sale it's first and foremost a player base issue. I've never had an easier time farming oblivious players making suicidal plays 🤷 Not saying the Abrams are strong in-game, they're not... But they're mobile and punchy... But that mobility is actually what kills all the newbies even faster 🤷 The Fuji players manage a lot better... How do you explain that? It's super chewy. It relies solely on its mobility for survival.

They need to add the sepv3 since it has without a doubt du in the hull. It would help a little.

IRL that upper plate would not ricochet modern APFSDS It's too thin to bounce

If the spall liner actually worked on this tank in the game, it would make this a way tougher tank

I love playing against abrams tanks. You just take bmp2m or 2s38 with aphe and mass kill them under the turret. It takes 1x30mm APFSDS shell to completely disable abrams if you shoot it under the turret and 2-3 more to kill (with firerate of bmp2m it takesl ike 1.5s) and for 2s38 APHE it's always a oneshot. I always use these vehicles to prove wrong people who call abrams best and (don't laugh) well protected MBT in the game.

It a 40 year old tank/design there a reason the m1e3 will bring massive changes.

It's not Gaijins fault. As far as I'm concerned they modeled it correctly. Even if it was uparmored it wouldnt stop any 9.0 and Above APFSDS. In real life you have really small chance of hitting weakspot but in war thunder any experienced player can hit it with relative ease. You can just whine about turret ring untill Gaijin nerfs Strvs and Leopard 2A7s and adds bigger weakspots

Idk if a shot to the turret ring would destroy the Abrams irl, but I view this problem as the equivalent to the soviet/russian tanks which have terrible reverse speed and low gun depression by design

Isn’t the turret ring modeled completely incorrectly?

Stronger lower glacis would help a lot, especially at longer distances.

just give the m1a2 and the 11.3 varients a spall liner in the turret ring. that will make it actually difficult to klll

Let’s hope our enemies irl aren’t good at aiming .3.

0:07, leopard is better at that, more armored better apfsds and same mobility idk why people glaze m1 so much, literally worst nato tank at 10.3 imo, m60-2000 is better than this (once again imo)

Except irl the whole ufp is a guaranteed kill spot anyway. It only has 280mm los protection and unlike in game it won't ricochet apfsds let alone one with 500-700 mm pen Only suited for t62 gun with 300mm pen

tbf that is a VERY small zone to hit. Complete front and turret check protection. Leos on the other hand you can just point and click anywhere on them.

Everyone losing their minds that the M1 Abrams is turning out to be kind of a cruddy tank in comparison to the rest of NATO and even Russia forgetting that the M1 is a 1970's design. To put it in prospective the T-90 was made in the 1990's... China's main battle tank was made in the 2000's. I know it's a hard pill to swallow but the M1 is getting outdated.

One thing I learned about playing this shit game, is that in most cases, you can't blame the game Blame the people and design firms that made your favorite tank so ass

American mains when their tank that is one of the most mobile mbts and has one of the best reloads isnt completly invulnerable from the front:

The thing is in ukrainian abrams got destroyed by hit on the ring

here we go again, why is it always the american crying the loudest? I sont see an issue here...

They don’t need to fix the American m1 …… just face the fact that American tank are trash and always will be 😂

I have no complains. Since the hellfires and mavericks buff this is the most balanced top tier has ever being. I average 8-10 kills per games easy as US. I actually feels like they spall little less this update. Yes, player base still terrible, make sure to squad up with some decent players before joining and you will do great. Unless you are the problem, then go back to lower tiers or pick another nation to screw over.