THEY DELETED THIS TANK BECAUSE HESH IS SO BAD - M728 CEV in War Thunder 

GET YOUR GLOW IN THE DARK TANK HERE: www.makeship.com/products/object-279-gitd-plush

Gaijin thought process: "If we fix HESH what would help sell this premium ... however it would also help British tanks" "We decided to delete the M728 CEV instead"

Gaijin after making it a premium pack: 🤡

Honestly, the first few mins of this vid explains why I feel that deliberately not hitting tanks is sometimes a better choice than aiming at them in the Cent AVRE. Often times I've gotten used to aiming at the ground or wall next to a tank because I know it's more likely to kill than hitting the enemy straight on lmao

hit track: act like HE. hit armor: act like shrapnel shell gaijin: works for me :)

Now for real life. I was an M728 gunner and commander for the 72nd Engineer Company of the 197th Inf BDE (Mechanized Separate) from 1985 to 1988. I can tell you the M135 Main Gun has a maximum effective range of 800 meters, a maximum range of 1000 meters, and the ammunition used is not called HESH, it is designated HEP (High Explosive Plastique). The M135 main gun is designated as a Demolition Gun, and it is intended to destroy objects like log cribs, bunkers, and other battlefield obstacles. The M728 was not intended to fight with other combat vehicles but a crew has to deal with what's in front of it and I did have the pleasure of gunning the M728 on the first, and only time that they were allowed to fire live rounds for Tank Gunnery during crew qualifications at Fort Benning, GA. It was the first and last time because, yes, our demolition guns demolished the range. I fired and scored a direct hit on an M48 target tank and the round tore the M48 apart. The shot was at night, I got the order to engage the tank from my TC, we had no laser range finder so distance was a visual estimate, he called it at 600 meters. I laid the gun on target, fired, and when the round hit the explosion was real, and the M48 was side -on to us, the target rocked back like it had been slapped, the engine deck which weighs probably 3000 pounds was ripped off and flew up into the air slowly rotating and spinning while burning. A couple of road wheels were burning and thrown perhaps as high as 20 meters up. There was an overall impression that a lot of other unidentifiable pieces/parts were flying all over. That tank would not have been able to continue fighting, and I don't think an enemy crew would have lived. The rest of the range, well the range personnel spent a week on bulldozers filling in the holes and repairing the other targets. The M48 I hit, they had to haul it off a bring a replacement. But all of this aside, while I did hit the enemy tank, the other two tank crews did not, and in a real situation probably would have been killed. The crews only got to train like this one time a year, and with nothing but visual range estimation and the targeting reticle to use for ranging shots, it's not an easy thing to do. I'd recommend shooting short before shooting long, a short shot at least throws up a ton of dirt and debris that will make it harder for the enemy to target you in return. Then you can hope he doesn't move while you quickly adjust and fire again hoping to score a hit. Which brings me to the next problem with the game, the reload time is stupidly wrong. It takes almost no more time to reload the M135 than any other manually loaded tank gun in service. I good loader will use the recoil of the main gun, to help lever open the breach so it's open as soon as it's been fired, there is no empty casing to extract as the entire thing does down range and only a small plastic white colored disk of plastic about the size of a quarter remains, the loader just reaches in and sweeps it out with his fingers. Much easier then dealing with a shell casing. Then the process is the same as any other tank, move the securing bar that keeps new rounds from falling out of the honeycombed ammo rack, pull out the next round and ram it into the breach with your fist, hit the release to close the breach, and yell "UP". Might have to take the electronic safety off, I forget. But in the end, the M728 reload is just as fast as any other tank not using an autoloader.

I remember when this thing was first added. I was scared of it at first but the amount of times I've been shot by HESH and literally nothing happens has taught me that this thing doesn't matter, so much to the point I'd run at one knowing its fate is sealed

Typical gaijin antics of just straight up deleting perfectly feasible vehicles from the game instead of fixing fundamental issues with said game

The AVRE is decent but it has the same issues with HESH because Gaijin wont fix it. If I hit your tank with a 165mm hesh charge it should not exist.

That T44 deserves a medal. I wish my teammates held the line like he did and assist you in repairing when they could

From my HESH experience, this is what I’ve concluded. It *does* have a mechanic for overpressure, just modelled differently (and incorrectly) in relation to standard HE. The HESH shell on this thing and the AVRE has around 25kg of TNT, so any armour plate below around 66mm (calculated via the BM-31-12 HE rocket, as that has about the same HE filler as the AVRE shell) will be penetrated via the HE overpressure - rather than HESH mechanics. This is why stuff like the Bulldog is consistently one-tapped, despite having angled armour like the Tiger II, which as we know regularly survives UFP shots. Bulldogs are penned via the UFP with HE overpressure (which is an effectively guaranteed kill) whereas the Tiger II is penned via the UFP with HESH mechanics (which won’t one-tap cause HESH is scuffed). As mentioned, anything above this armour threshold (assume about 66mm) up until the HESH’s maximum penetration of 203mm, and penetration works via HESH rather than HE. As we’ve seen, this is consistently inconsistent. This is also why track shots and shooting *near* the tank seems to reliably one tap them - you will notice that you can kill tanks the same way with traditional HE. In these cases, the HESH kills via HE overpressure. There are two ways in which (in my eyes at least) which would fix HESH: • Give HESH the ability to overpressure the same way as HE does, not just directionally. Pretty self explanatory, as Odd talked about this himself. • Model the internal ricochet of spall inside the tank for HESH. This is the more developed solution, but in real life, spall fragments heavily ricochet inside of a tank. As you can see on the kill cam, all these spall fragments simply vanish after travelling adjacent from the impact spot. If even 10% of these were modelled to ricochet, again HESH would be both more realistic and also viable, although if HESH is to ever be fixed it would most likely be via the first option. Giving the AVRE back its LRF would also be welcome.

I find it weirdly funny that APHE, a shell largely phased out some 60-70 years ago, is amazing while modern shells used on tanks still in service today are often terribly modelled and do worse than the shells they replaced IRL.

You know Oddbawz, the one thing I love about your videos so much, making you probably my favorite WT creator, is the amount of interactivity in your videos. You spent the first four minutes explaining everything that was about to go down, like having a direct conversation with us

I had wanted this tank in game for years because it was the first tank I ever saw in person at my local military base. Then they released it as a premium, and it PERFORMS HORRIBLE. Such a genuine letdown

I remember this tank when it came out and seeing a handful for the first week afterwards, but I didn't know Gaijin removed it after the fact.

I used to play the FV4005 frequently a while ago, and I noticed that it was almost always a one shot kill if you hit the enemy tank in the turret side. For some reason, the higher the impact angle, the higher the "HE effect" the shell has is.

HESH is so bad a toddler punching the enemy would deal more damage

Calling this the worst premium when the 15cm Nebelwerfer exist lol

28:23 Oddbawz pulled an old school COD knife throw at the start of a match right there

I don't think HESH is modelled too poorly its more just the fact that in the real world if 3 out of the 5 guys in a tank get turned into a fine paste by a HESH shell larger than a toddler, the other 2 guys don't tend to stick around to try to fight back, unlike war thunder.

That yeet from spawn 😂 absolute Chad

lesson of the day: high caliber hesh goes to the track!

They made APHE the best shell in the game so logically they had to model HESH as if it were HEAP and make it the worst

I miss when HESH was BESH..............

19.50-20.10 "the is-2 got him"(The bulldog disappeared)😂😂

10:10 ah yes 5 people running into enemy spawn while the enemy has more capture points

I’m surprised as punishment they haven’t added to normal tech tree to try and make players spade it

The AVRE has now also been taken off the store when the holiday sales ended. They would rather get rid of all the tanks using this shell than actually put effort into fixing it lol. With that said, I still have fun with both the AVRE and this thing. The AVRE gets great ERA protection against HEAT slingers which are plentiful at this rank, and the CEV makes up with mobility, better base armour and a good .50 cal.

The time for plushies has come. *[edit]* that shot at 14:03 was really interesting: your shell produced a shaped charge (HEAT) effect because it hit right in the middle of a V-shaped armour part and squashed around it before detonating.

That shot in the intro reminds me of something a squadmate did during squad battles. It was top tier(11.0 at the time) and he spawned in the Brumbar on Stalingrad, randomly fired a shot over a building and got a kill on an LAV-AD 🤣 Epic stuff, well played.

28:20 legend says this man activated 500% RP booster

The fact that the M109A1 is the exact same BR as the FV4005 which only gets HESH, has a 40 second reload, and can only carry 12 rounds (compared to 13 seconds and 24 rounds on the M109) proves that Gaijin has no idea what they're doing with balance.

I barely see the Cent AVREs anymore, and when they released it they were everywhere. But once they added this I’ve seen maybe a total of 3 since.

I was once killed by one of these things in Object 268 when the HESH round landed about 20 or so feet in front of my tank, and it overpressured me. :/

Odd, I’ve been waiting for you to do a video on the Centurion AVREs less desirable brother, and here she is. ❤🎉🎉 keep up the content!

Classic Warthunder team moment around @10:40 - all caps lost but the entire team in the enemy spawn... and it is not even a German team LOL

Combat Engineer's Vehicle..... Struggles to repair own track..... DOH!

The biggest issue ive ever had with this thing is my HESH just having like a 50/50 chance of ghost shelling, mostly against tiger 2s and T-44s.

Thanks for the example of how messed up HESH is. I've had the same problem with the FV 4005, which has the best HESH shell in the game. Specifically, I shot 3 different Tiger I's in the lower front plate, the turret face, and the muzzle brake. The only one that died was the one that I shot in the muzzle brake.

Re: HESH being inconsistent.. just add it to the list, but yeah, it's worse than a lot of the other inconsistencies. To be honest, the only thing consistent about this game is that it's so consistently inconsistent.

On average I get around 5 kills a game with the AVRE. What's different about this one? I understand that HESH is pretty awful on every other vehicle I've tried but the AVRE (which I think has the same gun as this??) oneshots everything it comes across. I've even killed a Leopard 2 a kilometer away with it.

“it isn’t that bad” - me seeing this video right after i was about to try it for the first time

Never watched a RU-vid video this fresh

This is an engineer's vehicle for clearing obstacles, thus why it has the HESH round. Max range 1000 yards and NOT meant to engage other tanks.

I was looking for this the other day and I thought I was going crazy for not finding it

That guy spaming atgms from the cap was so funny :D

hey man good to see your doing well

From what I understand, a normal HE shell explodes outward in all directions, which is why the non-pen to the King Tiger’s turret face caved in the hull roof: both the turret face and hull roof were exposed to the same intensity of pressure. A HESH shell, on the other hand, is designed to direct its pressure wave most intensely through the part of the armor that the plasticized explosive is in contact with. Explosive force directed outward is wasted energy for a HESH shell, so it’s minimized. Hence the King Tiger’s hull roof was subjected to less overpressure than the turret face, as the shell is designed to direct the maximum amount of energy into the surface it contacts. HESH is almost like a shaped charge HEAT that doesn’t need to penetrate to cause damage. A HEAT shell penetrates by converting a liner cone into a hypersonic jet of molten metal into a pinpoint spot on the armor, where as HESH directs a shockwave through the armor structure itself. But in both cases, the force is not omnidirectional, like HE; it’s focused on a specific area:

I've grabbed AVRE in a recent sale and it performs well for me, ~600 kills in ~200 battles. HESH definitely performs a bit weird against heavy armored targets, takes awhile to figure out where to aim.

I was actually kinda tempted to get this recently because I like goofy ahh short barreled bonkers in the American tech tree (talkin to you Sherridan) and was confused when I saw it wasn’t there. A shame it’s gone, but at this point I expected it from a tank game…

I havent used it since before they messed with the hesh physics, so thank you for the forewarning lol

how hard could it be for gaijin to just roll it back to when HESH worked

To think that you need to aim for HESH specific weak spots with this thing and the AVRE is awful but I still love both of them so much, way too much fun. Great content as always Bawz

Oddbawz : it's so bad Also oddbawz : "insert montage clip on intro"

Poor HESH.. played the doom barn the other day to try have some laughs with friends, using big boom.. So many times you shoot a front plate that is not even 200mm thick, HESH doesn't pen and somehow kills one track..

The floor under the tank is a guaranteed 1 shot on anything I've faced in my AVRE

My great uncle was a crew member of one of these back in the 60s while he was stationed in Europe. Sadly I found this out after he passed away because of a photo of him driving it, and never got to ask him about it.

Loved this video!

I find it hilarious that is was removed on the basis of being bad, me and a mate picked it just prior to it getting removed and it is defiantly up there with some meta vehicles K/D wise. I mean the fact you can insta kill a Maus by hitting the gun mantle between the primary and secondary guns is ludicrous.

"Worst premium ever added" *Happy BM-8-24 noises*

Respect to your squad mate in match two

If I were that tiger I wouldn't be playing war thunder again for the day

Gotta respect that Zachlam for persistence though

im glad warthunder never became an esport. people would have lineups CS style for every spawn/cap with all the arty tanks being added.

The only reason why i dont have the Centurion avre is how long it takes for the range indication in your scope to change. It take about 15 seconds to go from 100m to 200m and i cant figure out how to make it fast enough to make it worth while

His performance matches the size of his barrel. All the german cats try to not giggle as they attempt to hide their amusement at his effort while they pretend to feel it.

In reality HESH shells kind of are the be all and end all of explosive shells. There's a damn good reason the UK army is only just now moving to tank guns that can't shoot it. Mostly that the advantages of HESH shells have been overshadowed by the advantages of the new generation of long rod APFSDS rounds that can't be fired through a rifled HESH compatible gun.

I watched something the other week about hesh. I think they were shooting 120mm hesh at some static tanks and were checking what damage it would do. From what I remember it tended to chip off one big piece of spalling rather than lots of little ones and generally just broke all kinds of internal parts and workings inside the tank when it goes off including fuel leaks. It also had a track hit which completely wrote the track off and tore parts away and the other test I remember is it hitting some plating to show effects on spaced armour and it just ripped the plates off and did it's job regardless. It's a really interesting ammo type and it would be cool if it had more of an impact in game.

I love this tank, so fun to arc shells, and most of the time aiming near the top is a kill

HE and HESH have always been poorly modeled. Gaijin can't give a shit about it. Like how shrapnel created has inherently no penetration and gets blocked by the first thing they hit, which incidentally is the same thing that causes a majority of the "volumetric" issues. They don't program further than the first interaction and then it just vanishes. I understand that programming internal ricochets and pieces of armour bouncing around the tank is impossible to put into the game but the fact the HE\HESH damage marker makes it look like you literally remove chunks of armour and then "only" killing like one part of the tank and a crew member is an insane lapse in thinking from gaijin's end. Also the shot at 36:21 kinda made me think that the reason your engine went out in the first match when facing that Tiger 2P is because he hit your engine with the MG through that armour hole that is apparently there. The only armour that shell seemed to interact with it the mudguard after that it's counted as shrapnel\past first interaction (or there is an actual armour hole) and just ignores armour. Gaijin should really look into the shell\shrapnel\spalling and armour interaction cus there is so much bullshit going in in there you could write a fucking book about it.

Hey look our favourite Scott has uploaded

you explained my agony with the British FV4005

Here's a thought. Tun a challenge with anything HESH with a big shell - AVRE, this thing, the 4005 - what have you. But exclusively shoot for tracks the whole video and see if that doesn't consistently kill more XD

28:22 I would not have been at al surprised if you were in a traditional HE derp tank, but with the horrendously modeled HESH? That is so goddamn funny.

I think I know why you can overpressure on track with that thing. It’s probably, because the game has some properties telling it, hesh is able to overpressure, but only on thin armored vehicles, as vehicles with big armor can’t be. So when hitting track, it will do the maths of overpressure working or not, while when hitting a tank somewhere else, it will not do that as it’s stoping after knowing it penned.

I've actually seen it twice in a match and was wondering what it was

This tank holds a special place in my heart since we got one on display near the local armory

I love this tank, got it when its released all you have to do is shoot under any tank you see and it will kill it. Genuinely surprised how much it is hated on

i love that zachlam player, he knew he was in a garbage box xd

I dont care how bad it is, it's still my first premium I ever bought so it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I was a gunner on this tank during desert storm, we used hep rounds that did massive damage, if I remember right it was 65 pounds of c4, I’m old now and it seems so long ago

I was gonna buy this tank on sale but i didn’t know they were gonna delete it, here I stand during winter sale devastated

The way HESH works is by aligning to the angle becoming 0° using the squash part, then explodes, causing fragmentation on the INSIDE.

i use this thing ALL THE TIME !!! i love that you finally showed it! I personally love this thing idk why its the worse but i use it and it does ok if you hit the hatch on the mantle of most tanks

love you big man

i had footage of myself getting 1200+ meter kills with that thing before hesh was nerfed into oblivion

Your in their spawn while they still have a base captured and are in the field. That doesn’t show the capability of the tank.

that thing with working HESH and a laser rangefinder would be so nice

I loved to dig a fighting position for a squad mate on a reverse slope for something like a "walley" M901 ITV. or a scorpion m56, the blade was more useful than the gun if you placed the position right.

It may not one-shot tanks like it should but holy cow is it resilient from what I saw.

"10/10 did not die to artillery" is my new steam review

every time I think of using hesh I look at this video to remind myself why I never touch it, especially vehicles that rely on it as a main ammo type.

I had somebody I suspect was using HESH, so I turned my T-44-100 to have the side skirt take the shots.

That Zachlam is a hero!

It's funny they literally tested the AVRE's cannon on a tiger 2 p irl and it absolutely annihilated the tank but gayjin is just like nah that never happened

"this tank is so bad they removed it from the game" proceeds to use the tank and preforms way better then I ever do in the game. 😢

I’m so glad I picked this up :) I’m a new player and I’m always upset that I missed certain tanks, sturmtiger, etc

Why is this man uploading at ten past one in the norning

When I first saw the plushie from the front, I thought it was a Blob Fish plushie.

I honesty love this thing. Got a nice 7.0 lineup with it