War Thunder's Ammo Problem 

As always, if you have any feedback regarding ammunition, leave it in a comment. I'll pass it along to Gaijin.

war thunder’s “____” problem could be a very long playlist

Before I deleted WT for the most recent time, I was grinding the British tree. The issue with solid shot was very frustrating, particularly with the 17 pounder. I was fighting tanks that could reliably one shot me, whereas my ability to do damage was very limited. Furthermore, I couldn't reverse out of the way because most WWII British tanks have the painfully short reverse gears. IRL, velocity has a big impact on damage and spalling, so a gun like the 17 pounder shouldn't feel so weak. Post war testing showed that for medium caliber guns, solid shot was roughly comparable to APHE regarding post pen damage. Spalling reducing against thicker armor actually makes sense, since in real life when a shell hits a plate it can only barely penetrate, not much of the shell actually makes it through to the other side

"It's fixed" - Gaijin, creators of the cancel button that puts you into a match instantly

The most painful tank to shoot solid shot at is an LVT. There is so much space between crew members and equipment

Another problem i have is modern vehicles lacking access to shells they'd fire in real life like in the case of the XM 8 I believe gaijin should make your vehicles BR depend on your ammo choice. This would improve realism and increase the amount of vehicles you can use in a line up

I myself can say that HEAT got nerfed at some point. Sherman 105 sometimes doesn't do any damage to target or minimal at best.

Another thing, HEAT/HEATFS exploading on some leaves... Or a fence, while heat-shielding on a M46 for example is useless.

The worst is when you need to grind for a top level round on a bunch of tanks. On things like the PT76, the grind to get the CheatFS round makes you almost want to keep the BT-5 in your lineup.

You state the problem with APHE very well. It’s great when you’re on the giving end and is horrible when you’re on the receiving end. I can’t tell you how many times the inside of my Sherman got “nuked” by a Tiger I’s shell. It didn’t hit or destroy anything when it penetrated but then exploded and destroyed everything!

Happy Valentines Yaw, I Hope You Guy's Are Showing Much Love To Your Loved One's!

Something I find quite frustrating is the inconsistency of spall behavior, the amount of spall produced is practically random and how it bounces even more so. Sometimes I’ll get shot centermass and one crew just eats the three pieces of spall, I’ll then be shot again and my tank folds into itself with 100+ pieces is spall from the same type of round. Also as mentioned, side skirts are hellish I’ll hit a panther flat on the side skirt with APCR and poof, gone

Earlier today, i was hit by an T-34 in my Jagdpanzer IV, i was using the addonarmor, which manifestes itself as spare tracks on the front of the tank. He hit a shot that bounced off the bottom of the track, which then went straight into my tank at a 90 degree angle, which killed my entire crew. I am just thinking that it is a bit weird that the shot can bounce like that from something that is just sitting loosly on the tank.

The carrots I shot during that April fools event were more realistic then the current apsfds

APCR is so bad too. It's supposed to give more pen than APHE, especially in WW2 tanks, but it will bounce most of the time. It's so useless.

Idk how about you but I find it lazy that apfsds damage depends more on gun caliber than round caliber, of course spall would also depend on velocity and etc but it’s amount is what feels inconsistent

Darts got nerfed across the board by accident? That explains the fact that AGS's M735 can't pen the LFP of a TURMS-T when I fired at one less than 10 m 3-4 times

APCR/HVAP is also one the round types that sits in a bad spot. It doesn’t have the damage to outright kill most tanks in one hit like APDS does and it also performs extraordinarily poorly against angled armor. In the past it had a use against thick flat plates, but now after Gaijin implemented some changes to most APCR penetration, it has become extremely useless on most vehicles it is found on, mostly due to how the penetration increase offered by APCR is only marginally better than what APCBC already gives. Some great examples of this is the APCR for the 76 Sherman, the long 88 for Germany , and the US 105mm and 120mm cannons.

When it comes to post-penetration damage, I feel like gaijin's always used this as a method to prevent high-pen shells from overperforming at "armour meta" BRs. APDS is a pretty good example. If we look at APDS when tanks like the centurion mk1 were added, before even the french tech tree was in, 17pdr apds was pretty capable of one-shotting large tanks like the panther and tiger through centre of mass hits. Previously, you could only really find APDS on top tier (for the time) tanks like the cent mk.10 and leopard 1, etc. Shortly afterwards, APDS had its post-penetration damage significantly nerfed, and it hasn't really been improved since other than for "high calibre" APDS like is seen on the conqueror and chieftains. Speaking of the french, those who were playing when france was added to ground forces probably remember that solid AP saw a pretty major buff in post-pen damage around the same time, when previously it had been no better than low-calibre APDS. By contrast, APFSDS (which should essentially do the same damage; both are sub-calibre munitions) does more "consistent" damage, or at least used to until very recently. Again, I think this is because it was previously only really found on top tier vehicles, where everybody was firing it. These days there are far more lower BR vehicles and IFVs which fire it too, typically around the 8.3-8.7 mark, so it's ended up being tweaked to match the lower echelons of where it's found. This is a problem which I don't think is too easy to address. When it comes to solutions, either removing the more "modern" ammos from lower BR vehicles which don't need it (back to the cent mk.1 for example, it doesn't really require APDS these days with the improved solid AP) and re-buffing them to their more consistent states or more frequently adjusting how these rounds perform to better fit the flow of the game's meta, preventing rounds from falling behind in consistency more often.

I have had a 152mm aphe shell hit the 10mm skirt plate on a panzer 4 and disappear. Oh yeah, I hit it at 90 degree angle to the side of the tank.

I really think that apfsds should definitely be buffed (post damage) plus the m103 solid shot still has severe issues going through anything. I remember one shoting Leo’s but now it just bounces randomly.

The fact that you're getting 100fps at times with a 3080 in War Thunder is pretty crazy. Could you possibly make a video similar to your performance analysis when 2.0 came out again? I've definitely noticed a degrade in performance over last years updates despite no substantial additions to the graphical fidelity.

APCR. There is literally no reason to take it out unless you have no choice. I don’t think I need to explain how inexplicably bad it’s performance is against the slightest angle and it makes some vehicles stock grind near-intolerable

one more note: APCR is absolutely garbage in its current state.

APHE explodes in a perfect sphere in game, if you pen the turret, it will probably kill the driver too for some reason, even though things like 76mm APHE have less explosive filler than a hand grenade and produces a cone of shrapnel like AP.

Having worked on bugs for years, I can tell you that a LOT of the issues you mentioned towards the end of your video are related to being a distributed game: Not everything you see is as the serve sees it due to latency

Another thing is with HESH, what it should be doing is if it hits at an angle it should do more damage or the same damage as hitting a flat surface. What I'm noticing is if it hits a flat surface there's devastation, if you hit at a slight angle, the round goes to space or across the atlantic and hits meemaw's home.

I don't know what makes me more sad, the fact that those (and other) issues on core mechanics exist or the fact that they will probably never fix them because you know, money is better than a perfectly working game

That clip at the end was so nice.

There are three core pillars in tank combat. Firepower, speed, firepower. Once you get above like 6.0, armor is basically pointless. You'll pen almost everything you go against as long as you are using a TD, light tank, or medium tank.

I just wanted to say that Spookston has come a long way and is still a great war thunder youtuber. Thanks for all you talk about with us Spookston.

I think the best example of this is brits. Brits in wt were always underpowered for me, never being able to one shot like ahpe. It always bugged me but I finally looked up why the brits never used aphe. Aphe does not explode in a sphere. Aphe explodes in a cone and testing showed that the cone didn't offer enough of an advantage over solid shot.

4:15 I was the dip$hit in the AH-1F lmao good shot!

Gaijin: The Maus is indestructible. Real life: The Maus can be destroyed by a single person kamikaze with a greanade.

3:30 i was waiting a year to hear it... finally u said that on video. i hope gaijin will fix this.

Don’t forget Hesh getting absorbed by a gun barrel or tracks on a bmp when the impact would blast a 183 mm hole and crack it open like a can when fired from an FV4005

Mans built different. The shot at the end taking out a plane, chefs kiss

Happy valentines day spookston love ur vids!

APHE should have the chance to just shatter depending on angle and armor type and then not explode and isntead break into parts, reducing penetratve power. That's why solid shot was prefered cause it reduced the risk of the round just breaking up or the fuze failing.

Speaking of ammo: Sweden MBTs need better apfsds

next vid: war thunders "war thunder" problem

You know, I noticed that my M4A3 76s AP shot seemed worse. I remember it having pretty good pen, and the damage being good. Now its just..worse than the APHE in every way, I used to carry 3 different shell types but now its just APHE and HVAP I honestly loved having different ammo types that truely felt useful in different situations, but i guess it is nice just loading APHE only I reckon

How about firing a 17pdr at the middle of the front of a T-34-57’s turret and getting non-penetration at close range? I don’t care how many armour plates have stacked up under there, be it 2 or even 3, there’s no way that gun doesn’t go through with its basically 200mm of penetration. Considering Russian shells and armour are vastly over performing, and British shells are vastly underperforming, I have to ask whether there actually is some sort of bias. Not necessarily towards Russian vehicles, but at least against British vehicles. The fact that the firefly is rated at a significantly lower BR than the Sherman 76 should be a dead giveaway that something isn’t right, and that’s been staring them in the face for years now. Same for the Achilles.

Unrelated: I believe warthunder needs a ranking system based upon K/D/A+ Critical hits per match+ assists and scouting+ number of bounces you take per match ( you already get a reward for bouncing a number of shots so the groundwork is already laid out). The ranking system would need to based upon game mode for each country

Here's a crazy thought, make the game historically accurate. If your chosen country has garbage tanks... oh well.. is what it is. Gaijin could literally pick up the latest Janes book and make the game work

I would like to add my friends experience of a apfsds round barely glancing off the top of his amx-30 DCA turret sending what looked like a full load of shrapnel straight down into all his crew. Confirmed what the game did in pen analysis, looked a bit sus. Its been at least a update ago so I don't know if it still does this. Great vid btw

Jut a few days ago I had my 20pdr APDS non-pen the back of a Tiger II's turret, because it hit where the escape hatch met the rear turret armour. I was less than 10 feet away

Nice work

It's not about specific ammo being inconsistent, it's about Gaijin tightening the screw when it comes to rigging the RNG so players need to spend more time grinding stuff, making tasks for the season and events. I have the same feelings in lower tiers where for example German flak 88 mm can bounce off of slopes of panthers and t34 fired at almost point-blank like with a vehicle length distance between barrel and the enemy. All the analysis that you are doing is happening on the client on what you can try to figure out with stuff that is on your client, but once you're in the match, you'll see magic bounces or magic shots where it doesn't make sense because game server has different configuration/behaves differently. Try to compare panther's front plate against flak/nashorn/waffentrager/vfw 88s and then try to shoot at it in game. you can't pen panther's front plate at close range even in arcade when whole front plate is showing up as green. It just doesn't happen, you need to send like 5 rounds at it before something pens. Any analysis in test drive, custom battles and armor analysis is meaningless for what's happening in the random battles where the game is tinkering odds to make sure you're spending more time grinding.

What about the fact that HESH is almost completely useless in most situations despite the fact that it was used as a primary anti-tank round by the british in weapons like the L2 BAT?

This along with APCR miraculously non penning any armor sloped at more than 70 degrees. I know there are odd times where APCR will pen angled armor but it's very inconsistent. There are a lot of times where 90 mm or any other caliber APCR will simply bounce off the front plate of a Marder 1, BMP, or even a PT 76 57 simply due to the angle being sufficient for it to ricochet. In reality a 90 mm projectile travelling at that velocity would never bounce off a plate that thin. With regards to volumetric armor, there are a lot of problems like you mentioned. One of the issues I commonly find are that armor plates with optics behind them somehow bounce shots twice as often as they should. Another is the obvious side skirts (I'm looking at you panthers, tigers and t34's/IS tanks) where the game believes that those areas have almost 1000 mm of armor due to the overlaps and angles so they will not pen in critical situations. IMO a firm rework of these features is required.

Spalling is the usual method of cracking a tank in real life but unfortunately they decided they hated physics at Gaijin.

Most annoying for me is having my APFSDS rounds just disappear because they clipped a twig of a chain link fence

I like to use the word "dexterity" when talking about the tri-way balance of combat vechicles. Firepower can encircle the topics of fire strenght, Armor covers the topic of taking damage (or tanking it no pun intended). Dexterity in difference to mobility is more broad, it encompasses how responsive a vechicle is on top of it's speed. It also refers to how fast it can deliver its attack and then hide, which of course also adds stealthiness to the mix.

I like for that insane snipe at the end.

4:03 we get it you're goated

my problem with ammo was that gaijin would say that X vehicle got bumped up for getting a 10% better pen round, or a half baked heat round, but then do something like putting the swedish APDS that cab pen a T-34-76 at 1.0, or the cheese wedge against tiger IIs because "the round only has X pen"

**Spookston posts a New video** Gaijin: *-Oh no, not again...*

There are more than 3, and every tank commander will tell you that. Carius also said that. Communications is one of the most important ones. Thats how outmatched german tanks were able to defeat russian armour in the early stages of Barbarossa. Communicating by Radios

It's such a pain when I'm trying to hit the cheek of a king tiger or a Russian t34 and watch it just barely nip the barrel or mantle and do absolutely nothing afterwords

Not to mention insanely inconsistent HEATFS rounds. I have only managed to consistently use PT 76B HEATFS to overpressure Marders.

fixing sound, fixing volumetric shells, and fixing aphe over performance would make the game legendary and truly esports ready...

Has anyone noticed that plane sounds have been off the past couple weeks? Like I am finding it harder to spot planes just by using sound.

Also, aphe don't have a laser rangefinder to know at which distance to explode. They use a timed detonator, usually 0.01 second, so the round can go through the entire tank and out the other side before exploding

Well said. Ive hit the side of the jumbo so many times with both the SU and ISU-152 and had the round vanish. I have to hit the front of the jumbo to kill it, side shots are too risky. Very frustrating

I noticed this with the HSTVL not being able to one shot reliably with 90 degree side shots on the t80s/t72s when hitting the ammo directly

The tiger 1 is a amazing example of rounds catching 2 surfaces at once. It seems flat and easy but the amount of times my shell clips the smallest edge just to get trapped into the void that is tiger one armor is insane.

there was balance between aphe and solid? iirc the former always had plenty of instances completely outshining the latter. aphe with good pen was no rare occurence at all and even after the ap buff, HE filler always was a huge convenience, not just a little more dmg. not that the snail will ever tone down aphe tho. i am confident they want the main nations to remain ez mode and make ohk remain common. i recall aphe doing far less damage at a very early point in gf, and i also read it was quite impopular. just to say that overperforming ammo serve a clear core gameplay purpose even if not all nations benefit from it. the snail rarely cared much about accurate post-pen, and that is unsurprising in a game where players have the whole tank as the avatar, with crews acting like fearless, biologically connected muscles.

BMPs take a ridiculous amount of damage and bounce things it would bave no possible chance to irl.

nothing made me more suicidal in war thunder than finding out a new vehicle I unlocked had stock apcr

Why does this man always sounds angry too every thing in history?

I hate how if I shoot the housing around the gun, the round acts like it hit an adamantine wall. The metal around the gun barrel alot of times is thinner than the armor, but the geometry somehow makes it unbreakable even when the round hits dead on.

Not to mention, basically anything about a round related to explosives is also pretty inconsistent APHEs will often not detonate if penetrating some weird angles and spots which aren't uncommon to shoot at This is a problem since APHE won't generate almost any spalling, the only damage it will deal is the shot going through something, but if you're firing an APHE, you're not exactly thinking of aiming at an exact point, but rather an area. I think APHE should generate almost as much spalling as an AP would. I know it doesn't as a way to balance a bit the high damage it already does, but like, a working APHE should already kill whatever is behind the armor, whether there's spalling or not It also should generate spalling mostly in order to be useful against light armor tanks who don't detonate big rounds. You can see it whatever way you think is more balanced, but I think that if a big, slow reloading gun shoots a lightly armored vehicle, the result can't be that it just goes through it without nothing happening at all, that's just ridiculous Shaped charges like HEAT and the ATGMs have unreliable damage, as the direction and amount of spalling they generate is often lower than it should or just weird. ATGMs in particular can hit 2 different spots at the same time, and they don't even have to be close. The case I've seen while playing is, an ATGM is fired to the rear of a vehicle, hits the rear of the chassis (like, the back, not the top of the tank), and also hits the lower part of the turret. The damage is applied twice, it needs some serious fixing

Community: Reasonable critic Gaijin: HeRp DeRp I LIKE MONEY!

What Gaijin has failed entirely in doing regarding volumetric, is introducing the shell taking the path of least resistance, which occurs IRL. Right now if he hit the corner with the impact being pretty much perpendicular to 1 plate, and along the other, the shell is basically guaranteed to either shatter and deliver miniscule damage or magically continue along the plate in a straight line, never deviating even 1cm from the course. This is basically ridiculous.

Playing the french currently and what I can say is that it isn't different to do a substantial amount of damage with solid shot, though there are a few times when shells will penetrate but do light damage to most things The most frustrating thing about this game is barely glancing off a plate and shell disappearing, leaving you to hope the other player didnt noticed, which they usually do

The air target belts on the Ho-103 is kinda good at the moment, its the only belt worth a damn for that gun but only good on the Ki-43 hayabusa for now and other aircrafts having it as their nose mounted machine guns.

great video thanks. Additionally: APHE rounds are like the name suggests filled with an explosive. This filler has a much lower density than the metal which would make up the space of the filler in the grenade, leading to less kinetic energy. Therfore, APHE having a higher penetration than comparable APCBC rounds ist straight-up nonsense.

The less residual pen the less damage, thats true for "solid" shots because they "pierce" at high speeds like needles. HEAT on the other side, "injects" explosive

The other issue with solid AP is it gets double nerfed by the formula. The k factor Gaijin uses is too high, so penetration is reduced. Then, the formula adds a .9x modifier to uncapped rounds, reducing the penetration even further. To make matters worse, Gaijin uses slope formulas that are meant to work with the maximum theoretical penetration of the round. Uncapped AP is then underperforming across the board. Also, the arbitrary ricochet chances need to go away.

Skoop, i know you dont make this type of videos, but can you make a video where you talk about settings, because i love how game see and i can do the same with mine

Just casually shot down an A-4E like it was nothing

I just had a bruh moment with dm 33 going througth t t72s ammo bascet hitting multiple rounds and charges. The game just told me that i destroyed ammo, but the tank was completely fine.

you might want to check out the drivershatches on the t34 tanks. There are some weird one shots on angled frontplates.

nothings better than quitting war thunder for a few months after over a year of trying to and still seeing the same issues if not more than when you quit

hey, very decent information! I am looking forward to self-sealing fuel tanks, in comparison to IRL russian ww2 aircraft majority of fuel tanks did not have anything related to self-sealing, while in game they have these special fuel tanks and their planes do not burn down.

Arcade has very odd ammunition since .. I was able to pen a tiger 2 front gun mask with and apds from American m41 from a 1.4 mile away and it went straight in between the cannon breach

A good way to fix the "Volumetric Shells Vanishing when they hit get stuck between two plates" would be to add a feature that, Once an APHE Shell reaches its Maximum Penetration, It blows up, Sending a part of it's explosive filler flying inside the Tank, As usually when these things happen, There should be enough of the shell popping into the inner side of the tank for a part of the explosive filler to be able to fly inside the tank and at lease damage it. Something similar could be added to Solid AP, But with the spalling instead of the explosive

3:50 My 500+ mm APFDS Round could not pen the side of a BMP-1 and the BMP was not angled or anything and it was point blank to the side, but somehow the round did not pen and the BMP Killed me. "War thunder is just great, nothing wrong" - Gajijn Probably

A few things I think should be changed: Sub 100mm APDS needs (and especially solid shot) needs to be more consistent in it's damage. Especially early tier brits are just painful with their solid shots where often you hit the ammo directly and nothing happens. I've also had cases where with a bulldog (76mm APDS) I shot a tiger II THRICE in the ammo rack, and it did not detonate. And I've had several occasions where shooting ammo with solid shots is just pointless. Additionally, some tanks just have godawful solid shots (looking at you m26) that make you wonder why they even make you go through them. They have no advantage over their APHE counterparts which is just... nonsensical. Because we know for a fact the m26' solid shot was better at penetration than the APHE shell. Especially the T33 shell that you use in war thunder should be able to penetrate up to 200mm of armour. Not be equal in penetration to the m82 shot. It would also make the m26 a much more viable tank since right now.. it literally can't even penetrate a panther through the hull, and it's supposed to be a considerably higher tiered vechile (lowest panther is 5.3 so that'd be a 1.0 downtier that it cannot reliably pen if not aiming for the exact same weakspot that a 76 sherman has to aim for) Additionally APHE needs to just straight up be nerfed a little bit, with some rare exceptions it's a guaranteed one hit kill if you penetrate which just does not seem accurate at all.

Pretty much agree with everything you said. Although one thing to note is that the playerbase has spent a serious amount of time with the way APHE shells work in game, and some players have started the game with it as such. Changing that is going to have serious ramifications for player comfort. I don't like it, but it's true.

A big thing is the difference between penetration (where the whole round enters the tank) vs perforation (where the round is destroyed or glances off, but the plate fails and generates spalling) an APHE that perforates rather than penetrates shouldn't deal explosive damage at all, since the round doesn't even enter the tank. Check out SY Simulations on youtube, he shows more accurate interactions.

Some ammo of the same type from different vehicles has glaring anomalies where the supposed "weaker" ammo by specification does far far more damage. Not just with a lucky or well placed shot, but consistently and repeatedly. When ammo with the same cap and say 20 mm less penetration manages front on penetrations again and again for one shot kills, but the supposed better ammo cannot even penetrate you have to wonder why. Why does Gaijin go out of their way to freak with specs so the numbers on the spec sheet are irrelevant to the gameplay?

I recently quit War Thunder, and I've gotta say you pointing out basic problems makes me glad I did. I did Britain as my first tech tree, and largely died in the first shot to many tanks. I first presumed it was because Britain's light and medium tanks were poorly armored, as an attempt to balance their above average speed and mobility. Meanwhile, I thought the above average penetration of British ammo was also supposed to be balanced by it's weaker after effect. But finding out these are problems endemic to APHE, really makes the whole game feel upside down and poor.

The panzer 4 eating 4 57mm solid shot rounds from my Valentine 😮

4:06 damn nice shot xd

We not going to talk about the fact that most top tier tanks start off with HEAT, when most contemporaries can be functionally immune to HEAT, not to mention that even if the breech is 99% locked and the loader ends up getting taken out, that the breech unlocks and the round magically goes flying back into the ammo rack?

I also think the game has a real issue with not modelling round tumbling after hitting objects or armor. Some shot traps make sense but when you're shooting a tank from the frontal plate and somehow it glances off and hits the chin of the turret, I highly doubt that shell would actually penetrate the second plate it hits off of

Speaking of volumetric. The Jagdtiger, the only Tiger II to get volumetric frontal armor has... a terrible implementation of the volumetric armor. The UFP should be a homogenous 15cm, the LFP a homogenous 10cm. The joint between them should be basically the same as the plate thickness, upper part 15cm, lower part 10cm. But for reasons only known to the snail, the UFP thins as it goes down very slightly, until it reaches the joint between the UFP and LFP. The problem is the LFP, as it's modeled as a heavily thinning plate is it goes down. This is not only innacurate (the bottom of the LFP plate was cut at an angle so it did not thin towards the bottom edge) but incredibly frustrating. The plate literally ends up becoming less than 30mm thickness, when it should be 100mm from top to bottom. And APHE with high post pen damage can abuse that, by penetrating somewhere they shouldn't, and magic grenade damage model killing the tank.

Yup, this sounds abput right. Tje Obj120 has the single biggest and heaviest apfsds in the game. But it does not deal more damage than 105mm apfsds.