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T20s have the traditional US tank armor of the terrain they hide behind. Due to its tiny silhouette and good depression, it's one of the better armored tanks out there. =p

I have the devil's own time, sometimes, finding places where there is useful terrain to hide behind without getting cornered- and exposing my gun to the enemy while minimizing how much of the rest of me is exposed. Plus, the front turret armor on the T20 just isn't that impressive, so even hull down you're vulnerable unlike a US heavy... and for some reason it's always Germans shooting back, with those damn high-accuracy guns that can hit the turret from three states away.

Sigh. I'm probably just remembering all the times it went wrong.

Simon_Jester wrote:Yes, this is mostly a problem against Tier 5 and 6 tanks with high DPS, especially at short range (since the T20 benefits from the accurate 90mm gun, as a rule).

Although I have one fond and proud memory of stopping a T20 dead in its tracks and blowing it to hell and gone in my M3 Lee; I had the vast, unfair advantage of being able to tuck most of my tank behind a boulder with just the sponson gun sticking out, and I suspect something was wrong with his tank to prevent him from outflanking me.

My fondest T20 kill was a Tier 5 Sherman 105mm ass-shot. Killed the T20 in one shot despite the 30% HP remaining.

We lost, but I died hard dammit.

Yeah. 105s are pretty neat.

Hm. If I understand the gun accuracy stat correctly, then a gun with inherent accuracy of 0.4 will land shots in a Gaussian pattern with (roughly) a standard deviation of 0.4 meters per 100 meters of range.

The catch, when you think about this, is that your tank turret is considerably more than 0.8 meters wide. To actually get far enough away that your enemies miss a significant fraction of the time, even with mediocre guns, you have to back up to 200 meters or more. And it's very hard on most maps to force the enemy to fight you only at that distance. Much closer, and any good marksmen among the enemy will be able to hit your turret regardless.

Of course, you can compensate; the T20 lends itself to shoot-and-scoot.

You only need to show a little bit over half your turret to show your gun if you're careful, and it aims fast enough you don't have to do it for long. On a mechanics thing, I believe the .4 is actually two standard deviations and the ingame reticule shows three standard deviations. However, very little of that matters when you're poking only a small sliver of a very short turret out from behind cover. The turret's only about twice as tall as the gun after all, so it's at most .3 m tall, which further minimizes the area exposed. I've outsniped a Tiger handily at about 150-200m range just by being incredibly hard to hit.

This requires a degree of precision in where I park the tank that I have trouble achieving without spending more time with my turret hanging in the open than I would by poking out more to take the shot...

Just got a shiny new T29 and dropped the 90mm M3 in the baby. First match landed me only two kills, but I put some good pain on twelve other enemies. Best moment was bouncing a shot from a King Tiger off my mantlet before shooting him on the lower front and killing him. Gods, that felt nice.

The T-29 has a simple motto. It cannot lose if its enemies shoot at its front mantlet!

Zinegata wrote:The T-29 has a simple motto. It cannot lose if its enemies shoot at its front mantlet!

So you shoot 'em in side hull instead

How does the KV-5 run? I'm planning on grabbing one soon, to round out my KV series. I won't be deterred if it sucks, but I would like to know ahead of time.

From fighting them, it seems to be very well armored but slow and with a weak gun. However, it has a pretty high rate of fire, so it'll tear lower tiers apart.

The KV-5 is a fairly tough nut to crack, so long as you remember two important features: 1) The little R2D2 MG turret on the front is a giant weakspot and 2) everyone knows this. They're reasonably capable of fighting most things they'll encounter, though they seem to lose out to most other T8s in terms of damage output.

Just how light is the armor on that MG turret? What are the minimum weapons people have seen penetrate it reliably?

For the KV-5? I've seen all sorts.

I've Penned it with the 76mm M1A2 on an E8 Sherman, so that's ~130 avg Pen.
I've also PENNED it with a 90mm M3 HE round. Not just a 'splashed and did damage', but a 'it went actually through the armor and did 600 massive bonus damage'. But that likely was also a really great RNG roll.

When you hit it with the M1A2, were you penetrating reliably? Or was it like "shoot-bong, shoot-bong, shoot-pen, shoot-bong?"

You probably won't know, mind.

I felt like I was penetrating more than half the time. But I only encountered a KV-5 once at close enough ranges on the E8 though.

OK.

This sounds like something to test out, is there any way to do that?

You could test it in a training room, if you know somebody with a KV-5.

I can possibly try it tonight, though I haven't had any kind of consistent luck in penning R2-D2 with anything less than a 90mm M3 (160mm pen). The one time I remember taking on a KV-5 head on at short range with the M1A2 I don't remember penetrating more than once with something like 20 rounds fired, though I wasn't yet confident about shooting that turret so I think I aimed a lot of rounds at the main turret ring.

I've penned it every time with the 90mm on the Slugger, and regularly with the M1A2 machinegun on the E8 Sherman. So it's pretty damn unarmored.

When you guys aim at targets 300+ meters away, do you aim at center of mass or where you'd actually like to hit? And how has that worked out for you?

I try to cover as much of where I can penetrate when aiming at long range, with a bias towards putting the center of the reticule on it.

At 300 Meters, you'd be lucky just to get a hit, especially if the target is moving. Aim center-mass, as you'll never hit precise spots anyway. Plus, you lose ~20-30 percent penetration at that range anyway as a rule of thumb, so if you need to target spots, it's probably not going to work.

If you're against a target you can easily penetrate, you'll still aim center mass, as you want maximum hit probability anyway. It's how I use the E8's M1A2 when engaging most things Tier 6 and below. Just keep firing and hope for any hit. Even a 90mm or 88 should do that.

i tried it out during the test server, if you park your front behind a building angled inward at about 10 degrees so your back end hands out slightly you are very hard to kill, i've gotten 5 kills in a game while doing this including a T34 lowe and amx 13-90 that were attacking together. the T34's 120 could pen me sometimes but with the droid hidden and my side armor at 80ish degrees even that bounced a lot, the only place they could pen was the commander's hatch and that's a much smaller target than the radioman's little mg turret.

[___] building
/ / kv-5

There's a trick worth trying too. Called 'Sidescrapering', which is something any tank with a strong turret can do. Basically what was said above for the KV-5, but possible for any other vee.

Instead of traditionally pulling up and peaking around a corner to snap off a shot then retreating, you instead drive into the corner, letting the leading edge of your track meet the corner. Your turret will still be able to fire out at the enemy , but the enemy cannot actually hit your tank's hull from the front. They'll at best, hit the tracks, knocking them off and doing zero hitpoints of damage. The tracks'll deflect or eat up enough of the shell's energy before it goes into your sidehull armor at like a 70+ degree slope, virtually guarenteeing a bounce.

Diagram:
[___]building
....\_\ Tank

With the turret poking out straight ahead/slightly to the right, shooting.

Just came back from the Malinovka Proving Grounds with the following report: the 76mm M1A2 pens roughly 2/3rds of the time on the R2-D2 - though those were essentially ideal shots straight on.

Thanks guys, that's all good to know