Gunner, HEAT, PC’s latest hot-under-the-collar Haus, the early* Leopard 1, hits hard, goes like stink, and cuts quite a dash in its scalloped skirt. However, because it does its rangefinding with two lenses rather than a laser beam, using it effectively in long-range engagements can be tricky.
* pre 1A5
Unlike the laser-less M60A1 which utilises a coincidence rangefinder, early Leopards rely on a stereoscopic device for judging distance. In game this means selecting the rangefinder with E, and then altering range with a combination of ctrl and mouse wheel until the target comes into focus.
At short and medium range the difference between a crisp Warsaw Pact AFV and a blurry one isn’t hard to distinguish. It’s when your target is a distant horizon pimple and there’s a bit of smoke about that you can find yourself leaning closer to your screen.
The West German big cat comes with a small supply of HESH ammo – a round type previously unseen in GHPC. Interestingly, some of the information in this primer from Radian…
“Much like real-life HESH rounds, the 105mm HESH featured in the Leopard A1 loadout is most effective against lightly armored targets and when impacting a perpendicular or mildly angled surface. Some amount of angle will make the round more effective, but too much angle will cause it to rapidly become useless, possibly failing to detonate at all. In addition, the armor scab tends to blast off in the normal direction (directly away from the plane of the armor face), so the target’s shape will have a large influence on whether you damage anything important inside of it.”
…seems to contradict Wikipedia assertions. According to Wikipedia, lightly armoured AFVs aren’t necessarily optimal targets for squash head rounds:
“In general, the higher the armour thickness, the higher the scab weight will be.”
Also nice to see some small visual things like infantry animations being added.
GHPC makes me wish I had a rig with more horsepower.
Light armour I’d expect to suffer comparable to a brick wall: HESH presents a big bang across a broad surface area that creates a big hole. Certainly HESH is recognised as effective against light armour and structures.
The commentary on spall size is accurate, and there probably is (for a given size/weight of shell) a damage curve where vehicle kill chance decreases as armour increases, then rises again as spall size increases. I’d like to do experiments but Bovington took out a restraining order.
I think it’s plausible that both GHPC and Wikipedia are correct, given appropriate context.