DeltaV112
Posts: 45
Joined: 10/16/2014 Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: zgrssd quote:
This is not really the case, IRL howitzer-style guns on tanks(short 75mm guns, or the US 105mm and Soviet 122mm) were entirely displaced by high-velocity guns in similar calibers. You could mount even larger howitzer guns to tanks, but this wasn't done primarily because you don't actually get meaningfully improved effect against the sorts of targets that actually exist in the vast majority of cases. That just means it is impractical to put a howitzer on a modern tank with modern doctrines*. Or that a modern HV gun does so much damage with HE shells (Soft Attack/defense), there is no reason to get a bigger number. It does not mean there is no longer a difference between Howitzer and HV gun. *Opposedly in WW2 the tankers prefered the Howitzer over the HV gun, because tanks usually did not fight tanks back then: https://youtu.be/-ZKxmlpbwqk The difference is so small as to be irrelevant. Tanks still primarily fight infantry, in particular I'd look at Soviet doctrine which always favored the tank as an anti-infantry platform primarily(soviet ammunition loads were very HE-heavy in both WWII and the Cold War). If howitzers were really much better as anti-infantry weapons, you'd expect them if anyone to use them, but howitzer like guns basically disappear except on artillery vehicles in the Soviet arsenal post-WWII(the postwar 122mm is replaced by a high-power 122mm, and the 152mm has no successor platform). Ingame, firepower values on guns don't go high enough to reach diminishing returns for HV guns. Infantry have a baseline of 100 or maybe 200 hp(depending on if combat armor has come out) and a 105 HV gun gets a soft attack base of 175. Let's note that this means the 105 HV is weaker than the smallest howitzer available, the 25mm(unless combat armor is involved). That's, uh, way too much of an advantage for the howitzer. Practically a howitzer of the same weight as a gun is perhaps 25-50% larger in caliber, not 4-5 times as large. We're pretty likely with this gun(71%) to kill a 100 hp infantry, and somewhat likely to kill a 200 hp infantry, but that's if they don't have any bonuses from entrenchment/terrain and we have no terrain attack penalties. Get those in play and even 60mm howitzer starts to majorly outperform us with 400 soft attack. If we compare the sort of advantage in weight a howitzer has versus a high-power gun, it should perform roughly equal(i.e. a howitzer with the same caliber has around 1/2 to 2/3 the weight). I mean sure on the whole WW2 tankers bit, but at the same time WW2 doctrine favored building for more powerful anti-tank guns. The 76mm gun was intended to replace the 75mm gun wholesale, and the subsequent tank M26 had no equivalent to the 105mm howitzer at all. The only two howitzer-like guns the US would ever again mount for direct fire were the 152mm gun-launcher, which was to fit missiles(and was replaced by the 105mm/120mm in subsequent tank programs both light and heavy), and the 165mm which was a specialty weapon for combat engineers. Probably HV guns should only have a soft-attack penalty of 50%, making them hit major diminishing returns against troops without combat armor in almost any terrain/entrench and against troops with combat armor in most terrain/entrench by medium tanks with larger guns or heavy tanks. Otherwise as-is even heavy/monitor tanks with the largest HV guns are still seriously outperformed by even light/medium tanks with small howitzer guns which is really, really weird.
|