• 2 months ago
With the release of the Seek and Destroy Update for War Thunder, its time to have a quick rundown of all of the new tanks being introduced in the update, from the new American T1E1 (90) Heavy Tank to the Soviet ZSU-23-4M2 and everything in between!

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Game: War Thunder ⬅️

USA: 00:00
Germany: 01:50
Soviet/Russian: 02:42
UK: 04:18
Japan: 06:13
China: 08:02
Italy: 11:54
France: 12:11
Sweden: 14:23
Israel: 16:18
Final Thoughts: 17:48

#warthunder #tanks #danceofdragons #released #update #ifv #spaa
Transcript
00:00So with the release of the Dance of Dragons update, I figured it was time to take a look
00:04at all of the new ground vehicles that have been introduced in the new update.
00:08And we're going to be starting off with the American Tech Tree and the T1E1-90 Heavy Tank,
00:14which is coming in at rank 3 battle rating 5.7 between the two Jumbo variants,
00:19the 75mm and 76mm variants. And the main difference between this and the original T1E1
00:26is the addition of a 90mm cannon and the removal of the gun stabiliser.
00:32But it's still got all the same benefits of the old T1E1, and of course the old disadvantages.
00:37It doesn't have the best armour in the world, unfortunately. 101mm for the lower glasses,
00:43only about 82mm for the upper hull, and then maybe up to 100mm for the mantlet,
00:48but that's only if you hit the right place. You can easily just go through one of the
00:53armour plates here. But you've got that very good transmission,
00:56so you've got a top speed of 23.1mph forwards and backwards. And of course,
01:01because we've now got that 90mm gun, we can now pack a little bit more punch against more
01:06heavily armoured enemies. And we still retain that 37mm gun for against lighter armoured vehicles,
01:12and the 90mm gun does provide a little bit more parity against some more heavily armoured
01:16vehicles like the Panther. And all in all, this just seems to be basically just a straight upgrade
01:21from the original T1E1, so I think this is a very good addition to the American Heavy Tank line-up.
01:27And yeah, I think this is going to be a very fun vehicle for players to use in War Thunder.
01:34Other than that, the only other major addition is that the M41A1 has been given a visual update,
01:40so it does look a little bit more sharper than it used to, which is always welcome. There's
01:44been a few visual changes in this update, so it's nice to see them going back and doing some of the
01:48older vehicles. Then moving on to Germany, they only got the one extra vehicle, which is the Puma
01:54VJTF, which is folded with the original Puma. And the main difference between this and the
01:59original vehicle is the addition of the Spike LR2 anti-tank guided missiles. So these have
02:04got a penetration of 700mm, and it's got a tandem charge, so it should be good against
02:10ERA-equipped enemies, and it's got a lock range of 20km and a missile guidance time of 45 seconds.
02:17And like I say, this is broadly the same as the original Puma, so I'm not aware of any other
02:22major changes to this. You've still got the optical active protection system, you've still
02:26got your 30mm cannon, top speed of 44mph. Yeah, basically, as far as I'm aware, this is very
02:33similar to the original Puma, but I haven't really had much experience in using that vehicle, so
02:38I don't think I've missed anything, but please leave a comment below if I have.
02:42Then moving on to the Russians, they only got one new vehicle in this update, which is the ZSU-23-4M2,
02:48which comes between the ZSU-57-2 and 37-2 at rank 5, battle rating 7.3. And basically,
02:55this is a regular Shilka, but with the radar removed and double the ammunition complement,
03:01so 4000 rounds instead of 2000. So this is good in some ways, so having this at a lower battle
03:07rating will make this very lethal against late war prop aircraft and early jets. But of course,
03:13without the radar, you're going to have less warning of enemies coming for you, and with
03:16that extra ammunition, you're going to be a lot easier to ammo rack. And because you're at a lower
03:21battle rating, it might paradoxically do a little bit worse against enemy ground vehicles, because
03:26the original Shilka might go up against something like the Leopard, which has lighter armor. This
03:30will easily go up against Panthers and Tiger IIs, which have quite thick armor, so you might not
03:36necessarily be able to take those vehicles down very well, even if flanking. So some trade-offs
03:43that are good in some ways, but some trade-offs that are not very good in other ways. Then the
03:47other major change for the Russian tech tree is another visual change for the T-80U-E1, which,
03:53like I say, has been given a visual update, but has also been given a camouflage net that can be
03:58equipped to the vehicle. We take this for a test drive with the reference vehicle modifications,
04:04so it should be equipped. And so there is the camouflage net, which is, um, you know,
04:09that's kind of good to have. Not sure how much difference it's going to have in-game,
04:12but it's always nice to have the extra options regardless.
04:20Then moving on to Britain, again only one extra vehicle, which is the Stormer AD, between the
04:25Marksman and Stormer HVM, at Rank 7 Battle Rating 10.0. And unlike the later Stormer vehicle,
04:32this comes with a 25mm cannon. So this can fire your standard HFRAP and semi-armour-piercing
04:39high-explosive incendiary tracer shells, max penetration of 46mm. You can also have a belt
04:45with the semi-armour-piercing shells and a lot of high-explosive incendiary shells, so good for
04:50against enemy aircraft. Or you can fire a HFRAP majority belt, so better for against enemy ground
04:57forces. And then you've also got the Stinger missiles. So you can fire the FIM-92E and 92K.
05:04There doesn't seem to be much difference between these missiles, but the K does have a trigger
05:08radius of 1m, so presumably that'll detonate at 1m away from enemy targets, increasing the
05:14lethality. Other than that, they both have all-aspects targeting, a lock range in the rear
05:18aspect of 11km, all-aspect of 6km, and a missile guidance time of 15 seconds. Also comes with a
05:25laser rangefinder, thermal vision devices for the gunner, night vision for the driver, a 7.62mm
05:31machine gun here for against soft-skin vehicles. The gunner's got track IRST with a range of 10km
05:36and a zoom of 2.6-8x zoom. And then you've got your radar up here with a range of 11km. Pretty
05:42thin armour, but again, this isn't really meant for going up against enemy ground vehicles.
05:47And then you've got a fairly decent speed of 50mph forward and backwards on 7 gears.
05:52And you've also got a little bit of internal armour for your three-man crew.
05:56So again, this seems like a decent addition to the British tech tree, just filling out the
06:01anti-air line-up a little bit more, and you can see more of the
06:03damageable modules like the driver controls and the electronic equipment.
06:09So it's nice to see that's being added to new vehicles as well.
06:13Then moving on to Japan, they didn't get any new regular vehicles, but they got the CTWV
06:17RCV. Battle rating 9.7, rank 7. You can see a whole lot of spool liners and internal armour
06:25here. And this is armed with a 30mm Bushmaster II Mk44 cannon. So much like other vehicles using
06:31this weapon, you've got your APDS rounds, high-explosive incendiary tracers, and your
06:36top-tier APFSDS round. And of course, it comes with a two-plane gun stabiliser. It's got a scout
06:42UAV, can be fitted with smoke grenades, has thermal vision devices for the gunner, commander,
06:48and driver, and comes with a laser warning system and laser rangefinder. And the gunner's got zoom
06:53of 4x to 13.3, and the same zoom for the commander, whose optics are all the way back here.
06:59And armour isn't the best in the world, but it does have some external composite screens. So,
07:04good against other enemy IFVs, but not necessarily that good against enemy main battle tanks and the
07:09like. And your crew are quite spread out, so you've got your driver here at the front, you've
07:13got your commander and gunner in the turret itself, and then a machine gunner and loader right at the
07:17back here. So you've got a large crew, so some redundancy for against crew losses, and they're
07:21quite spread out, so one-shot kills are a little bit less likely. For example, if the turret gets
07:25taken out, the two crew at the back here can quickly fill in their spaces if they've managed
07:30to remain unharmed. And it's got a top speed of 69mph on 5 gears forward, 25mph on 2 gears
07:37backwards. And here's the traverse rate, so very fast traversing turret, very fast elevating turret,
07:44and here is its fire rate. So, pretty fast fire rate,
07:48good against lightly armoured vehicles, and against the flanks of enemy tanks.
07:58And there's your commander view.
08:02Then, moving on to China, they got two new vehicles in this update. First of all,
08:06we look at the Antelope ATS, which comes between the PGZ-04A and the TOR-M1, battle rating 10.3,
08:14rank 7. And this is basically just a truck with some surface-to-air missiles fitted to the back.
08:20So you've got a radar with 10km range, and you've got these AAM-TC-1L missile launchers,
08:27which fire the TC-1L missiles. So these have got a maximum overload of 35g, all aspects targeting,
08:3411km for rear-aspect targeting, only 3km for all-aspect targeting,
08:39missile guidance time of 60 seconds, and a trigger radius of 5m.
08:44And the gunner's got access to thermal vision devices, the driver night vision devices,
08:48and it's got a top speed of 61mph going forward on 6 gears, 7.5mph on 1 gear in reverse.
08:56And so the gunner's got optics with a zoom of 8x to 12x zoom.
08:59And then there's your three-man crew. Very vulnerable indeed. The commander can fire the
09:04main armament, but I'm going to be honest, I've struggled to see a situation where
09:07only one of these dies. I mean, you just need one bullet from the side to take out all of them.
09:12And if it's like half a metre to the right, then you can easily take out the fire control system,
09:16the radio, and the driver controls. Again, there's a lot of modules on here that can be easily
09:21destroyed. So it looks like it'll be a decent vehicle, but very vulnerable. You're not going
09:26to be able to go up against basically anything on the ground. You haven't even got a machine gun
09:31for basic defense, so it might be good against enemy aircraft, but vulnerable to basically
09:35everything else. Then the other vehicle is the Al-Khalid, which is a pack vehicle at rank 7,
09:41battle rating 10.7. So this was a joint venture between China and Pakistan, as far as I'm aware.
09:47So you've got the said PT-98 cannon, fires HEATFS shells, HE, two APFS DEOS rounds,
09:54and your HEV T-shell, so good against enemy ground targets and enemy air targets.
10:00You've got a 7.62mm machine gun in the craxle position, 12.7mm machine gun on the roof,
10:07comes with a two-plane gun stabiliser, reload rate of 7.1 seconds, a laser rangefinder, can be fitted
10:13with a dozer blade, has smoke grenades and a smoke generating system, and thermal vision devices for
10:19the gunner, commander and driver. You've got a whole bunch of composite armour and external ERA
10:24armour, so you've got composite armour at the turret and hull front, and ERA armour for the
10:30upper hull front and the turret. You've also got some slat armour around the sides and rear of the
10:36turret, so that's a little bit extra protection there. Though the external armour underneath
10:40doesn't look the best in the world, but again remember we have got some composite armour that
10:44shows up only in the internal view, and it's got a top speed of 48mph on 7 gears forward,
10:5021.9mph on 4 gears in reverse, and you've got a crew of 3, so you've got your commander and gunner
10:57in the turret here, and your driver at the front. Commander's got zoom of 6x, and the gunner's got
11:03zoom of 3x to 10x. There's the turret traverse rate, and the elevation, so not the fastest in
11:11the world but not the worst either. And the tank turns pretty well on the spot, so good for getting
11:16out of a tricky situation or if you need to turn quickly. And yeah, the ammunition seems to be
11:21pretty decent against enemy vehicles. So yeah, this'll probably be a decent vehicle, but I won't
11:26be buying it myself to be honest. There's also your driver and your commander view.
11:34And then last but not least, the ZTZ-99A has also been given an updated visual module, so
11:40that's how it now looks like in-game. And again, I haven't really used this vehicle,
11:44haven't looked at it in a very long time, but it does look a little bit sharper
11:47than what I would expect. So yeah, again it's good that they're going back and doing some of
11:51these visual changes. Then moving on to Italy, they didn't actually get a new vehicle, but the
11:56Freccia has been given the Janus optic system, so now the commander's got an optic system with 2.5x
12:03to 10x zoom. So yeah, it's good to see that's been added to the Freccia. Good that they've gone back
12:08and added that new module in. Then moving on to France, again it's another squadron vehicle,
12:13the CV-9035NL, rank 7, battle rating 9.7. Pretty similar to other vehicles of this type,
12:20so it's got the 35mm Bushmaster III cannon, fires APDS, high explosive incendiary tracer shells,
12:27armour-piercing incendiary tracer shells, and your top-tier APFSDS shells, and of course it
12:33comes with a two-plane gun stabiliser. It can be equipped with smoke grenades, got a 7.62mm
12:38coaxial machine gun, it's got a laser warning system and a laser rangefinder, thermal vision
12:44devices for the gunner and commander, only night vision for the driver. Armour is not the thickest
12:48in the world, only maxing out at 20mm for the front, but it does have this new composite armour,
12:53the side pro and a roof pro armour. So this looks like it protects more against kinetic
12:59shells than the regular composite screens, they only have like a 0.16 multiplier I believe against
13:04non-heat shells, so they're basically worthless, whereas this is still giving 42mm protection
13:09on a total of 60mm of armour, so it looks like it is a lot better against kinetic shells,
13:15but again that's only really going to help you against IFV-type vehicles. I mean, the side armour
13:21is just very bad, 10mm to 6mm, just adding a little bit of external composite armour is not
13:26going to particularly save you, though it does seem to be a lot thicker on the side, so 60mm,
13:31so I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe this will protect you against some of the
13:35less penetrating shells. Definitely seems better than regular composite armour,
13:39and then you've got a top speed of 48mph forward on 8 gears, 27.6mph on 4 gears,
13:45you've got internal spool liners and regular armour, and you've got your crew of three,
13:50driver up the front here, and your commander and gunner in the turret. Commander can also fire the
13:55main armament, he's got zoom of 1x to 6x zoom, gunner's got 8x zoom. And you can see more of
14:02these modules that can be damaged, like the fire control system, and here is the traverse
14:07and elevation of the gun, and here is the fire rate. So again, seems to be a pretty decent weapon,
14:16won't be the best against more heavily armoured vehicles, but you know, on their flanks and such,
14:20and it seems to turn pretty well on the spot. Then for the Swedes, we unfortunately only got
14:25the one vehicle, which is the Finnish KV-1 M1942, which is a premium vehicle in the Swedish tech
14:31tree, so it's for sale for 2,980 Golden Eagles, at a rating 5.0 rank 3. So I believe this KV
14:39variant hasn't actually been given to the Russians yet, because this is a later variant, so you've
14:44got this cast turret, it's quite rounded in areas. It's got the SIS-5 gun, which is already present
14:50in the Soviet tech tree, so it can fire a whole slew of shells, APHEBC shells, APCR, APBC,
14:58high explosive, shrapnel, smoke, basically all your standard shells that are usually on the SIS-5.
15:03You've got your coaxial machine gun, the armour is pretty good, so it looks like it has been
15:06given some external armour, so at the front here you've got 70mm plus 25mm, and again you can see
15:13that for the upper hull front, so this is going to be a very heavily armoured vehicle, very tough
15:17to take down, and it's just heavily armoured all over the place to be honest, like KV-1s are always
15:24very tough to take down if you haven't got the right tank, especially if you're in a downed tier.
15:28You've got your crew of five, driver and machine gunner at the front, loader, gunner and commander
15:32in the turret, top speed of 21.3mph forward and five gears, 3.8mph in reverse on one,
15:39and your gunner's got optics of 1.9-3.5x zoom. And here's how it turns on the spot,
15:47there's the traverse, you've also got that machine gun on the roof that traverses very quickly,
15:51but it hasn't got much elevation, so good if an unarmed vehicle comes up against you, but not
15:55necessarily the best for going up against enemy aircraft, though if they're coming in low that
16:00might be possible to engage them pretty quickly, you can see it's not got the best traverse in the world.
16:05Depression isn't the best either, but it's to be expected from this type of tank from this era.
16:11And yeah, I think this would be a pretty decent premium vehicle for the Swedish tech tree.
16:16Then, moving on, last but not least, we have the Israelis, again only one vehicle,
16:20which is the Terran VI, which comes in just before the Macava Mk1B, at rank 6, battle rating 8.7.
16:28And this, from what I understand, is basically just a T-62 that was captured by the British,
16:33a T-62 that was captured by the Israelis. I don't think it had massive modifications,
16:38so you can see it's got a 50 cal brand new machine gun on the turret here, and you've got
16:42your 30 cals at the back here. I'm pretty sure it even fires Soviet ammunition, I mean this looks
16:47like Soviet ammunition, so again, if you've used this T-62 before and the Soviet tech tree, you
16:51sort of know what you're going to get already. It comes with night vision devices for the gunner,
16:56commander, and driver, can't be fitted with smoke grenades or smoke generating system,
17:00which is a bit unfortunate. This seems to have broadly the same armor as the regular T-62,
17:06and unfortunately you've got those fuel tanks at the front here, so that might be a bit of
17:10a problem if you penetrated from the front. It's got a two-plane gun stabilizer, and you've got
17:14a crew of four, so your driver at the front here, gunner, commander, and loader in the turret.
17:19Gunner's got 3.5 to 7 times zoom, and the commander's got 1 times to 5 times zoom,
17:25and your top speed is 31mph forward on 5 gears, 4.7mph in reverse on 1 gear.
17:32So yeah, seems like a decent addition for the Israeli tech tree, but it's not exactly a
17:35groundbreaking vehicle either, though it also doesn't really fill a gap because we've already
17:39got an Israeli tank at 8.7 already from what I remember, so still a nice addition for the
17:45Israeli tech tree regardless. And so that is the ground vehicles that have been added in the Dance
17:50of Dragons update. So not the most ground vehicles in the world, but they do seem to be
17:56decent vehicles. I mean, they're not exactly going to set the world alight, at least for me. I mean,
18:00the vehicle I'm looking forward to the most probably is the T1E190, although even then,
18:05I'm probably not going to go for this straight away because, you know, I'm trying to advance
18:08the American tech tree at the moment. But I don't think we've had any particularly bad vehicles here,
18:12but yeah, just nothing that would particularly set the world alight for my liking anyway. I'm
18:16sure those of you who play the higher tiers are probably more excited for some of the vehicles
18:20like the SAM vehicles, which fair enough, you know, I'll probably be enjoying those vehicles
18:25when I get to the higher tiers myself. But yeah, for the moment I'm just quite happy that the T1E190
18:30has been added. It's just a shame that some nations haven't really got vehicles that haven't
18:34been premiums or squadron vehicles, but hopefully we'll get a more ground-focused update in the
18:38future. Anyway, that's all the ground vehicles of the Dance of Dragons update. Hopefully you've
18:42enjoyed this episode. I've been Torano, and I'll see you next time.

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