I have noticed in the Pacific tourny as well as other games I have played with flame tanks that they seem to be unnervingly accurate. Obviously the game cannot portray the spouting of flames and thus shows it like a shell impacting with the flame graphics. I realize flame tanks/flamethrowers are pretty much an area effect sort of like a mortar but how realistic do you think they would be against an armored tank? In my mind I would think the armored target (tank) would buffer the heat very well as all that armor thickness would act as a heat shield. Of course maybe if it entered a firing slit the sludge mixture would enter? I can see tracks perhaps melting and such but what is the temperature output of a flame gun or flamethrower anyway?
Just a post to invoke feedback is all. In the Pacific Twilight tourny my Jap flame tanks are doing quite well when they get in close.
Well fire must do something to a tank or else the Soviets wouldn't have invented the Molotov cocktail.
I do know that on older tanks the episcopes were not sealed tight, thus the gasoline would be able to seep into the episcopes with no problems. But mostly they would use it on the engine compartment to melt hoses etc. Throwing it at the side of a tank turret wouldn't do a thing.
Hell we even use to have the gun blast come down the episcopes when the main gun was fired over the drivers hatch! Boy was that fun having a sheet of flame come down the scope. Always had to make sure you sat well back in your seat when they were shooting.
Obviously todays episcopes are well sealed incase of NBC wafare.
I just finished reading a book called CUTHROAT about a sherman tank driver in the pacific. They mounted a flame thrower to his tank were the bow MG should be. Well when they went to use it the naplam dribbled down the front of the tank and set the tank on fire! Luckily they also installed a fire extinguisher to the front of the tank in case that happened and they were able to put it out, but the author sure was freaking out!! It ended up the pressure tank had a leak and all the pressure had escaped so there wasn't enough to squirt the napalm out.
BTW - the crew hated it so much that they took the flamethrower out after the first try.
Flamethrowers in Win SPWW2 have accuracy rating of 20, which at just a quick glance, appears to be the highest accuracy rating of any weapon in the weapons lists
Maybe due to their area effect instead of having to be dead on hit? We have all seen the clips of the sherman flamethrowers covering a football field with napalm. That would make sense to me.
Accuracy 20 is not the highest in the game. A quick scan through the weapon list in the german OB for example shows quite a few weapons with 20+ cores (lmg, mmg, hmg, cmg, bmg's especially). One german flamethrower has the 20 accuracy, another 30. Higher still are the 'rottkapchen' (35) and naval artillery (60).
Flamethrowers basically have a similar accuracy as machineguns. Both are also foremost area effect weapons. The big difference is range. Flamethrowers have a range of only 1 or 2 while mg's an fire much further. So whenever an mg fires at more than range 2 it'll show a much smaller hit chance. You'll also tend to be firing it at soft targets like infantry which is much smaller and harder to hit than a tank for example. So when you fire at a tank with a flamethrower from range 1 you'll probably hit it. Fire at that same tank with a machinegun from range 1 and you'll have a similar chance of hitting it. The flamethrower will APPEAR to be much more accurate due to it's range limitation.
Flamethrowers are much more likely to hit a unit in their 'splash' area as a secondary effect. So the hits you may see are probably often secondary in nature.
They are more effective because the weapon doesn't rely on kinetic energy for it's effect. So there is much less loss of effectiveness (compared to the blast area and secondary effects of other weapons). The primairy way a flamethrower does damage (to a vehicle) is by disrupting vital systems onboard, the most common being motoric failures due to oxygen starvation for the engine. Many tanks had (small) leaks, fume build ups, small pools of spilled fuel, etc which could all start off a fire on board.
Narwan
Narwan Wrote:Accuracy 20 is not the highest in the game. A quick scan through the weapon list in the german OB for example shows quite a few weapons with 20+ cores (lmg, mmg, hmg, cmg, bmg's especially). One german flamethrower has the 20 accuracy, another 30. Higher still are the 'rottkapchen' (35) and naval artillery (60).
Narwan
Yes, I just took a quick glance at the weapons list..., missed those.
