Tanks vs Ships

[Root]

I remember reading a book about an M48 battalion deployed to the Vietnam War and the author told a story of having to use his tank platoon to engage boats smuggling weapons along the coast at night. It got me thinking if it were possible for a tank vs ship battle to be interesting in War Thunder.

In WW2 during Normandy, a British destroyer was sunk by artillery, and we have self propelled arty in game, so maybe something like that.

[AttackerCat]

I remember this being brought up a lot when naval alpha testing started. The biggest issue is that of firepower imbalance.

For example:
KV-2, widely considered to be an HE derp gun, and one of the largest on a tank chassis in the game. 152mm gun. One of them, with a ~30 second reload.

We have ships with 203mm and 8-inch guns (and the Graf Spee with 280mm guns that have 140mm of armor). Some of those ships have between 6 guns for larger calibers and up to 10-15 of smaller calibers. With reloads ranging from a few seconds to about 20 seconds.

One single naval broadside from one ship is the equivalent of at least one artillery strike (the HE shells of arty in-game is 152mm). Now imagine an arty strike every few seconds, from a ship that might be 9-10km away where you have no hope to do anything to it in a tank.

Now what if you had multiple ships on the team?

Sure you might hope for aircraft to disrupt or distract ships, but in high tier naval ship AA is plenty to clear the air as it is, and a shore bombardment with no pause would just mean death for tanks. Imagine a plane that could drop the equivalent of a few thousand pounds of bombs just carpeting an area every 15 seconds.

In short: interesting idea, was discussed with alpha testers way back, but no gameplay benefit to it.

[CaptainSpacetime]

Sounds good as long as I'm the giant invincible battleship

[PFC Demigo [29th ID]]

I highly doubt it's gonna work especially if Gaijin adds the more dangerous CA or hell, BB into the game that can shoot 10km+

[Slyke]

With small boats, sure it can work. What would they be doing on one map with tanks, though? There's practically no way for the two to directly interact with each other, not in a meaningful way and on a 1 to 1 scale (it's always 1 player per vehicle and 1 vehicle per player). If they don't interact there's no reason to have them together. As for indirect interactions, those don't require the two to be present on the same map and are already a thing in "world war" events.

[Root]

Besides the historical testing of tanks being used as a mobile beach defense. Like in Phillipines with M2 Lee opposing Japanese Night landings on Bataan. Again, just a BR2.7 match. It's kind of like a shark vs gorrilla thing, or monkey vs robot. Two massively dissimilar combatants duking it out.