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IS-3's are invincible :(


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So how do you kill the Russian IS-3's? I've thrown King Tigers at them and I just get pounded. I try to maneuver in for side and rear shots, but anything that carries a gun big enough to penetrate can't seem to maneuver fast enough to get in behind them.

The only time I've managed to kill one was rushing one with infantry. I also disabled one once with a Sturm Tiger by knocking out the main gun.

And I thought the King Tigers were nasty :(

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There are 2 ways you can deal with them:

1/ play historical scenarios and not "what if"'s ;)

2/ learn how the Russians deal with Tigers and Panthers in 1943 and use those same tactics!!!

[ June 23, 2003, 08:33 PM: Message edited by: Mike ]

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A Panther has a low chance from the side and good from the rear at hundreds of meters. But not when the beast is hulldown.

A Jagdpanther should be fine from the side anytime and is fast, but probably not the right vehicle for flanking giving current turn rates.

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nothing like a rush of infantry against an IS-3. or you could get a bunch of anti-tank rifles and "ping" the IS-3 to death. The effect of the ATR on the IS-3 is negligible but it irritates the hell out of your human opponents.

seriously, the IS-3 made very little showing at the last stages of the war. so to have a bunch of IS-3s storming berlin is stretching it a bit.

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Originally posted by Stalin's Organ:

Oddly enough the Panther's GUN did KO some IS-3's historically - in the Sinia in 1967, when it was mounted on the French AMX-13 light tank!!

But they probably had better ammo by the time.

I really wonder how they pack so much armor into that beast and keep it so light. Look at the side armor, then the length and then the weight. Something doesn't fit here.

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The armor is not much thicker than the IS-2, just better sloped. The only place it is seriously thicker is the turret front, which is not a large area. The IS-3 and IS-2 both have about the same weight. How did they get the extra load onto the IS-3? Well, it is a foot shorter - height not length - than the IS-2.

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Originally posted by jtcm:

Why doesn't the IS-3 have the "pike shaped" angled front glacis in CMBB ? or am I missing something ?

They never got the chance to put in the Model for the JS-3. The armor data is spot on, but the visual model you see is just a place holder. There are still some other units that do that as well like the early war captured French tanks in german service.

As for the JS-3, put it hull down against a KT that is also hull down and watch what happens. It's like two giants shooting at each other with sling shots.

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Thanks Jason, I overlooked this.

Seems to me the JS-3 is the first in the Soviet steps to comprimise crew space for other factors even more than they did before and during WW2.

Not sure anything good ever came out of it in the last 50 years except they need less food for their tank units (only very small crewmembers).

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Soviets went with smaller, lower profile tanks than the west did. One way they acheived this was by removing the loader, and substituting him with a mechanized "auto loader". The only problem was that sometimes the auto loader would screw up and instead of loading a round into the breech and slamming it shut, it would grab the gunners arm, load it into the breech, and slam it shut. Gunners arm won't penetrate even an M-60A1 at 500 meters...

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Post war Soviet tanks were lower and that did help in terms of reduced tgt size.

However, its actually a disadavantage when attempting to find hull down positions because the gun can’t depress as far (on a lower vehicle) so you have to be higher on the feature to achieve the same amount of depression as a western tank and as a result expose more of the vehicle.

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Just a few notes:

The IS-3 does not yet have the autoloader, as well as the first port-war designs T-54/55 and T-62. The T-64 is the first autoloader design and if you look at the turret shape it seems to have helped the volume and shape of the profile a lot.

However, people often misunderstand how bad the autoloader is. Besides the mentioned problem of grabbing crewmembers by the clothes it also has a much slower rate of fire than manual loading and, maybe worst of all, the gun has to be elevated to be reloaded. So the enemy can see when and how long the tank is reloading. In addition, there are many duties around a tank where a fourth man comes in handy.

The low maximum depression of the gun is already in all WW2 designs, including the SP guns. The SU-100 can be used from hulldown a great deal more in CMBB than in real life.

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Originally posted by gibsonm:

However, its actually a disadavantage when attempting to find hull down positions because the gun can’t depress as far (on a lower vehicle) so you have to be higher on the feature to achieve the same amount of depression as a western tank and as a result expose more of the vehicle.

With the T-55 I experienced some difficulties with the gun not being able to depress enough, but the low profile gives advantages too when it comes to hull down positions. The T-55 could find hull down positions in small depressions where taller tanks could not. The small depression angle is a hinderance in my opinion only when trying to engage an enemy fairly close and from higher ground. But it's definately a thing to take into account when fighting with such vehicles.
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According to one english language Russian Armoured History website (no longer available)the JS-3 didn't make any appearances AT ALL during WW II. Not even in August vs the Japanese. So KT vs JS-3 is purely speculative.

A more interesting match up would have been JS-3 vs M26E.

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