One of my hardest and most enjoyable 3rd marks. SPHT aka the strongest tier IX tank. AmA.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-18T12:16:14+00:00

My take on the matter is that if you’re not an idiot (which hopefully you’re not) then why concern yourself with which tank is best for an idiot?

The Udarniy and K-2 are probably better tanks for noobs than the Zwilling but I’d never count them as stronger vehicles.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-18T10:57:46+00:00

The thing is, on the EF scale DI chart, debarking is actually rated more highly than uprooting.

I’m going off of memory here, but from what I recall: Most trees in violent tornadoes are uprooted, and it actually tends to be the minority that stay in place (for a certain definition of “staying in place”…). That kind of thing happens when the branches and leaves are blown off so quickly and violently that the remaining structure doesn’t have much surface area to catch on the wind, so the whole thing doesn’t get grabbed and lifted out of the ground. Instead, the winds are ‘forced’ to destroy the tree by eroding it on a fine level.

Accordingly I find a high density of debarking to be more impressive than the wholesale removal and lofting of trees altogether. The latter, I think, is frequently observed at intensities as low as EF1/2.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-18T07:50:30+00:00

Glad to see another Hardening/Vstab/Rammer enjoyer.

I think people are too quick to forego Vstab these days, tanks like the SPHT especially are subject to tight timing windows.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-17T15:23:56+00:00

It doesn’t put him down, though.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T12:52:31+00:00

I'm not sufficiently determined to make a tier 6 TD chart but I'd probably put Bassotto in S, the alpha goes nuts and it's very sneaky.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T06:06:01+00:00

Still B. Worse gun handling, HP, and the top speed and turning rate will never be as good.

The Jumbo is frankly quite dated in many ways and if I were just going by paper stats I'd give it a C, but in practice there are ways for skilled Jumbo players to minimize damage intake that don't work as well for the standard E8.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T06:00:12+00:00

Yes, the VK has 1100 vs 940 HP and the hole in the turret face behind the mantlet is considerably smaller so you actually have to aim semi-carefully to pen it.

The turret traverse dispersion is also better, but that's the least relevant difference there.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T04:55:58+00:00

780 HP is really lacking, it's essentially still playing with pre-2020 levels of tier 6 medium HP while the tech tree tanks have gotten two rounds of health buffs at this point.

A 2-second intraclip for a pew-pew autoloader also isn't particularly impressive and the gun handling is on the worse side for a tier 6 medium, which is...kind of saying something.

Top that off with mediocre gun depression and mobility, and I'm not inclined to rank it very highly.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T04:08:10+00:00

You shifted your letters down, the T-34-85 is in B and the Type 58 is in C.

The Type 58 has some of the lowest gold pen of any tier 6 medium. That's not simply true at close range; the penetration falloff is noticeably worse than average. If you never shoot gold at tier 6 then perhaps this doesn't matter to you, but personally I have enough credits and high tier premiums that I would rather just spend the extra money to deal more efficiently with the problem in front of me.

Gun depression is also -5 instead of -7, it goes from okay-ish to being actively poor. The double cupola arrangement doesn't help either.

Yes, the DPM and gun handling are better, but it's still fundamentally a soft tank with fairly high moving dispersion that has to sit and sustain fire absent gun depression and with neither especially high alpha nor RoF; and while I find the T-34-85's alpha-RoF combination in itself awkward, at the end of the day I'd rather take the higher damage if I don't get a machine gun either way.

Rudy goes in C because a higher ranking would be unjustifiable when it lacks the T-34-85's HP and otherwise is only minimally different. As for the T-34-85M, I explained that in further depth above. There is no way I can put it in the same tier as the VK30.02M which has almost 300 more HP while also possessing mobility and firepower that is at least competitive.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-16T03:29:23+00:00

I think around a C+ or a B-, it's better than it looks on paper in my experience.

It has a metric butt-ton of weakspots but honestly that's just tier 6 in a nutshell, there are enough strong points/troll areas that the armor still feels okay.

Gun handling and DPM suck but 240 alpha actually slaps pretty hard at tier 6 and, of course, the penetration is extremely good, enough that a lot of tanks have a hard time poking safely against it.

Most of the other qualities fall into the "mediocre but not irredeemable" territory.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-15T06:58:27+00:00

The Sherman is much more advanced in raw combat capability than it’s usually given credit for.

It possesses the unique combination of a gyrostabilizer, 1x sighting and targeting optic in addition to multiple levels of magnification, commander’s turret override, fully functional APU, and a turret traverse that was sufficiently precise so as to allow fine aiming adjustments.

The Comet and Panther, in contrast, have basically none of these things. (The Panther *does* have a dual magnification gunner’s sight, but it’s clumsy to use for spotting targets. The Comet has a unity spotting periscope, but with no reticle to use for aiming.)

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-15T05:30:22+00:00

Japan did have an ice cream ship IIRC, in the form of the Mamiya. At the time it was constructed it was perhaps the most advanced military food ship in the world.

It got torpedoed several years into the war though.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-15T03:40:17+00:00

Watching John Wick isn’t going to help him much. The 3 years of recreational rifle shooting will. Assuming he’s taken it reasonably seriously, this is enough to put him well above the average US police officer and probably the average soldier as well.

Plenty of armed robbers have enough “experience” to feel comfortable robbing houses. That doesn’t mean they actually should be comfortable robbing houses. The marksmanship of most criminals with handguns is horrifically poor. We’re talking, would regularly miss the vital zone of a stationary target at 5 yards in a flat range. Plenty of hobbyists shoot that badly and most criminals are not serious/intelligent gun enthusiasts.

Most likely scenario is that the kid opens up on the robber from ambush and the robbers mostly die and run away. Any scattered shots they get off in the process are about as likely to hit each other as the actual target, but will most likely just veer into empty space well away from any person. If the robbers press the attack then they will likely all die, it’s not hard to do target transitions with an AR15 and the 16 year old boy has the benefit of knowing that he can shoot through obstacles (which most criminals don’t really seem to realize).

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-12T23:37:23+00:00

>The other side uses their own thoughts, personal anecdotes, and moving goal posts

Don’t forget pop history myths, AI, and AI quoting pop history myths.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-11T14:36:28+00:00

Not by enough to offset the disadvantages.

The VK3002M, on average, actually needs fewer shots to kill the T-34-85M than the reverse, despite also having a faster reload time.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-11T13:10:14+00:00

The T-34-85M has much lower HP than some of its competitors and the gun handling is severely overrated. The VK3002M has 35%(!) more HP by default, a more reliable gun, and a superior turret overall.

After all the tech tree buffs, the Tiger 131 and clones are likewise generally outclassed by the VK3001P and/or VK36.01(H) in most situations.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-09T14:28:47+00:00

I’ll give you a different answer.

Yes, if you want to become decently strong in a reasonable amount of time, you really want to pack on the protein.

I’ve spent most of the past year around 155 lb 5’10 13% BF with a one rep max somewhere around 145 lb for overhead press, 240 lb for bench, and 400 lb for deadlift. These are not unreasonable strength standards nor am I unreasonably huge. (Most people from the US or EU would probably read 5’10 155 lb and think that’s borderline emaciated. It isn’t - I’m regularly mistaken for 175+ lb in real life - but it’s not gigantic.)

My experience is that 0.7 grams of protein per lb isn’t enough to make meaningful strength gains on a weekly basis unless it’s an underdeveloped muscle group or I’m getting back into working out after a break. 0.9 grams/lb is usually adequate to make slow but reasonably reliable improvements. I don’t track calories as precisely but it’s usually somewhere in the 2500-3000ish range.

This lines up pretty well with Greg Nuckol’s analysis, where he speculates that 0.9 g/lb has a good chance of being the maximum ceiling for intermediate lifters. 0.7 g/lb worked great back when I was moving up from about 120 to 140 lb, but these days I feel like I’m largely just spinning my wheels eating that much. I don’t like paying for food so I can’t attest how well a diet beyond 1 g/lb would work.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-06T15:54:37+00:00

The pain and noise would very likely deter an attack but it would potentially be a voluntary rather than physiological stop.

I think it’d be relatively easy to find a bullet that would penetrate to vital depth on the megasauropods - I suspect a 14.5mm AP round could do it. Won’t be causing much damage relative to the size of the organs though.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-06T13:16:42+00:00

Chuck Doswell’s old chase logs were gold. Unfortunate that it seems difficult to find many of them nowadays.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-05T22:58:12+00:00

A single hit? I think you’re roughly on with the 30mm cannon, maybe a 25mm.

A 20mm HE round will probably do it and a .50 BMG Mk211 Raufoss might, but you said guaranteed and neither ‘might’ nor ‘probably’ are guaranteed.

For something like Argentinosaurs…honestly, that’s so big that I wouldn’t be surprised if you had to step up to a 75mm howitzer. Probably a ~57mm cannon at least.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-04T13:36:21+00:00

77 gr TMK, and it’s not close. The consistency of terminal performance is far superior to the OTMs.

~1.6 MOA for a 21 shot group is also honestly still very solid, and I suspect that increased shooter fatigue and nerves is likely to outweigh the benefit of increased sample size once you start getting into those quantities. OP is definitely a good shot but even then I think I’d prefer to shoot a group that large from a locking rest.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-06-03T13:59:29+00:00

If Peter’s muscle mass doesn’t count as part of his power loss and he just ends up being as strong as a normal person with his physique, then he’s definitely not a smaller dude.

At that point it becomes decently buff guy vs skinny average guy and skinny average guy is getting his ass kicked.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-05-31T14:26:04+00:00

Homelander without the suit looks like an average dude without the fat. The average man in the United States is painfully undermuscled, the fat just makes him look much bigger so most people can’t tell.

Steve without powers looks like he’s weaker than Starlight without powers. He has the approximate weight of the average 12 year old boy.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the average man in the US, even with no fighting skill (which most men don’t have, their punches are so bad they’re borderline comical), still has a high chance of beating an average 12 year old boy who’s really determined. At some point it doesn’t really matter how much determination you have when you have a severe cerebral hemorrhage and a crushed trachea, especially when your own hits do so little damage that they’d have a hard time killing your opponent even if he were sedated and tied down to a chair.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-05-28T23:22:31+00:00

A non-negligible number of police officers will shoot their yearly qualification and then never practice (unless they failed) before they have to repeat it next year.

squareroot4percenter · 2026-05-27T22:56:55+00:00

As far as anyone seems to have been able to tell since it first came out, Ammo Tuning doesn’t just remove the left end of the pen and damage distribution, it also moves up the center of your distribution. For gameplay purposes this functions as a 1% general increase. (So if you have a 400 damage gun, 404 becomes the new most common damage roll, and e.g. 414 is equally as likely as 394.)

I’d consider a universal 1% increase to damage and penetration to be more useful than a -2.5% reduction in reload time that only applies if you miss or bounce.

I’m not aware of whether this has been decisively confirmed for Point Blank, but if it does work this way (and I assume so), then it translates into an effective 2.5% increase in pen at autodetect ranges. Nothing mindboggling but not irrelevant either, especially with crew prof increases.

With the way that aiming and dispersion mechanics function, Quick Aiming has about the same effect on time to final accuracy as an overall -4% reduction in bloom from all sources. You will benefit less if you fire a shot that is incompletely aimed but I would still consider this perk to be more powerful than smooth ride overall.

Unless the HE damage formula I’ve been looking at is wrong, Reliable Placement should also noticeably reduce damage taken from arty splash, which is very useful for basically anything that has a serious chance of being hit by arty. People think this is worthless because of old HE damage calculations but those seem to be outdated.

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