Hello everyone,

as you probably know by now, there’s a Sherman Fury in the game (a tier 6 premium medium tank). It’s being sold on ASIA server (not sure about the US, it’s not on EU yet however).

It is no secret that the Fury E8 has quite different armor layout than the regular Sherman E8 (we are talking about the elite turret now). Let’s make a quick comparison. This is the regular E8 (in Fury-corresponding configuration):

And this is the Fury E8:

At first glance, you can notice significant differences on the hull:

- the original E8 has the entire lower part 101mm thick. The Fury has only a small strip of very thick armor on lower frontal plate (108mm thick), while the rest of the lower frontal plate is 50,8mm thick (easily penetrable)

- upper part of the frontal plate is 63,5mm thick for both models

- the frontal hull roof thickness increased from 19,5mm to 25,4mm, the sides thickness is more or less the same

- Fury has ticker space armor rim, protecting the turret rotator mechanism

The biggest change however happened to the turret. On the pictures above, you can see how the mantlet covers the entire frontal of the turret in both cases. But there’s a catch. Check this out – this is the regular E8 Sherman turret, with the mantlet (in both cases 89mm thick) removed:

And this is the Fury turret:

In words – the old E8 basically has an 89mm mantlet over 76,2mm frontal turret armor, giving the deep violet zone a protection level of 165,2mm mostly. The Fury on the other hand has a giant hole behind the 89mm mantlet, which means that most of the frontal turret has only 89mm protection. Additionally, compared to the new model, the upper part of the turret (above the mantlet) was nerfed from 76,2mm to 44,5mm. Together, this all means that the Fury turret is MUCH easier to penetrate than the old E8 turret.

Additionally, the Fury is 4 tons heavier (this is unhistorical according to Hunnicutt by cca 1 ton), gun depression nerfed from -12 to -10 (historical) and has lower maximum speed (nerfed to 41,8 km/h, this is historical). But is the armor nerf historical? Is there a really such a hole in real life?

Yup. There is. So, why was it modelled differently until now? Well, two reasons really.

- the original M4A3E8 model is very, very old, it was in the first American line and all that. Back then, the developers didn’t really care about historical accuracy that much.

- at that point, instead of accuracy, the developers cared about the “line continuity” and the “distinctive feature of American tanks”, which were, as you know, very tough turrets. And so, they buffed the turret unhistorically by not using the “hole” behind the mantlet at all (earlier 75mm models had it smaller, but it still was there) to produce the “tough turret” element at the expense of historicity

Things have changed since then, the boundaries between lines have blurred. French are no longer the only ones with autoloaders, Germans don’t have long range fighting exlusivity in the game anymore and not all Americans have tough turrets. What this however means for us is the fact that when the original E8 gets reworked to the HD standard, its armor will probably change to resemble the current Fury layout. According to Storm, it will not happen anytime very soon, but it will happen at some point. So be ready.