Hello everyone,

so, tomorrow, we are going to recieve the Wargaming Type 97 Te-Ke as a reward (nice to see that the yesterday’s event leak was accurate, which means the rest of it (events in entire August) likely also are).

At first glance, it looks like a solid tier 2 tank. Thanks god it doesn’t have a “spitter” machinegun, but a relatively interesting 37mm cannon. Let’s have a look at it though to see how it’s doing.

Armor

As you can see, the armor is not this vehicle’s strong side. After all, it’s a lowtier light tank, it’s not supposed to be a hulking unpenetrable fortress (unless of course it’s sold in gift editions, then it’s okay). Either way, the armor is pretty clear from the picture, not too much to tell about it. The armor is roughly comparable to other tier 2 gift tanks – the Tetrarch and T1E6, it’s a little thinner, but it hardly makes any real difference. The obvious idea would be not to shoot the well-sloped part, which in theory has decent effective armor, but the thing is, despite its good slope, it’s only 6mm thick and thus it will be triple-overmatched by pretty much everything except for the .50 cals and the 15mm BESA (and of course the 7,92mm, but that’s another story, given its penetration), so it is pretty much irrelevant. In armor, it’s the worst tank of the three, but again, on this tier it hardly matters (the slope can save you from some of the .50 cal bullets I guess). It’s worth noting that the T1E6 has worse side armor by a few milimeters.

Firepower

The Te-Ke is equipped with a 37mm Type 98 gun, that is actually not bad. It has a decent penetration (40,4mm), standard damage (45), decent rate of fire (20) and tier-standard accuracy (0,4) and aimtime (2,2s). This gun is superior to the .50cal “spitters” of the T7CC and other tanks and possibly over the 15mm BESA MG, but it is inferior to the Tetrarch gun, especially due to the 2pdr penetration capabilities. What makes it very useful is the -15 degrees depression, but be warned – in 38 degrees frontal art, the depression is “only” -12,7 – still awesome, but less than advertised in WoT Wiki. It’s not an autoloaded gun, but against the opponents of its tier, it’s sufficient. Tetrarch is better and the T1E6 is different (it has an autoloader, but less penetration), I think it will do just fine. “Sufficient” is the right word I guess.

Mobility

The Te-Ke weighs 4,757 tons and is equipped with a 65hp engine, giving it 13,66 hp/t (to compare, VIc has 17,6, Tetrarch has 25,5 and T1E6 has 27,64 hp/t). Maximum speed is 42 km/h (15 in reverse).

I guess you can see where this is going. The mobility will be most likely rather poor. This might be compensated to some degree by terrain passability – we’ll have to see how much exactly, but the terrain passability of 0,8/1/1,6 is better than any of the other reward tanks (T1E6 for example has 1,1/1,3/2,4), but the mobility compared to other “blazing speed” reward tanks will likely be worse.

Conclusion

It’s neither a gem nor a complete shit, it’s going to be an okay tank. I assume the mobility will cause it not to be as desired as other reward tanks (plus the fact it is Japanese and thus, unless you are grinding Japanese tanks, useless for crew training). An interesting thing – it seems WG is hellbent on pushing the Japanese tanks to become more popular – just check the events of the EU server (linked above) – two events, tied to Japanese tanks in a month. Interesting.