Supertest: GSOR 1010 FB, Tier VIII British Wheeled Medium (+ Initial Branch Details!)
4 min readAn exciting new vehicle has entered Supertest today, premiering the upcoming line of 🇬🇧
British wheeled mediums:
VIII 🇬🇧
GSOR 1010 FB
To quote the official forum post: A new branch of British wheeled medium tanks is being prepared for release by the WoT team. The game concept of the new branch: Lightly armored mobile wheeled medium tanks with a large Silhouette. The wheeled suspension ensures excellent dynamics. To ensure the highest level of mobility, the hulls of these vehicles have been made lighter, and they basically carry no armor. However, they will be equipped with guns that boast great gun handling and damage per shot parameters, as well as decent dispersion and aiming time values. The first representative of the new vehicle branch coming to the Supertest will be the GSOR 1010 FB, a Premium vehicle. This tank possesses all the main features of the upcoming British branch: good gun handling parameters, excellent mobility, and the new wheeled suspension. The vehicle is equipped with a 105 mm gun that fires every 12.2 s. The penetration value of the standard shell is 218 mm, while the special shell penetrates 252 mm. Both cause 360 HP of damage. The gun dispersion is 0.33 m, and the aiming time is 2.1 s. The frontal protection of the vehicle’s armor reaches 18 mm. The vehicle’s top speed is 60 km/h, while its specific power is 23.7 h.p./t. The tank’s durability is 1,300 HP, and its view range is 390 m.
Features of Wheeled Medium Tanks
The new wheeled mediums combine the main features of both the French wheeled scouts and classic tracked vehicles. The strong point of the new British mediums ensures their excellent dynamics and allows building up high forward and reverse speeds. This should help them take key positions on maps during the first stage of battle. In terms of mobility, these vehicles fall short of the wheeled scouts, so their Commanders will have to consider their escape routes in advance. The design specifics of the wheel suspension for these medium tanks allow them to turn on the spot and to turn the hull at low speed. This is one of their main differences from the wheeled light tanks. However, the British mediums have significantly worse maneuverability than the French wheeled scouts at medium and high speeds. In other words, you will not be able to change movement direction quickly at high speed (as in the EBR). It will not take much time to get used to such behavior, though—many vehicles in the game behave the same, such as the Bat.-Châtillon 25 t. Also, control of these vehicles in close combat will be intuitively simple and won’t require additional skills (which are usually needed when playing wheeled vehicles). Commanders of the new mediums should also consider their bigger dimensions and worse concealment compared to the wheeled light tanks. Although excellent mobility and a good view range may allow for active scouting in certain combat situations, the new medium tanks will not be able to play the role of full-fledged scouts. Some official renders of the vehicle have been provided by WG:
- The VIII 🇬🇧GSOR 1010 FB will be the premium vehicle for this branch.
- Unlike the 🇫🇷 French wheeled lights, the design specifics of the wheeled suspension for these medium tanks allow them to turn on the spot and to rotate the hull at low speed. However, they also have significantly worse maneuverability at medium and high speeds. (The X 🇫🇷B-C 25 t was used as a point of comparison here, which should give a rough idea of how the branch will feel to drive mobility-wise.)
- These vehicles will feature excellent dynamics, with reasonably-high forward and reverse speeds for medium-class vehicles. Furthermore, it has been stated they will come with great gun handling and damage per shot parameters, as well as decent dispersion and aiming time values. However, they will fall short of the wheeled scouts in the mobility department, and feature much larger silhouettes with extremely-poor armor (less than most lights!).
- According to the initial mockups posted by WoT Express, the branch will start from the IV 🇬🇧
Cruiser IV*, featuring a total of 6 new vehicles from tier 5-10 (not including the premium).
*IMPORTANT NOTE: The WG version of the tree from the February 2023 Roadmap showed the V 🇬🇧Covenanter as the start of the branch instead, so it is possible either one may be incorrect.
From the initial descriptions, it appears these vehicles will function much more like tracked vehicles in how they move/rotate. However, as they still feature wheels rather than tracks, they will likely be a bit harder to bring to a stop than their tracked counterparts (since there is no track to shoot off/entirely-immobilize the vehicle with). Additionally, these vehicles will NOT feature either of the two mechanics which the French wheeled lights get — NO mobility mode, NO magnetic autoaim. The line is expected to release sometime in the second half of 2023. Stay tuned for further details, including the composition of the branch!
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