World of Tanks Supertest: 122 TM Tier VIII Premium Tank
2 min readA brand new Chinese Premium Tier VIII medium tank has arrived at Supertest: 122 TM. If you are wondering what tank is this, it’s no more than the Chinese Army WZ-122-1 main battle tank prototype, so don’t be surprised if the final version of this vehicle changes name once it’s released into the live server.
This vehicle wields a 120 mm gun with 400 damage per shot, with good aiming time and accuracy at 2s and 0.33, respectively. The penetration of a standard shell is 233 mm, while the HEAT shell can penetrate 299 mm, making it quite a powerful vehicle for its Tier in terms of penetration.
The combination of good armour for a medium tank, 280 mm of frontal turret armour, and -8 degrees of gun depression allow the vehicle to take advantage of the terrain. However, the tank pays a price for all these advantages: the gun reloads speed is 16 seconds, making the damage per minute quite low. The top speed is 55 km/h, and the power-weight ratio is 15.5 h.p./t, should give it decent mobility. It’s unclear if the vehicle will feature hydropneumatic suspension as the real vehicle.
The WZ-122-1 is the wrong name for this vehicle, the more correct name is Project 122. The genuine WZ-122 is the much later medium tank, Type 80, and was the 5th vehicle to receive the name Project 122. The vehicle we will see in World of Tanks had its development start in 1969, after the Sino-Soviet Border Conflict, where the Chinese captured a T-62 tank. The Project 122-1 was designed with a hydropneumatic suspension and had a 120mm smoothbore gun on a 122 barrel, this is why Wargaming used the 122 for the current name.
Very few pictures exist of this vehicle, but you can see by the above that it had two missile launchers installed on each side, and both of them plus the gun are covered by canvas. The World of Tanks final model will likely reassemble these pictures, with the Red Stars at the front. The timing of testing this vehicle at Supertest, suggest it might be the upcoming Christmas loot boxes special tank, but we will have to wait and see if this information is accurate or not.
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it’s even better than the T54 (dpm put aside)
ridiculous
“The Project 122-1 was designed with a hydropneumatic suspension and had a 120mm smoothbore gun on a 122 barrel, this is why Wargaming gave it a 122mm gun.”
But the leaked ingame screens with the modules clearly show that the gun is 120 mm.
**** China
Yeah, my bad. I wanted to say the 122 in the name, not gun 🙂 Corrected now 🙂
Really looking forward to this tank!
I’m ***uming TM stands for triple mechanical, aka WZ-122-2, a simpler version of the tank without the hydropneumatic suspension. The tank had some great features, but lacked refinement being an experimental prototype built from scratch, it shares virtually nothing with the type-59 and was merely an ispiration (some design elements were kept) for the type-80.
Makes sense as a tier 8 for that very reason, it’s a great concept, but a flawed one. It is superior to the type-59 in the hard stat department, but lacks polishing (reload speed, view range, turret rotation etc)
They have to make money aut of something… but they will destroy the game. I have 390 dpm on my tier 9 E50, and 420 dpm on tier 10 Leopard. 280 mm turet armour is ridiculous… If you PAY you win….
Doru im going to presume you are not very good at this game
Well, considering the DPM is absolutely abysmal for a T8 non-autoloader, I’d say that’s the ‘balancing’ factor.
There’s plenty of hard turreted mediums that do just as good a job. (might be high raw value, but it’s quite flat in the front, so there’s better turrets at T8, especially with the big cupolas.)
And it’s about damn time the Chinese tanks get some love.