Ladies and Gentlemen, on the 31st of March, will begin the early access event for the Pan-American cruisers. As such, it is time to take a look at how they perform and especially if the tier X is anything worth it as she will require a lot of effort and resources to unlock.

In any case, here is my opinion on the matter.

Historical background

There isn’t much historical background in the case of San Martín. She is a what-if Worcester-preliminary, taking elements from multiple real preliminary designs and slapping them in a blender for a slightly weird-looking design.

Ship’s preview

The camouflage

The permanent camouflage of the San Martín comes with the standard permanent tier X economy bonuses:

• +50% credits
• +100% XP
• +100% Commander XP
• +100% Free XP

With the early access event, you will also be able to obtain a unique commemorative camouflage for the ship.

The Good and the Bad

The Good

• Improved ballistics for the guns and shells she carries
• AP shells with greatly improved penetration angles
• Good AP penetration for 152 mm shells
• Destroyer dispersion
• Good firing angles
• Some turrets can rotate at 360°
• Torpedoes with good damage and low reaction time
• Strong anti-air
• Great concealment
• Access to the Surveillance Radar Consumable
• Access to an absurd Specialized Repair Team
• Combat instruction that greatly reduces the consumable cooldown

The Bad

• No HE shells
• No improved arming threshold or fuse timer on the AP shells
• Only five torpedoes per side
• Very long cooldown on all consumables
• Only has the Short-Range Hydroacoustic Search
• 25 mm side armor
• Thin citadel armor

Modules

Hull	Engine	Gun Fire Control System	Main battery	Torpedoes
San Martín	Propulsion: 145 000 HP	Mk10 mod. 1	152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret	‎533 mm Mk14

General Characteristics and Playstyle

Tier	X
Health	49 800 HP
Torpedo Damage Reduction	7 %
Displacement	21 000 tons
Dimensions
Overall length	216.6 m
Beam	21.9 m
Overall height (keel to the highest point on the ship)	22.3 m
Freeboard	5.4 m
Main Armament
Maximum Firing Range	15.510 km
152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret	2 x 2 152 mm 2 x 3 152 mm
Torpedo Armament
Maximum Firing Range	10.500 km
533 mm Mk14	2 x 5 533 mm
Maximum speed	34.0 knots
Turning Circle Radius	790 m
Rudder Shift Time	11.36 s
Surface Detectability	11.26 km
Air Detectability	8.52 km
Detectability After Firing Main Guns in Smoke	5.45 km
Combat Instruction – Consumable Operational Readiness
Duration	30.0 s
Progress per shell hit	3%
Time of inactivity before progress loss	15.0 s
Progress loss per second of inactivity	15%
Active effect – Consumable cooldown reduction	-85%

Consumables
Slot 1	Slot 2	Slot 3	Slot 4
Damage Control Party Work time: 5 s Cooldown: 60 s	Specialized Repair Teams Number of charges: 4 Work time: 20 s Cooldown: 180 s HP regeneration: 1.5%/s Casemate damage regeneration: 80% Citadel damage regeneration: 80%	Short-Range Hydroacoustic Search Number of charges: 4 Work time: 100 s Cooldown: 180 s Torpedo spotting range: 3.0 km Ship spotting range: 3.0 km	Surveillance Radar Number of charges: 4 Work time: 25 s Cooldown: 180 s Ship spotting range: 9.0 km
		Defensive AA Fire Number of charges: 4 Work time: 40 s Cooldown: 180 s Continuous Damage: +50% Damage from shell explosions: +300%	Spotting Aircraft Number of charges: 4 Work time: 100 s Cooldown: 240 s Maximum firing range: +20%

San Martín and her predecessors might be holding the record for the number of gimmicks that you can slap on a single tech-tree line. Just to summarize quickly, they get:

• Destroyer dispersion
• No HE shells
• AP with improved penetration angles
• Surveillance Radar
• Short-Range Hydroacoustic Search
• ÜBER Specialized Repair Team
• Combat instruction.

Like… How many gimmicks do you need?

¡SÍ!

As much as all of these gimmicks may sound over the top… I genuinely had a lot of fun playing San Martín, especially because we finally have a line of light cruisers that can do open-water engagement and that doesn’t massively suck. Looking at you all Japanese light cruisers…
In the case of the high-tier Pan-American cruisers, they are mostly doing well because of one reason. They are stupidly hard to kill! If you thought that Conqueror back in the days was scary, San Martín and the others bring it to the next level with that busted Specialized Repair Team that covers for 80% of damage taken, may it be from regular penetrations or citadel hits and torpedo hits. The amount of HP that you can recover is just insane, allowing the ships to play fairly aggressively and gun-blazing like a whole Mexican cartel in a bad mood.
The best part is that the long cooldown of that Specialized Repair Team can be completely negated by the Combat Instruction that reduces its cooldown by 85%. For the quick math, that turns a 180s cooldown into a 27s cooldown. This means that you can easily get two activations of the consumable one after the other extremely quickly.

At this point, you can quite freely open fire and farm damage on enemy ships but you can also play it smart and use and abuse the great concealment of the ships. On San Martín, you can reach a concealment of 9.1 km. Combined with her good speed, she is able to sneak in on objectives or on the sides of cruisers and blast them with AP.

Another thing to note is that, because of her Specialized Repair Team, Martín particularly shines in the late game where she is still as good as new and might even have some charges of her consumables left in store.
As for the Surveillance Radar vs Spotting aircraft, it all depends on whether you want to play the objectives or get big damage numbers. In both cases, with the combat instruction, the consumables also become very easy to quickly get them back and ready to use.

If you want to see the ship in action, here is a commented replay of one of my games:

Main Armament

2 x 2 152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret 2 x 3 152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret Turrets n°1 and 4 can rotate at 360°
Maximum Firing Range	15.510 km
Reloading Time	6.0 s
180 Degree Turn Time	7.2 s
Optimal firing angles at the front	30°
Optimal firing angles at the rear	30°
Sigma	2.05 sigma
Maximum Dispersion	131 m
Shells
Type of Projectile	AP – 152 mm AP 130 lb Mk35
Alpha Damage	3 400
Projectile Speed	812 m/s
Air Drag	0.28
Projectile Mass	59.0 kg
Projectile Krupp	2 692
Projectile Detonator	0.025 s
Detonator threshold	25 mm
Ricochet Angles	60° – 75°

The main battery of San Martín has a particularly interesting design. Just like the British light cruisers, the Pan-American cruisers have no access to HE shells. However, while they also present greatly improved penetration angles, they don’t have the reduced arming threshold or fuse timer. The main effect of this difference is that they have a particularly hard time dealing with destroyers as they will more often than not take overpenetrations. Against other ships, it doesn’t matter too much in my opinion.

If we had to compare the DPM of San Martín with Minotaur, it wouldn’t be a competition as Minotaur has nearly twice the theoretical DPM of San Martín (600 000 vs 340 000). However, Martín compensates on three aspects. The first is the dispersion as Martín uses the dispersion formula of destroyers which gives her a very tight spread. The second is the ballistics. Compared to her cousin Worcester, she has way better ballistics, similar to those of the Soviet light cruisers. This gives her a much easier time hitting targets at any given range and maximizes her capacity to fill the gauge of Combat Instruction. Finally, San Martín also has, as an extension to the previous point, better penetration at any given range, making it less likely for the shells to shatter.

Torpedo Armament

The torpedo armament of San Martín is a nice side weapon for close-range encounters. While it is only five torpedoes per side, it is still the mighty reliable Mk 17 torpedoes with their solid damage and low reaction time. With their firing angles, they can also easily be used when kiting away from an enemy battleship or cruiser that wouldn’t be paying attention.

Anti-air Armament

The anti-air of San Martín is overall pretty good. The DPS of the long and medium-range anti-air are solid and combined with 6.9 km/4.0 km range, they will deal good damage to enemy planes before they can drop.

It is definitely inferior to what Worcester or Yodo can achieve but it’s still nice against most carriers, especially with the high-damage flak barrage.

ASW Airstrike

Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer 650-Pound Depth Bomb
Reloading Time	30 s
Number of charges	2
HP per plane	2 000
Attack range	0.5 km – 8.0 km
Number of planes in the squadron	1
Number of bombs in payload	2
Damage	4 900
Sink speed	7.5-11.3 m/s
Explosion radius	375 m
Fire chances	28%
Flooding chances	300%

The Armor

As a light cruiser, San Martín has pretty weak armor protection. While she has the 30 mm deck armor and the low citadel, she can still get demolished if you aren’t careful enough. As a side note, it is good to keep in mind that the triple turrets can easily get knocked down due to their large size so you might want to be careful with that.

External armor protection:

Citadel armor protection:

Hidden deck protection:

Turrets armor protection:

Final Opinion

San Martín is an absolute blast to play. She might be overloaded with gimmicks and suffer from the pain point of having no HE shells but the gameplay offered by her consumable kit combined with her combat instruction is simply amazing. Back then I was skeptical when I saw the ships with normal AP shell fuse timer and arming threshold but it turned out to be, generally speaking, only a small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

I warmly recommend you guys to get that ship when you will be given the opportunity.

Recommended Build

For San Martín, I recommend the following commander build and upgrades:

This concludes my review of San Martín. Thank you for reading this article!

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Yuzorah

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