ARL 44
Revision as of 20:53, 2 March 2013 | Revision as of 21:13, 3 March 2013 | |||
Line 37: | Line 37: | |||
*Go from there | *Go from there | |||
? | |InTheGame_equipment= | + | |InTheGame_equipment= Tank Gun Rammer, GLD, Coated Optics | |
Revision as of 21:13, 3 March 2013
ARL 44
Mouse over "
[Client Values; Actual values in
925,000 Cost |
870184 HP Hit Points |
46.47/46.9624.53/50.5 t Weight Limit |
- Commander
- Gunner
- Driver
- Radio Operator
- Loader
575750 hp Engine Power |
37/10 km/h Speed Limit |
1820 deg/s Traverse |
12.3730.57 hp/t Power/Wt Ratio |
NoNo Pivot |
// mm Hull Armor |
110/30/30110/30/30 mm Turret Armor |
AP/APCR/HE
AP/APCR/HE Shells |
96/2800/68
255/4800/255 Shell Cost |
115/115/185240/240/320 HP Damage |
128/177/38212/259/45 mm Penetration |
r/m ▲
15.79 r/m Standard Gun ▲
6 Rate of Fire Standard Gun |
▲
Standard Gun
▼
Standard Gun
▲
1815.85 Standard Gun ▲
Standard Gun
▼
Standard Gun
▲
1440 Damage Per Minute Standard Gun |
m ▲
0.43 m With 50% Crew: 0.533 m ▲
0.38 Accuracy With 50% Crew: 0.471 m |
s 2.3 s 3.4 Aim time |
2022 deg/s Turret Traverse |
360° Gun Arc |
-10°/+20°-10°/+15° Elevation Arc |
7050 rounds Ammo Capacity |
2020 % Chance of Fire |
m 340 m 350 View Range |
m 400 m 750 Signal Range |
VI
925000
The ARL 44 is a French tier 6 heavy tank.
Development of the vehicle started while France was still occupied by the German forces. It was an attempt to use the obsolete B1 Bis chassis and fit it with a modern, more powerful gun. The project was finished by the Atelier de Construction de Rueil Design Bureau. A total of 60 vehicles were manufactured. However, the tank was considered unsuccessful compared to similar foreign vehicles.
Referred by players as "the barn" due its incredibly large and house-shaped stock turret, It has a decent sloped frontal armor, but the turret, sides, and rear are very weak. It also has great gun depression and elevation and should also be noted that the tracks are almost completely exposed and easy to track. There is a choice between a powerful 105mm gun, with low armor penetration, and a smaller 90mm DCA45 gun, with extremely high penetration, making the ARL 44 the most powerful tier 6 tank in terms of penetration, and as such is played best as a medium and long ranged sniper.
The ARL 44 leads to the AMX M4 mle. 45.
Modules / Available Equipment and Consumables
Modules
Tier | Engine | Engine Power (hp) |
Chance of Fire on Impact (%) |
Weight (kg) |
Price ()
| |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
VI | Maybach HL 230 | 575 | 20 | 700 | 26000 | |
VIII | Maybach HL 230 P45F | 750 | 20 | 750 | 55000 |
Tier | Suspension | Load Limit (т) |
Traverse Speed (gr/sec) |
Rmin | Weight (kg) |
Price ()
| |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
V | ARL 44 | 46.96 | 18 | B/2 | 14200 | 8600 | |
VI | ARL 44 bis | 50.5 | 20 | B/2 | 14200 | 15420 |
Compatible Equipment
Compatible Consumables
Player Opinion
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Highest pen of tier 6 heavies with the DCA 45 (212)
- Excellent gun selection
- Agile in comparison of its predecessors
- Sloped front armor can bounce some shots
- Good gun depression
Cons:
- Weak turret armor
- Very long aim time
- Turret side armor is very vulnerable to HE shells
Performance
The ARL 44 is best played as a sniper, staying well behind the front lines and picking off enemies from range. It's top gun does good damage and has one of the highest penetration values in the game, but it's slow rate of fire means this gun only achieves a low DPM value. Accuracy is good, but the aim time is very long; you have to sit still for a long time before you can hope to hit anything. It is important to note that even the top 90mm gun has penetration equal to the L/71 on the Tiger, it has nowhere near the shell velocity, so leading your shots at long range is required. Although the ARL has decent armor on its upper glacis, the rest of the tank is easily penetrated, making it even more important to stay behind the lines so you're not an easy target while waiting for the gun to aim. The ARL is quite mobile for a heavy tank, able to reach speeds of 25 to 30 kph on flat ground, and as such it can keep up and continue to support a flank easily. However, because of it's mediocre armor, long aim time, and low DPM the ARL is a very poor brawler, and it shouldn't spearhead an attack unless the enemy is already severely weakened. For a more "brawler" play style the 105mm gun is advised (due to the higher damage and DPM), however sniping with the 105mm gun works as well as it has plenty of penetration for its tier, and decent enough accuracy - and this is especially true when top tier as the ARL 44 with the 105, as you can easily penetrate everyone you see at a distance.
Although the ARL 44's hard stats are good, it does have a major design weakness: the tracks. The ARL's tracks are almost completely exposed to enemy fire, and they are easily damaged. When tracked, any tank is an easy target for anyone who wants to fire at it. Also note that the ARL has the typically slow turret traverse of a heavy tank, so when tracked it is extremely vulnerable to smaller, faster tanks capable of circling it, outrunning the turret traverse and penetrating its weak side and rear armor.
The 90mm DCA 45 can penetrate tier 10 tanks at the right places, and will penetrate any tier 8 you see from the front (you will see a lot of tier 8's in this vehicle). Only the thick gun mantle of the T29 can bounce it. The 105mm Canon 13TR has great alpha damage, as well as good penetration and accuracy for its tier, making it very worthwhile.
Early Research
- Curiously, the stock turret weights more than the upgraded one, and as such, you should research the new turret first as it makes you a less conspicuous target.
- Research the 90mm DCA 30 gun (if it wasn't researched on the BDR G1B already)
- Research the 90mm F3 gun
- Research the Suspension
- Based on your play style, either research the high Alpha 105mm gun or the high Penetration 90mm DCA 45
- Research Engines
- Research Radio
- Go from there
Suggested Equipment
Gallery
Historical Info
During the German occupation some clandestine tank development took place in France, mostly limited to component design or the building of tracked chassis with either a pretended civilian use or with a German Navy destination. These efforts were coordinated by CDM (Camouflage du Matériel), a secret Vichy army organisation trying to produce matériel forbidden by the armistice conditions, with the ultimate goal of combining these components into the design of a possible future thirty ton battle tank, armed with a 75 mm gun. The projects were very disparate, including those for a trolleybus, the Caterpillar du Transsaharien (a regular cross-Sahara track and rail connection) and a tracked snow blower for the Kriegsmarine to be used in Norway. Firms involved were Laffly and Lorraine; also a military design team in occupied France, headed by Maurice Lavirotte, was active. When in August 1944 Paris was liberated, the new provisional government of France did its utmost to regain the country's position as a great power, trying to establish its status as a full partner among the Allies by contributing as much as possible to the war effort. One of the means to accomplish this was to quickly restart tank production. Before the war France had been the world's second largest tank producer, behind the Soviet-Union.
Development history
However French pre-war light and medium designs had become completely outdated and there was no way to quickly make up for the time lost and immediately improve their component quality. It might be possible though to compensate for this by sheer size. A large and well-armed vehicle might still be useful, however obsolescent its individual parts were, especially as the British and Americans seemed to be behind Germany in heavy tank development, having no operational vehicles that could slug it out with a Tiger II. An important secondary goal of the project was simply to ensure that France would in the future have a sufficient number of weapons engineers; if these couldn't be employed now, they would be forced to seek other occupations and much expertise would be lost.
Consequently it was decided to produce 600 heavy tanks, to be designed by the Direction des Études et Fabrications d'Armement (DEFA) in which engineers from the former APX (the army Atelier de Puteaux) and AMX (the Atelier de Construction d'Issy-les-Moulineaux state factory) design teams were concentrated, and built by the Atelier de Construction de Rueil (ARL), the army workshop. The type was named ARL 44. The specifications were not at first overly ambitious and called for a thirty ton vehicle with 60 mm of armour and armed with a new 75 mm Long 44 gun, rendering a penetration of 80 mm steel at 1000 metres and developed by engineer Lafargue from the 75 mm CA 32 gun, conforming to the earlier CDM intentions.
As France had been rather isolated from engineering developments in the rest of the world, the designers based themselves on types they already knew well, mainly the Char B1, the Char G1 and the FCM F1 — contrary to what some sources state[4] the ARL 44 was not directly derived from the earlier ARL 40 project. It was tried to use the components developed between 1940 and 1944, though most soon proved to be incompatible. As a result of the reliance on older types, the ARL 44 was to be fitted with a very old-fashioned suspension system with small road wheels, using the same track as the Char B1, limiting maximum speed to about thirty km/h. The suggestion to use a more modern foreign suspension system was rejected as it would have compromised the tank's status as a purely French design. A Talbot 450 hp or Panhard 400 hp engine was envisaged. Progress was very slow as there was a lack of resources and much infrastructure in the Paris region had been destroyed. Even finding paper and drawing materials was difficult.
In February 1945 a meeting took place between the engineers and the Army. The tank officers quickly pointed out that building a tank according to the original specifications was pointless as such a vehicle would be inferior to even an M4 Sherman, a type that could be obtained for free from the Allies in any numbers so desired. It was therefore decided that the ARL 44 would be fitted with 120 mm of sloped armour, bringing the weight, which even in the conceptual stage had already grown to 43 metric tons, to 48 tons. The armament should consist of the most powerful gun available; sadly this would probably be the American 76 mm or with some luck the British 17-pounder; 90 mm guns had not been made available by the Allies.
Only a wooden mock-up had been completed by an engineering team headed by Engineer General Maurice Lavirotte, when the war ended. However, the end of hostilities did not mean the end of the entire project. To maintain some continuation in French tank design and bolster national morale, it was decided to build sixty vehicles, even though there was no longer any real tactical need for them. In March 1946 the first prototype could be tested. The Atelier et Chantiers de la Loire built the ACL1 turret, fitted with the American 76 mm gun; this was later replaced by a Schneider turret based on the one designed for the Char F1 and fitted with the 90 mm DCA naval AA-gun which had a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s (AP; 1130 m/s HE) and a muzzle brake — the ARL 44 was thus the first French tank to feature this item. Firing trials began on 27 June 1947; the gun often proved to be more accurate than that of a Panther used for comparison.
Mainly due to the change in armament, the development and production of the turret would be drawn out; it was not until 1949 that turrets could be fitted to hulls produced in 1946 and placed into storage. Forty hulls had been completed by FAMH and a further twenty by Renault. They were fitted with captured German Maybach HL230 600 hp engines (real output 575 hp), brought back by a mission headed by General Joseph Molinié in the summer of 1945, repeating the course of events with the Char 2C, which after the previous war had also received captured Maybach engines.
Description
The ARL 44 clearly shows that it is based on earlier French heavy tank design. The hull is long, over nine metres, but relatively narrow, just as a vehicle meant to cross wide trenches. The covered suspension, with its many small road wheels, that had already been outdated in the thirties, is the most obvious sign of its basic Char B1 ancestry; it is in essence identical to that of the Char B1 ter. The type has often been compared to the many "Super Char B" projects from before the war. Its speed is likewise limited, the lowest of any fifty ton tank built after the war. This was also partly due to the lack of a sufficiently strong engine; it had originally been intended to compensate for this by using a more efficient petro-electrical transmission. This kind of transmission has as a major drawback that it very easily overheats and the ARL 44 as a result was fitted with an impressive and complex array of ventilators and cooling ducts; the engine deck was made to extend behind the track to accommodate them all. The hull glacis plate is 120 mm thick and reclined at about 45°, giving a line-of-sight thickness in the horizontal plane of about 170 mm. This made the ARL 44 the most heavily armoured French tank until the Leclerc. Within the glacis, low on the right side, a 7.5 mm machine-gun is fitted in a fixed position.
The turret was the most modern looking part; it's also an obvious makeshift solution, somewhat crudely welded together, made necessary by the simple fact Schneider as yet couldn't produce complete cast turrets large enough to hold a 90 mm gun. The turret front was a cast section though. As the turret was positioned near the middle of the tank, even when pointing to the back the gun would have a large overhang; to facilitate transport it was therefore made retractable into the turret. The turret was rotated by a Simca 5 engine.
In all, the ARL 44 was an unsatisfactory interim design, afterwards often called the "Transitional Tank", which main function was to provide experience in building heavier vehicles. The main lesson learned was for many engineers that it was unwise to construct too heavy types and this opinion was reinforced by the failure of the tank project that the ARL 44 formed the transition to: the much more ambitious heavy AMX 50. Only after a gap of sixteen years France would in 1966 again build a main battle tank, the AMX 30.
Operational history
The ARL 44s equipped the 503e Régiment de Chars de Combat stationed in Mourmelon-le-Grand and before the end of 1950 replaced seventeen Panther tanks used earlier by that unit. In service the ARL 44 was at first an unreliable vehicle: the brakes, the gear box and the suspension were too frail. A special improvement programme remedied most of these shortcomings. The ARL 44 made only one public appearance, ten vehicles participated in the Bastille Day parade on 14 July 1951. When the American M47 Patton became available, which type also had a 90 mm gun, they were phased out in 1953 and used as targets. The rumour that most ARL 44s were exported to Argentina is unfounded.
Three ARL 44s survive today. An ARL 44 can be seen in the Musée des Blindés in Saumur; another one at the 501st-503rd Tank Regiment, Mourmelon-le-Grand, a third is a wreck on the technical zone of the base of the 2nd Dragoon Regiment at Fontevraud. It is relatively complete but the gun is dismounted from the turret.
Historical Gallery