Comment by Alupis

ED has clamped down on it. Now if you post something and can't prove it's from an unlimited distribution source BigNewey will delete your post pretty much immediately. I typically see that stuff on community Discords where the volunteer mods have a longer reaction time.

Gonna need you to prove that by leaking some classified documents. /s

You do realize military personnel are gamers, too, right?

Video gaming has been mainstream for long enough for me to have had a full active duty and reserve career, retire as a senior officer, and then go utterly ga-ga over Baldur's Gate 3, which came out of early release over a month after I retired. The difference is I know how to keep my NDAs.

And the military needs nerds (positive term)! Who do you think maintains all our communications, networks, avionics, cryptography, collates all our intelligence information, and translates what the bad guys get intercepted saying in their native tongue?

All of these communities have, well, a reputation for a certain type of personality. The old joke is that you can tell an extrovert at the NSA because when he/she is talking, he/she looks at YOUR shoelaces.

It sounds like you haven't played War Thunder. The service manual is obviously useless in War Thunder because repairs happen automatically under a cool down. The point of the game isn't to learn how to operate any specific vehicle. The point is to act as the commander with high level controls but with some skill based elements such as aiming.

Meanwhile the technical specs of the tank.... Those are absolutely critical because the damage simulation is entirely dependent upon them, because this isn't world of tanks where tanks have hitpoints. When you shoot a projectile, the projectile interacts with the armor, creates spalling (or explodes inside) that then has to kill all the personnel inside the vehicle for it to count as a vehicle kill. Shots that don't kill can disable parts of the tank, activate the ammo rack, destroy the tracks, etc.

A service manual isn't going to tell you how thick a specific section of the armor is, or what composition the armor has or what angle the armor is. Yes this still retains a sort of arcade simulation feel, because a realistic simulation such as this [0] is computationally too expensive to happen in a multiplayer game.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eASJbjtw180

War Thunder has multiple game modes, one of which is very arcadey, one of which is relatively realistic, the other which is a simulator. Most of these players play the middle one, which attempts to model everything as accurately as possible from public information but which automates and abstracts common aircraft-specific sequences. That way you can have a relatively realistic multiplayer experience and something that approximates a life outside of it.

The realistic mode can optionally also hold your hands through many aspects of operating the aircraft, at a significant cost in performance, so more serious players will play with "simulator controls" (and will map more advanced things such as changing fuel mixture/prop angle/radiator activation, etc..., like you'd do on a proper simulator).

The developers in theory and sometimes in practice will correct inaccuracies in performance or capabilities if you can point them out from non-classified sources. Unlocking modern vehicles takes 100-600$ or hundreds (sometimes thousands) of hours, and sometimes due to inaccuracies they end up being or becoming non-viable, so some people are irrationally motivated to change that.

I think you've hit the reason with the wrong cause though: because War Thunder is pretty loosey-goosey with it's model, it leaves plenty of room for the "that's BS! The real Abrams would totally have..." argument.

Whereas in a more crunchy simulation model, whether one plane beats another or something is going to be tied up in a lot more nuance.

People aren't posting these for players to use as in-game references. They're posting them to prove that the developers short-changed their favorite piece of hardware, in hopes that the devs will say "sorry, you're right" and fix it.