00:00Welcome back to the Tusk Force dev server and today we're going to be taking a look at a new
00:05self-propelled howitzer vehicle, the M55. More specifically five of them because this is going
00:10to be coming to the American, German, French, Italian and Chinese tech trees at rank 3,
00:17battle rating 4.0. So this is going to work pretty much the same as the M44, at least in
00:23regards to its implementation in War Thunder. Lots of nations are going to have access to it.
00:30And as you can see, it has got a rather, and as you can see, it has a rather large weapon. So
00:35it's got a 203 millimeter M47 cannon. Now this has a rather slow reload rate of 38.9 seconds.
00:44You can bring it up to just under 30 seconds when you fully max out your crew, but obviously that's
00:50still going to be a very long reload time. This turret is not a 360 degree traversing turret.
00:56It only goes 30 degrees either way. It's got a vertical guidance of minus five to plus 65
01:02degrees and a turning speed of 5.9 degrees in the horizontal and 4.2 degrees in the vertical.
01:09And this only fires the one shell, the M106HE shell with 64.7 millimeters penetration at just
01:18under 600 meters a second muzzle velocity. So this should do decently well, especially at 4.0 for
01:24taking out other enemies. And you can also see you've got a 50 cal on the roof here for protection
01:29against enemy aircraft and soft skin vehicles. And another unusual feature of this vehicle is that
01:35all of the crew is housed within the turret, including the driver. So you've got six crew,
01:41you've got your driver, your gunner, your commander, who can also fire the main armament and then three
01:45loaders. And you can see the driver controls are up here as well, so they can be easily damaged.
01:51And unfortunately, that turret does provide a rather obvious target. I mean, not only can you
01:56kill the entirety of the crew if you manage to penetrate it, it's also not particularly well
02:01armored, only maxing out at 12.7 millimeters, including for the roof. In fact, the hull is actually
02:06better armored at 25.4 millimeters. And that also has the transmission and engine. So any shots to
02:13the hull are going to be probably blocked by those. Whereas, yeah, a quick shot to the turret will
02:18quickly knock out most of the crew. You can also see the gun has got optics with four times zoom.
02:23And the speed itself is 35 miles per hour when going forward on six gears or 14 miles per hour
02:29in reverse on two gears, which is not bad at all for getting away from ambushes. And it's got a 716
02:35horsepower engine. Now we're going to test drive the German version just because I haven't got the
02:40American version available to actually test drive at the moment. Here we are. You can also see you've
02:44got a 50k on the roof here. And this is about the limit of its traverse. So you have got a little bit
02:50of traverse, but not a massive amount. So we're going to target the IT1. We've taken it out straight away.
02:59It's actually probably going to be quicker to restart the level every time I want to fire this thing
03:04because it's just going to be quicker than waiting for it to reload. And you can see there's a bit of a
03:09difference with the recoil depending on where the gun's pointed. So if we're pointing straight forward,
03:14very little amount of recoil. But if we traverse the turret as far as it would go and then try and fire
03:20over there, the whole gun just jerks massively to the side. So you could in theory lose your target if you're
03:27trying to hit something that's quite fast moving, especially, you know, in sort of areas where there's
03:34a lot of cover. And you can see it seems to move decently fast. So we're already up to 25 miles per
03:40hour, still accelerating. Of course we've entered the river and crossing the bridge. That's going to
03:44slow us down a little bit, but still not below 20 miles per hour. We're also still reloading. So
03:50yeah, you can see that reload speed is not the best. Here is the driver's view. As you can see,
03:55we're above the gun because we're in the fighting compartment with everyone else.
03:58We still haven't actually reached our top speed, but we're about to reach it. And then we'll test
04:03the brakes. So it does take a little while to slow down. We took that T-55 in just one shot.
04:12And there's our reverse speed. Not the fastest in the world, but pretty decent, I think. Actually,
04:19no, yeah, I think this is pretty good, this reverse speed. And see how quick it turns on spot.
04:25It turns pretty quickly on the spot well. And couple that with the limited amount of traverse,
04:30you can quickly turn around and target any flanking enemies. And you've, of course, got
04:36your roof mounted machine gun to fend off any enemy aircraft. So we're taking this back
04:41to the hangar. And so that is the M-55. And yeah, all in all, this seems like it is a pretty
04:48good vehicle. My only complaint about it is that it's going to so many different nations. Obviously,
04:53it's fair enough for it to go to the American tech tree because it is an American vehicle,
04:57but it's a bit odd for it to go to the German, Chinese, Italian, and French tech trees,
05:02especially when they don't actually have their own domestic equivalents already in game.
05:07Well, the M-55 probably fills in a gap more than the M-44 did, but it would be nice to see some
05:13domestic German vehicles like the Wesper added. Obviously, I covered not very long ago the Semovente
05:19priest vehicles that the Italians had, which were pre-armed by the Italians with new weapons
05:25that could fire NATO standard rounds. It would have just been nice to see some, you know,
05:30more domestic vehicles and not have the M-55 copy pasted into a whole bunch of different nations.
05:37But yeah, the vehicle itself will do pretty well, and I think it will be fairly successful in game.
05:42I could even see this going up in battle rating a little bit because that shell was taking down
05:46even the Cold War vehicles with relative ease, and like I showed, it is pretty mobile. So,
05:52you know, I could see this increase in battle rating at some point, though that might cause
05:56problems, at least for the German tech tree, because then you bump up against the Jagdpanzer 4
06:00and the 38T. The Italians would be bumping up against their vehicles. The French one could be
06:06bumped up a little bit without causing too much overlap, and so could the American one. But yeah,
06:10we'll have to see how it performs when it's actually added to the game. Anyway, hopefully
06:14you've enjoyed this episode. Hopefully you'll join me for the next one. I've been Torano,
06:18and I'll see you next time.
