The terrifying Blitzträger auf E 110 wasn't the only vehicle to emerge from the Engineer's Gate in the recent Return of the Waffenträger special event, as the new Premium Tier VIII US Medium Tank ASTRON Rex made its debut. This article will cover the technical and tactical characteristics of this vehicle and give due consideration to how it stacks up against its peers.
Obtaining ASTRON Rex
Since the event has now passed, picking up ASTRON Rex is kindof a moot point however there were a couple of avenues available to players, mostly through the collection of Engineers Starters. These could be collected from either:
The Hard Way
- Complete Missions in Random/Grand battles to obtain Engineers Keys
- Complete Last-WT Harrier Missions to receive Engineers Keys or Harriers Starters
- Exchange Harriers Starters for a 1% Drop Chance of an Engineers Starter (and other things)
- Use Engineers Keys to complete Last-WT Engineer Missions (max. 5 Engineers Starters)
- Exchange Engineers Starters for a 2.4% Drop chance of one of 10 Tier VIII Premium tanks*
The Easy Way
- Buy bundles containing Engineers Starters
- Exchange Engineers Starters for a 2.4% Drop chance of one of 10 Tier VIII Premium tanks*
*Notes on the Hard Way and Easy Way: If you rolled a tank you already had, the game re-rolled for another tank on the list. Also if you had exchanged 49 Engineers Starters without getting a tank, you were guaranteed a Tier VIII Premium Tank on the 50th attempt.
The Really Easy Way - Buy bundles containing Engineers Starters - Exchange 60 Engineers Starters at the Vehicle Gate for ASTRON Rex
The Patient Way Buy it when it comes out! As an indication, the Premium Tier VIII US Heavy Tank T77 debuted in the Last Waffentrager event of October 2020, and was subsequently first seen in the Premium Shop between February-April 2021 depending on the region. We can likely expect a similar availability timeframe on ASTRON Rex.
Giving the enemy a High Five
Born of an "anything goes" era of United States tank development, ASTRON Rex has a very unusual appearance but some very powerful characteristics, notably an autoloading 105mm main armament with a 5-round clip. For the purposes of this exercise, we'll be comparing this vehicle to other autoloading Tier VIII Medium Tanks with magazine capacities of 3 rounds or more. A 5-round autoloader is unprecedented among Tier VIII medium tanks, in fact you would ordinarily need to look towards French Heavy Tanks to get that order of magazine capacity. Accordingly ASTRON Rex has the largest damage capacity of its peers, with a well-aimed dump potentially setting the enemy team back 1,600HP. This is also down to having the heaviest alpha damage of its peers, with the 105mm gun landing 320HP per shot. The closest clip potential behind this is the Lorraine 40 t, whose 100mm 4-shot autoloader can muster 1,200HP damage with 300HP per shot. Feeding the larger-calibre shells through this weapon doesn't happen quickly however, resulting in a 4.0 second intra-clip reload and therefore the longest clip-dump duration of its peers at 16 seconds from first shell to last. By comparison the next-longest shell dump is that of Lorraine 40 t at 7.5 seconds. But as most Lorraine drivers will tell you, 7.5 seconds is a long time to stay exposed so will tend to seek cover between shots if they feel a loaded gun is pointed in their direction. With a significantly longer intra-clip reload, ASTRON Rex bears this requirement even more-so, such that you almost need to consider the vehicle as simply having a relatively high rate of fire with a need to take a breather after a few shots. Speaking of which, that breather starts at a base of 33.28 sec, which is slightly shorter than Lorraine 40 t's 35.24 sec reload. Altogether this gives ASTRON Rex a base output of 1,947HP/min which is outpaced only by Progetto 46's 2,086HP/min. But this isn't necessarily a fair comparison, as achieving this DPM is conditional on Progetto not using its burstfire capability (remember, the deeper you dive into the Progetto's magazine, the longer it takes to reload the next shell). To this end, the runner-up is ASTRON Rex's American tech tree counterpart T69 coming in at 1,806HP/min.
Rapid target acquisition is ASTRON Rex's forté, swinging its turret into line at just under 46 degrees per second, following up with a base aim time of a mere 1.92 seconds and significantly better dynamic gun handling characteristics (i.e. dispersion due to movement, hull traverse, turret traverse) than its peers. Whether you hit the target once pointed in the general direction is still up for debate, with a worst-in-show base dispersion of 0.41m/100m. 190mm penetration on the standard AP shells is serviceable at-tier, but it is barely better than the notoriously bad 181mm of T69. Fortunately like it's tech-tree brother, ASTRON Rex has access to a Premium option with 250mm penetration (although APCR rather than T69's HEAT) but you'll still struggle in a Tier-X environment without a sound appreciation of enemy weakspots. Unless you have a particular soft target in mind, the high explosive shells are most likely a waste of ammunition capacity hitting for 420HP but with just 53mm of penetration. Given the long reload time of this vehicle and limited ammunition capacity of just 30 shells, I would question the wisdom of carrying High Explosive at all even with the rapid mag-change available via the reworked Intuition skill.
Survivability
Combining a well-sloped armour profile of 125mm on the turret facing, 85mm on the upper-frontal plate and 10 degrees of gun depress should in theory produce a fairly bouncy vehicle. In fact this equates to ~350mm of effective armour at Tier VIII. The trouble is located in the right-hand side of ASTRON Rex's turret, and is a very subtle balancing of the vehicle which renders it pretty-much useless as a hull-down fighter unless hard cover can protect the disgustingly obvious weakspot. It's almost as if the development team decided to base the armour model on a Vervet Monkey... Aside from this, ASTRON Rex's low profile gives it slightly improved concealment values against its peers but neither this nor the armour should be relied upon unless the glaringly obvious weakspot can be protected.
Mobility
One of the first things players will notice about ASTRON Rex is how sluggish the vehicle feels on the ground. This can largely be attributed to a terrible power-to-weight ratio of 14.52hp/ton, even worse than T69's 16.84hp/ton or Progetto 46's 18.63hp/ton. This will make realising its top speed of 52km/h somewhat of a dream without a downslope and a tailwind, but fortunately this tank has a trick up its sleeve. A 30km/h reverse speed enables ASTRON Rex to masterfully avoid return fire as pokes the enemy between intra-clip reloads.
But in spite of a low power-to-weight ratio, the traverse speeds of both hull and turret contradict this in the strongest possible terms. We mentioned the zippy turret earlier in the piece, but neglected to mention the 62deg/s of hull traverse! By their powers combined, this this will get ASTRON Rex heading and the gun pointing in the right direction with record efficiency.
Also noteworthy is that resistance from terrain also tends to affect ASTRON Rex less than its peers as well, which means you can expect a reasonable degree of consistency of locomotion regardless of the ground conditions.
Battlefield Role
The mantra of T69 is "Play from support, always in support" and ASTRON Rex should be treated exactly the same. The high base dispersion values and the high traverse rates call for a fight in much closer support of the team's main assault. It's within the confusion of close-quarters battles shielded by friendly vehicles, destroyed tanks or other intervening terrain that ASTRON Rex excels but only when playing in support. This often means waiting for enemy vehicles to fire, and loosing several shells while they're on the reload and hence unable to damage your vehicle in return. Flanking distracted enemies is often crucial to overcoming the underwhelming penetration values, considering that the base dispersion doesn't exactly cater to cupola-sniping (a rough deal, considering that's exactly what the enemy will be doing to you if you're playing from hull-down!).
Broadly speaking, the Support role assumes that you're there to deal damage. ASTRON Rex is otherwise ill-equipped to receive it or operate independently of its team-mates. The sole exception to this is in the "Victory Cleanup" occurring in later stages of the game, where the killing potential of its large magazine capacity and a temporary effective DPM of 6,000HP/min can really start to bring medals, missions and glory home for ASTRON Rex where it might conceivably start to trade off its hitpointsfor killing bursts. After all, the ability to render an enemy incapable of shooting back is ultimately more effective than any armour plate.
Crew & Equipment Setup
There is something disturbingly French about ASTRON Rex, with just a 3-member crew layout. This will make ASTRON Rex somewhat unsuitable as a crew trainer, although to be fair Amercian medium tanks are generally quite awkward with their crew layouts, such that the only premium vehicle with exact like-for-like crew compatibility with the Tier X M48A5 Patton is the Premium Tier VIII T95E2. The sole advantage to this incompatibility is that you can specialise your ASTRON Rex crew to cater for ASTRON Rex's unique requirements. Unfortunately this does tend to result in an overloaded Commander, who is also performing the roles of Radio Operator and Loader. With already decent dynamic gun handling, your crews are free to focus on building the vehicles capability to operate in a flexible support role. Intuition as a Commanders "grinding" skill will assist the adaptability of the vehicle, enabling a quick mag-change (provided you haven't loosed any shots yet) to suit the situation. Grinding other crew members for concealment will provide ASTRON Rex with some license to stealthily and independently flank enemy positions, and somewhat overcome its marginal penetration values. Off-Road Driving will also assist mobility of the vehicle, enhancing its ability to engage and disengage from the enemy between intra-clip shots. Since you'll be aiming to cause damage to distracted enemy vehicles, spotting them in the first place becomes less of a priority. To this end, Recon or Situational Awareness can be deferred on your Commander. The exception is if you'd prefer to run a full-APCR loadout, in which case the flexibility offered by a rapid magazine change is pretty irrelevant in which case maintaining the focus on concealment or viewrange would be more beneficial.
In equipping ASTRON Rex, the obvious choices are that of the Turbocharger and Improved Aiming which can assist in ironing out the more glaring flaws of the vehicle. With Improved Ventilation and a BiA crew, your 0.41m/100m base dispersion can be reduced to 0.37m/100m (or 0.36m/100m with a Case of Cola). Low-Noise Exhaust or Coated Optics will enhance the vehicle's ability to operate more independently, but won't necessarily enhance performance in the core role of this vehicle. Having said that, the key to effective play in a Support vehicle is a team that plays to their Assault/Bnnnnnreakthrough roles to begin with and we don't exactly load into every match with that confidence.
Countering ASTRON Rex
Playing to its role, ASTRON Rex will generally reserve its appearance to the chaos of heated battle, at which point you're likely already occupied with another target. ASTRON Rex is less of a threat when it's fighting with the pack as your team is likely to be presenting a stronger armour profile, but if it's flanking your main assault it should be treated as a priority target. If conditions are suitable to counter-push it, keeping track of your hitpoints and their shots fired is crucial to surviving the engagement. A 1,600HP clip has a decent chance of zeroing out a full-HP vehicle at Tier VIII but this is still is dependant on ASTRON Rex penetrating its shots. If your opponent has loaded AP, then most heavy tanks and even quite a few Tier VIII mediums retain sufficient armour to shrug off its shots during a frontal assault. If they've loaded APCR however, a more calculated risk assessment is required. Either way, ASTRON Rex is most vulnerable while reloading so if you've established that it can't kill you with its burst then you can probably afford to eat a few shells and enjoy 30 seconds of delivering unanswered blows. Shots to the well-sloped turret armour should generally be avoided, as the combined mobility of the turret and hull could enable an skilled ASTRON Rex driver to wiggle its way out taking damage. Encircling ASTRON Rex while assaulting it is also an unwise strategy, as its combined rate of turn of hull and turret is around 110deg/sec. Instead, focus on keeping your armour to its strongest facing in order to neuter the effects of its sub-par penetration.
Gameplay Review (Double-Feature)
See Also
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