It's big, it's green, its angry, and it's here to spread some bias
Hello you sexy beasts, and welcome back to War Thunder
(intro) Before we start with the review, here are
the usual disclaimers: What you are about to see in this video is
not the final representation of the IS-7.
This is a very early look at an unreleased and unfinished tank that is quite likely to
have its stats changed before final release.
The purpose of this video is just to give you a general idea of what the tank might
play like, and whilst I will give you the detailed stats that are available to me, take
them with a grain of salt.
Secondly, I'm not going to be discussing operation summer or the marketplace, that's
a topic for another video.
This is purely about the tank itself.
With that out of the way, this is the IS-7, War Thunder's newest and meanest event tank.
The IS-7 started life as the Object 260 prototype in 1946, following on from the failure of
the IS-6.
The requirement was to build a heavy tank that could withstand the German 128mm PaK
44 gun as found on the Jagdtiger.
Calling the final design a battleship on tracks wouldn't be too far from the truth.
The IS-7 ended up featuring armour that could even withstand its on 130mm cannon derived
from a naval gun, as well as a naval diesel engine with an output of over 1000 horsepower.
Despite the tests overall being very favourable and the tank being quite liked by everyone
involved, it was rejected and ultimately superseded by the IS-8, which we know as the T-10.
The only remaining IS-7 today can be found at the Kubinka Tank Museum in Russia.
In game the IS-7 is a rank V gift tank without premium bonus, at a preliminary battle rating
of 8.0, only available through the 2018 operation SUMMER event.
The tank has a striking resemblance to the IS-3 and T-10M, with a pike nosed hull and
a very rounded and flat turret.
As always, we'll go through the Holy trinity of tank warfare in the order of armour, mobility
and firepower.
In terms of armour, the IS-7 does indeed fulfil the requirement of resisting Jagdtigers and
more.
The hull front consists of sloped 150mm plates both on the upper and lower plate.
The upper frontal plate presents an astonishing effective thickness of around 340mm, and even
the general weakspot of any tank that is the lower frontal plate still features 260mm of
effective thickness.
The driver's port might look like a weakspot, and in fact it is only a 100mm thick plate,
but due to the extreme angling it still presents over 400mm of effective thickness.
The turret front has various plates, with raw plate thickness reaching up to 250mm at
some points.
Due to the heavy rounding and sloping, you can expect effective thicknesses of anywhere
between 200 to over 500mm.
Without pinpoint accuracy, even APDS shells will struggle to penetrate the turret.
The side hull armour is not much weaker either.
The upper plate is 150mm thick and sloped, providing well over 200mm of effective armour.
The lower plate is also a classic Russian heavy trap, as it is not a flat plate but
instead rounded.
As you can see from this image, trying to penetrate the apparently flat side armour
actually results in a very high bounce chance on the rounded 100mm lower plate.
Your best bet is to aim for the area just above the tracks, where this plate flattens
out.
The rear of the hull provides between 60-80mm of effective thickness.
The massive engine will eat up APHE, HESH and HEAT projectiles, but a clear penetration
from a high power solid projectile should be capable of reaching the crew compartment
easily.
This also applies to the 80mm thick rear of the turret
Speaking of crew, the IS-7 features a total of 5, which includes what I presume to be
two loaders.
One crew, the driver, sits center in the front of the hull, with the other 4 sitting tightly
together in the turret.
Despite the high armour values, a penetrating hit should be devastating.
Onto mobility.
Despite weighing in at 68 tonnes, the 1050hp naval diesel engine provides the IS-7 with
a power to weight ratio of 15.4, which would put it in medium tank territory.
And this also reflects on the overall stats.
The IS-7 accelerates from 0-30km/h in 6.9 seconds, which is nearly identical to the
Panther A we tested in a previous video.
The indicated top speed is 60Km/h, although it levels out at around 40km/h off road, which
is quite quick.
Even the reverse speed is incredible for a machine of this weight, topping out at 23
Km/h.
This is a tank that can move very quickly in straight lines.
I say straight lines because it goes a bit downhill from there.
I'm not sure if it's a bug, or if it genuinely is meant as a weakness, but the IS-7 is terrible
at turning.
From standstill, it took a whole 51 seconds to do a 360 degree hull turn, in a massive
area given the lack of neutral turning.
This is by far some of the worst I've ever witnessed.
Rolling turning isn't much better, as even in third gear it still takes 24.1 seconds.
This is a tank that loves wide open fields with straight lines, but suffers heavily in
tight city combat.
Finally, I gave it a lap around the tank polygon test track.
Surprisingly, the off road performance was able to compensate for the horrible turning
performance, and the IS-7 finished the lap in just under 5 minutes, beating out a fully
upgraded Panther A by almost 10 seconds.
As I've mentioned before, for being such a heavy tank it does present medium tank mobility.
Finally, Firepower.
The IS-7 features an adapted 130mm naval gun with an automatic assisted loading system,
and a whopping 8 machine guns.
6 of these are 7.62mm mgs, two of which are mounted coaxially on each side of the main
gun, two fixed to the side of the hull, and another two fixed to the back of the hull.
All of these do indeed work, although the hull mounted MGs do not have any kind of traverse
or elevation, and the back mounted MGs only fire when aiming directly behind where your
gun is pointing, which results in constantly trying to turn the turret around.
The remaining two guns are 14.5mm heavy machine guns, capable of destroying lightly armoured
tanks, tracks and cannon barrels.
One of these is mounted coaxially straight above the gun, which means you don't have
to compensate for convergence, and the other is mounted quite high on top of the turret.
You would think this would make for excellent anti aircraft defense, and the top mounted
MG can indeed point straight up into the sky, but due to the terrible rotation and elevation
speed of it, it's going to be nearly impossible to track any kind of aircraft that's not
flying in a straight line towards you.
The coaxial machine gun isn't much better either, due to the very limited elevation.
That said, both the top and the coaxially mounted 14.5mm MGs can be used like the 20mm
cannon on the MBT-70 to destroy the enemy tank's cannon barrel directly or from behind
cover, an ability that is incredibly useful in 1v1 close range engagements.
The main 130mm gun features a 7 round assisted loading tray that functions similarly to an
autoloader, whilst still retaining two loaders to refill the tray with ammunition.
During those initial 7 rounds, the gun fires once every 10 seconds, which is below average
for most guns at this battle rating but incredibly fast for a gun of this calibre.
Mind you, after the initial 7 rounds are spent, it takes a long time to replenish ammo to
the tray.
Your gun can only feed from ammo from the tray, and every shot will interrupt the reloading
of said tray.
As such, I recommend sticking close to capture points, where you can reload the tray much
more quickly if you are going to be fighting multiple enemies in quick succession.
The IS-7 can carry a total of 30 rounds of APHE type APCBC shells with up to 265mm of
penetration and 195gr of explosive filler, at a muzzle velocity of 900m/s.
Whilst this shell can't compete in terms of raw penetration power with the HEATFS,
APDS and APFSDS shells you might find on enemy tanks within its BR range, it does make up
for it in pure damage.
With that amount of explosive filler, any penetrating hit is highly likely to result
in a one shot kill, if not crippling damage.
The gun handling isn't anything special however.
Contrary to some sources, the gun is not stabilized.
The turret rotation speed is mediocre at best with 12 degrees per second stock, and the
gun elevation range is terrible, ranging from negative three to 15 degrees.
As with the mobility, the gun works just fine in wide and flat terrains, but struggles in
close quarter combat or hilly terrain.
So, lets summarize the IS-7 then.
It is indeed a very scary tank, at a first glance of the stats it does remind a lot of
the IS-6, but better in every way.
The armour is stronger, the mobility is great, the gun is much better and it has not one,
but two secondary machine guns that can disable enemy guns.
Without knowing what it is or what its weaknesses are, the IS-7 might seem a completely broken
and overpowered tank.
But having tested it and analysed it's weaknesses, I have my reservations.
The armour is incredibly strong, yes.
It is pretty much immune against any kind of AP or APHE shell, even APDS might struggle
against it.
But it is also at battle rating 8.0 at the moment, which puts it just outside of 6.7
downtiers and into the 8.7 uptier territory, where it will often face HEATFS and even occasionally
APFSDS shells.
Whilst the tank does have a healthy number of crew, they are packed tightly together
along with sizeable ammo racks, and any penetrating hit is likely to cause devastating damage.
The mobility is once again great for such a heavy tank, comparing to or surpassing medium
tanks in many aspects.
However, as we also found out, it doesn't like to turn very well, neither the hull nor
the turret.
This makes it rather vulnerable in close quarters, where it might be easily flanked if it doesn't
have the space to use the amazing reverse speed to get into cover.
Given that the lower hull side is only 100mm flat in the right area and the crew is compacted,
even lower tier flanking tanks can do a serious number on it.
Finally, the gun.
Ignoring the bad gun handling stats, the gun itself is actually quite powerful and assisted
by the secondaries.
In close range frontal 1v1s you can easily use the armour to bounce the first shot from
the enemy and take your time disabling their guns with your machine guns and find the weakspots
to penetrate with the main gun, following up after 10 seconds if necessary.
And that is against heavily armoured opponents like an M103 for example, against medium and
lower tanks, the shell has more than enough penetration and explosive power to absolutely
obliterate them.
Unless you can disable the IS-7's gun on the first shot and avoid the machine guns
damaging your barrel or tracks, it is not recommended to go against it from the front.
That said, the IS-7's gun is not stabilized and is at a disadvantage against high penetration
stabilized guns when on the move.
105mm L7 carrying tanks with heatfs should not have too much of an issue against the
IS-7 from the front, much less so mobile tanks that can get onto their side.
Even aircraft shouldn't fear the IS-7 too much.
As long as you don't fly directly at them for an extended amount of time, the top machine
gun simply can't traverse quickly enough to catch you.
This is my own opinion, and I might of course be totally wrong by the time the tank releases.
After all, I haven't used it against actual players and the stats might be completely
different by that time.
But as they currently are and from my own experience over the last four years, I do
not believe the IS-7 to be the completely overpowered and invincible monster that some
people seem to make it out to be.
But this is just one side, I do very much want to hear your opinions on the IS-7 in
the comments now that you know more about the tank.
Again, keep in mind that all of these stats and battle ratings and performances are preliminary
and might or might not change drastically before it is actually put into the game, so
don't grab your pitchforks just yet if you believe the tank to be completely under or
overpowered.
Instead, say what you would want changed instead, based on what he have right now.
But in any case, hopefully you have enjoyed this preview of the IS-7!
If you're new around here, do subscribe, I seem to be in another monthly burst of video-making
motivation right now, and that's usually when I put out the good stuff.
As always, my name has been MikeGoesBoom, and thank you for watching!
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