due to laziness i decided to copy and paste Ghosth statement and my responce from the post mentioned above into this post without change.
Quote from: Ghosth on Today at 11:42:08 AM
321 just as an FYI the M18 came up in discussion at con. Pyro's short answer, its just too good, would make all other GV's irrelevant and have a huge negative impact on gameplay even if perked.
i have no understanding on this line of logic.
yes the M18 was fast (fastest of the tank destroyers) but that was only useful on open ROADS, it was still a multi-ton (17ish) piece of metal when it was off road thus the actual speed was dictated by terrain.
it has a skin about as durable as an orange peal. 0.2 to 1.0 inches. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M18_Hellcat for M18 stats, yes its wikkie but i cant find anything to contradict it) this translates to meaning that a solid .50 cal burst would not only penetrate most of its hull (see http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/infantry/mg/50_ammo.html for .50 cal stats) but would easily kill the crew inside, additionally any 20mm or bigger round striking it would decimate the M18. this ease of destruction is also true for any bomb landing near it or any HE shell landing close. you would have to park 3 of these abreast to stop an AP round fired from a tiger at close range!
its an egg shell with a cannon. in the real world it served its purpose efficiently because the allies held air superiority, without it this vehicle would have been destroyed en-mass on the field. as it would be in our arena's, providing the armor is modeled correctly, and it's use of super high speed on open terrain comes with consequences (hell if a sheep could flip a 50 ton tiger at 20 mph what would it do to an M18 at 50? ). almost every plane in the game could destroy or disable it without ords of any kind.
so go ahead put it in, model it correctly and I'm gonna laugh watching the screaming on 200 and counting all the "MY UBBER M18 GOT KILLED BY A........." threads that will in no time flood this board.
while I really want the M-18,,, the fact that I have bounced many a round off of m-3's m-8's and countless other gv's with as little or less armor, would seem to add to pyro's assessment that the M-18 would just be too good!
I still think it would be awesome,I don't care that it would screw up the GV balance,,, the 262 screws up the plane balance in the same way,, yet the perks it cost to fly fixes that problem! IMHO.
I would like to have the Yak -3 yet it did not even make the new plane poll,,, I was pretty sure it was in the top 3 last time we had one! What gives?
