Commanders!
Today, we’d like to tell you more about the Type 99B Main Battle Tank that’s coming to Armored Warfare.
As its name suggests, the Type 99B is a variant of the Type 99A Main Battle Tank you all know and love. With one caveat, that is – it isn’t real. No such thing as Type 99B exists in real life, this is an alternative history vehicle built around the idea of making an urban fighting variant of the Type 99A MBT. The idea is based on a render that appeared on the Chinese Weibo social network around 2016. In the render author’s mind, the biggest changes compared to the Type 99A included:
- Improved ERA with cage armor covering the rear
- Hard-kill APS (possibly of the GL-5 type)
- Improved sensors and FCS with advanced optics
- 360 degrees vision system for the crew
- Roof-mounted RCWS
The rest of the vehicle remained roughly the same.
Now, there are a lot of problems with the concept. For one, it suffers from the same issues some Russian tanks are suffering in real life – it has a carousel-style automatic loading mechanism and, from what we can see, no extra roof armor to speak of – only what looks like some composite plating. Why is there a man-operated machine gun in front of the RCWS like that? And a few other issues. And that just wouldn’t do – the way it was, the concept would fix no issues that exist with our Tier 10 Type 99A2, which is why, in the end, we decided to heavily deviate from the original vision. Here’s what we came up with.
As we wrote above, the Type 99B will be a Tier 10 Premium Main Battle Tank.
As you can see, it looks a lot like Type 99A2 at first glance (with the obvious difference being the dozer blade), but not to worry – the tank has a couple of tricks up its sleeve.
Let’s start with the model. The original Type 99A2 has a couple of issues that we’ll also be addressing and that are already fixed in Type 99B. For starters, it tends to explode rather enthusiastically when hit from the front. That’s caused by the fact that the ammo carousel is located on the bottom of the hull and it’s possible to penetrate it either via the lower frontal armor weakness or via the thinly armored sides of its hull.
There are three main changes we made to the Type 99B that address that. First and foremost, the turret was extended and the ammunition rack module was moved to the back of the back of the back of the turret. Welcome to the 21st century where urban combat can and does happen.
Secondly, the lower frontal plate and frontal side weakspots are covered by the dozer blade – and yes, it also increases its ramming damage. And, last but not least, the hull sides are now covered with ERA elements. These go further to the back than on the original Type 99B, but we dropped the cage armor (which doesn’t do much in the game anyway). In other words, this tank is designed around Armored Warfare gameplay to make it interesting. The tank will be protected by a hard-kill APS system (similar to the one used on the ZTQ-15) as well as 360 degree smoke cover.
Next, the firepower. The tank’s armed with two weapons. The first one is the main 125mm cannon (the longer version like on the Type 99A2) with identical performance to the Type 99A2 (we’ll probably tweak the reload time in order not to make it imbalanced). The gun fires APFSDS rounds as well as your favorite BTJ-III HEAT shells.
The second system is a roof-mounted Red Arrow ATGM launcher with two tubes firing thermobaric missiles similar to the Ataka-F model of the Ramka/Terminator. As the launcher is roof-mounted, these will serve as mid-long range weapons to dislodge static enemy vehicles from their positions. The original idea for this vehicle was to have a shorter gun and a classic ATGM launcher combo (with tandem warheads) with the gameplay resembling that of the popular Seongun-915 MBT (switching between missiles and shells to maximize your damage per minute value). We decided to do things this way to make them enjoyable but feel free to tell us what you think!
And finally, the mobility. In short, despite the additional weight, it’ll be roughly the same as the Type 99A2 one.
In summation, what you have here is a fast and agile mid-range support MBT that won’t be able to reliable break through enemy lines, but will be an excellent fire support platform. To address the huge elephant in the room – yes, this all does sound like a better version of the Type 99A2. That is because, simply put, it is. We’d like to implement some of the fixes we are planning for the progression Tier 10 MBT, which, as we are aware, performs notoriously poorly, the previous rebalance didn’t help in this regard. But, rest assured, we will take a look at the performance of the Type 99A2 in the near future. We won’t leave it hanging, that much we can promise.
We hope that you’ll enjoy the Type 99B and, as always:
See you on the battlefield!
