Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Fake Tank Friday the show where
we look at fictional designs and any real history behind them.
This week we once again find ourselves returning to World of Tanks to take a look at their
brand new line of Japanese tank destroyers.
Are these yet another case of utter fabrication or do they actually have some basis in reality?
Stay tuned as we find out.
You may recall a previous video where we looked at the Japanese Heavy tank line in World of
Tanks Blitz.
For those of you who haven’t seen that one yet I recommend it but in it we started with
the lowest tier vehicle and worked our way up from there.
We’ll be doing the same today for the tank destroyers starting with the tier V Ho Ni
III.
Wargaming starts off strong with a completely real tank destroyer with the Ho Ni III being
the third version of the Ho Ni tank destroyer lineage.
Unlike the first two this vehicle featured a fully enclosed fighting compartment on the
same Type 97 Chi Ha chassis.
They’ve obviously taken some liberties with the various modules of the tank with it having
100 more horsepower than the real vehicle, but the top cannon available is the real Type
90 75mm cannon the Ho Ni III carried.
Moving on we come to the tier VI vehicle known as the Ji Ro.
Similarly to the previous this vehicle has a solid real world counterpart.
The Ji Ro was one of two self propelled gun concepts designed to use the hulls of the
Type 95 heavy tank which we looked at before on this channel including the SPGs.
We do know the remaining Type 95s did not go entirely unused with their chassis being
chosen for some heavy spg variants.
One of these, known as the Hi-Ro or Hi-Ro-Sha, was an open topped vehicle with a Type 14
105mm cannon.
This one was actually built with photos showing one prototype.
As for the other variant, known as the Ji-Ro or Ji-Ro-Sha, it may have been a close topped
superstructure on the Type 95 chassis to mount either the same gun or another weapon.
It is not known if this was built as no photos exist today.
The armament of these two vehicles also vary wildly from source to source so I can’t
tell for certain what the true armaments were.
Neither seems to have seen any sort of combat.
As we don’t know the exact details of the real Ji Ro the ingame portrayal is about as
close as you can expect for a wargaming vehicle.
This now brings us to the tier VII Chi To SP.
I find this vehicle a bit confusing as it appears to be a complete fabrication.
That isn’t really anything new for wargaming but I find it odd because they could instead
have used the Ka To shown here.
Sources differ on exactly what hull this would have used with some saying the Chi To and
others saying the Chi Ri, but either would have been more realistic than the Chi To SP.
At least the gun is real I guess.
Wargaming does somewhat tell the player the vehicle is not real with the ingame description
but once again they use vague wording to make it seem more real than it probably is.
I will concede that a casemate style self propelled gun on the Chi To chassis is not
outside the realm of possibility though so at least it doesn’t stray into the utter
fantasy of some of the other tanks they’ve added.
The final three vehicles from Tier VIII to Tier X we will consider together as they are
three variations on the same concept.
The Ho Ri’s are another group of vehicles we have already looked at on this channel
in my Chi Ri video so let’s see what info I found on them from there:
As if the entire Chi-Ri program wasn't already overly ambitious there was even a plan to
produce tank destroyer variants of the chassis.
This tank would have been equipped with a 105mm gun and resembled the German Ferdinand
in overall shape while still retaining the 37mm hull mounted cannon.
The sloped front of the Ho-Ri which has been made more popular from its addition to War
Thunder seems to not have originated from the actual drawings of the tank but rather
from the scale mockup of it.
For the second layout of the Ho-Ri known unofficially as the Ho-Ri II it would have resembled the
German Jagdtiger with a center mounted casemate.
The planned 105mm was tested prior to the end of the war but neither design was ever
built making the Ho-Ri a completely paper tank.
I found mention of a third design of the Ho-Ri which the scale mockup may be based on, however
the entire article was listed as outdated by the author and the updated version seems
to have been deleted leaving me no way to tell what I can trust from the post.
When we look at the vehicles in World of Tanks they fairly closely resemble these concept
drawings and descriptions of the real world examples.
However there is one major difference when we look at the Tier IX and Tier X with both
sporting a massive 14.9cm gun.
The one on the Tier IX is correctly referred to as the Type 96 which was a real gun built
by Japan but the Tier X uses a Type 97 which as far as I can tell was made up for the game.
As it stands none of the Ho Ri concepts were planned to use this gun with the 10.5cm being
the chosen armament.
The Tier VIII similarly has a fictional gun assigned to it in the form of the 12cm Type
10 cannon which once again is real, just not for that vehicle.
Overall I actually quite like the way wargaming went about making the Japanese tank destroyer
line as it mostly utilizes real designs not resorting to blatant fakes outside of the
one odd choice with the Chi To SP.
I can’t say that I fully agree with slapping random guns on vehicles which never were intended
to use them but I accept that at the end of the day it's just a game.
I still will say that I wish they would do more to inform their player base about the
reality of not only the vehicles themselves but how they actually were configured in the
real world.
It obviously isn’t something wargaming seems to care about anymore which is a shame.
Something as simple as an option which allows you to configure the vehicle as closely to
its real world counterpart would be a really nice historical touch but thats little more
than a pipe dream.
So what do you think of the new Japanese tank destroyer line and the various vehicles it
features?
Let me know down in the comments.
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more covering Japanese tanks you can find
those on my channel.
Thanks as always for watching and to my Youtube members for their support of my content.
I’ve been working to bring some more cursed by design videos to those of you waiting for
them so please bear with the Fake tank videos in the meantime.
I’ll see you all in the next video.