AH-1W SuperCobra In Warthunder : A Basic Review

the ah1 Super Cobra is a family of follow-ons to earlier versions of the plain old ah1 regular Cobra after experience during the Vietnam war the US Marine Corps wanted an attack helicopter with greater payload and a more advanced weapon system well in response to this there was a rather significant amount of internal drama at the US Department of Defense where some of the senior leadership wanted to focus on maintaining commonality between the different service branches others wanted to just wait until the ah64 was ready and lastly a few holdouts wanted to just tell the Marines to make do with what they had well the Marine Corps ended up operating the ah1g during the late 1960s as a stop Gap but they still wanted an upgraded model preferably one with twin engines Bell Helicopter was already working on a new twin engined version of the Cobra called the ah1 C cobra which was optimized to operate from ships hence the name well long story short after all the drama at the Pentagon the Marines finally got approval and funding for the a1w nicknamed The Whiskey Cobra which was based on the C Cobra but had an improved weapon system that was compatible with the am9 Sidewinder missile and the new AGM 114 Hellfire missile this presented a pretty significant upgrade in capabilities over earlier versions of the ah1 family and the W was renamed Super Cobra to reflect this the Marine cores super cobras saw combat during quite a few overseas deployments including the first and second Gulf Wars but were eventually replaced by the a1z the Zulu Cobra which we also have in the game The Last whiskey Cobras were retired in 2020 the a1w was also exported to both turkey and the Republic of China over in Taiwan both of whom still operate the Super Cobra what we're looking at in War Thunder is the a1w this is an attack helicopter and rank six of the American and Chinese Tech trees at Battle rating 10.7 both versions are basically identical the a1w gets a full ballistics computer a modern APR 39 direction-based radar warning receiver a laser warning receiver a night vision setup and thermal targeting with a 13x optical zoom it also gets a missile approach warning system and an infrared countermeasure system along with its conventional counter measures its main gun is a 20 mm Cannon mounted in a chin turret with 750 rounds of ammo this usually won't be taking out main battle tanks but it's still useful and it puts out adequate Firepower especially against lighter vehicles for loadouts the Super Cobra has four pylons but notably it can only take rocket pods or gun pods on the inner stations and it can't mix gun pods with air to ground missile racks the outer stations can mount a side Winder or up to four air to ground missiles on each station The Sidewinder it gets is the am9 L an all aspect 30g missile with really good overall performance this is a totally credible weapon against low-flying aircraft drones or other helicopters at this battle rating the first anti-tank missile is the bgm 71d tow missile these have an effective range of a little bit less than 3 km semi-automatic command line of sight guidance and are very slow weapons you upgrade to the AGM 114b which is a laser guided missile with inertial tracking to survive short-term losses in laser lock an effective range of almost 8 km but again a somewhat slow flight speed they've got a better Warhead than the tow missiles but can still sometimes need a double tap in order to take out a main battle tank the flight performance of the Super Cobra is pretty good for its BR but there are some major quirks and caveats it has good agility with a really Snappy cyclic response but you're usually going to need to maintain a very high Collective setting in order to keep control at medium or faster speeds the a1w like other H1 variants before it uses a twin bladed semi- rigid rotary setup sometimes s called a teetering rotor and the Super Cobra is particularly prone to adverse role in forward flight especially with abrupt pitch changes at high speed but a medium cyclic setting which can cause it to roll over sideways this can happen very suddenly and sometimes ends up being unrecoverable at lower Treetop altitudes flying the Super Cobra might take some practice unless you did a lot of flying with the a1f before in the tech Tre in instead of just skipping over it now don't get the wrong idea the whiskey Cobra isn't hard to fly it's just a little different until you get used to it I found that the best way to counter some of the Super Cobra quirks is to add a little bit of yacht input against the direction of Bank when rolling at high speeds and in general not to roll past about 45° sideways if I can avoid it unless you're banked against the direction of flight to help cancel out forward momentum without pitching up like a car skitting outs sideway to slow down the last thing to mention is that the Super Cobra is generally a very stable weapon platform both in a flat hover and in forward flight with only minimal practice it's pretty easy to line up hits with both the unguided rocket pods and the gun pods taking the Super Cobra out into closee support gives you a taste of top tier helicopter Gameplay at a much lower battle rating but there's one major issue I have to mention here the targeting system only has a 13x optical zoom and in my opinion that's the reason this is at a much lower BR with an otherwise top tier defensive and weapon system so why does that matter well as you can see in the footage I didn't have an especially big problem finding targets with a thermal imager the ideal engagement range for the 13x zoom and the Hellfire B combo is going to be right at around 6 km this is within range of the hellfires close enough that you can spot and lock a Target without a whole lot of trouble and far enough away where it'll at least take some level of skill for an spaa to smack you out here's the thing at that range with this optical zoom you can't adjust targeting on your target you can't really zoom in far enough to accurately adjust your laser to point at weak spots like hatches or ammo racks yes it is still technically possible to manually refine the laser normally and maybe you're some hypervision sniper playing on a 90in 8K monitor but for us mere mortals actually getting Precision targeting at safer distances isn't going to be practical if you want to realistically Target weak points you're going to need to get in closer a lot closer like 3 km or so which is well within range of spaa even if they really don't know what they're doing this means that a lot of the time the hellfires might end up taking a double tap to actually destroy a Target and as a reminder they're pretty slow in the footage I'm showing in this match up on F the Gap where I got into this absolutely Savage snipy spot just dumping hellfires on the enemy team from the south I I clipped it a bit for time it was a 9-minute long Sor but I only got one kill with the hellfires before I went in with the rockets at the end I got seven hits and multiple assists out of it but only one full kill as you saw and it took a double tap because the targeting just went Center of Mass on all the tanks and I couldn't really zoom in enough to manually Target the weak spots uh skill issue yeah fine whatever but I suspect that average players like me will have a pretty similar experience with a 13x optical zoom on the Super Cobra long story short because the slightly weaker optical zoom is there you might have to get in closer if you want to direct your shots with a bit more Precision visually in my opinion the Super Cobra looks pretty mean it's got a nice design and both versions the Chinese and the American one both get some decent paint shops Landing the a1w is very basic and it's got fixed Landing struts which I always personally prefer but just remember that it's still a somewhat heavy helicopter and it can be prone to Vortex ring if you're not not careful to close out with the a1w Super Cobra this helicopter gets a very strong set of weapons for its BR its flight performance is a good upgrade over previous helicopters and it has a very strong defensive system for its BR however the limited optical zoom seriously holds back its long range Effectiveness the final verdict on the whiskey Cobra is that this thing has the potential to be very strong in combat and if you can get used to making slightly closer medium- range attacks to mitigate the poor optical zoom this thing is going to feel pretty overpowered as always thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this review check out this other one

Channel: Tim's Variety War Thunder

Views: 17,642

Keywords: war thunder, warthunder, war thunder review, war thunder gameplay, review, war thunder update, ah-1, ah-1w, ah1w, super cobra, supercobra, whiskey cobra

Id: k3zohdJ9H6s

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024