A New T-55 MBT for the 10th Anniversary of Steel Beasts

By SimHQ on July 20, 2010 in _land3

On August 21, 2010 eSim’s Steel Beasts celebrates 10 years. To commemorate the event, a new update to Steel Beasts Professional PEis being developed that includes several new and updated features including the new T-55.

eSim’s Director of Marketing, Nils “Ssnake” Hinrichsen told SimHQ about the T-55 addition to the new Steel Beasts Pro PE v2.5, and how it came about.

“The T-55 was one of the very first models that our Lead Artist, Raino Sommer, made. Sadly though we never found the time to implement it so that at some point he no longer was satisfied with the old model. What you’re seeing here is the T-55 2.0. Once we were committed to a new internal development tool which would make it much less time consuming to add in a new vehicle model, Raino was motivated to make a new model.

The T-55 was probably the first ‘real’ Main Battle Tank to the extent that, at its time, it combined heavy armament and heavy armor with good mobility for its time. One can still see the lineage to the IS heavy tanks with its shape and layout.

This will be the only T-55 for this release. But more variants will follow. The T-55 is not only the most widely proliferated tank worldwide, it has also undergone heavy modification over the past five decades, including the addition of laser range finder or guided anti tank missiles and armor modifications.

For this tank we implemented three different 100mm rounds. Included are the BM-8 APFSDS which can, though with difficulty, defeat a Leopard 1 frontally out to 3000m. Then there is the BK-5M HEAT round, and the OF-412Sh high explosive fragmentation round. Both are suitable to take out soft and medium-hard targets like IFVs.

With this new vehicle it is now possible to create scenarios from the 1970s timeframe, prior to the advent of the Leopard 2 or M1 Abrams, and still have them reasonably balanced. In such a scenario the T-72 would actually be a very formidable foe while the T-55 is still adequate.”

The images presented here of the new T-55 are just released exclusives for SimHQ.