Tips and Trivia

I've created this thread because there are a couple small bits of potentially helpful info that may be somewhat obscure or otherwise just don't seem immediately obvious on the surface. Some of these require a little bit of familiarity with certain game mechanics while others are occasionally overlooked; either way, they may be useful for people who haven't previously considered them.

("But I already know all of these, this thread is totally useless!" you say. Yes I realize that most of these are pretty much common knowledge among stats enthusiasts & can be deduced with a certain measure of research and contemplation, but not all of this is known to everyone, this subreddit's population is broader than that.)

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• BiA increases view range about as much as Recon (the commander view range skill) does, so there is no meaningful decrease in commander performance from dropping Recon for BiA provided you are not losing any other vital crew skills. Technically Recon also helps if your viewport gets destroyed but this doesn't happen that often and you're going to be pretty blind either way.
• To add onto the above, only destroyed (red state) Viewports reduce view range. Once they are repaired into damaged (yellow) condition they regain 100% performance, just with less module HP so they'll be easier to destroy if hit again. This means that it is usually not worth spending a repair kit on yellow viewports. Same goes for tracks but most people know about that already.
• The Aiming Gears Lapping field mod on TDs and Heavies, while perhaps the less competitive option on most tanks, is actually not universally useless. The reduced aim time helps practical aiming speed in certain circumstances more than the +3% dispersion hurts it, so if you're specing a tank with high bloom multipliers that spends a lot of time in the middle of its aiming process (e.g. WZ-114), Aiming Gears Lapping can actually be helpful. Parallax adjustment is better at the ends of the aiming process, i.e. almost completely aimed and almost completely unaimed.
• On that note, your tank can still aim down turret traverse dispersion and hull traverse bloom while moving forwards and backwards as long as you stop or slow down the turret and/or hull rotation. Your tank will always be aiming down any excess bloom that it is no longer incurring or is suddenly incurring to a lesser extent, so if you stop rotating your turret while you're moving forwards, the tank's aim mechanism kicks in and the turret rotation bloom immediately starts shrinking. (The bloom from moving your hull is not going to start aiming down unless you slow down your tank, at which point it will start to reduce to a proportionate level.)
• Suspension Arm Tuning on meds, on the other hand, is practically worthless on all vehicles. It does nothing for turret bloom (so Improved Sight is just straight up better for reducing turret traverse dispersion) and the effect on moving and hull traverse bloom is usually canceled out and then some by the reduced accuracy. Due to the way the bloom multiplier's effects on base accuracy are calculated, the practical effect is that Improved Sight is often the better choice even for totally unaimed snapshots; you need to bloom a lot before the -3% dispersion multiplier benefit from Suspension Arm Tuning starts overriding the -2% base dispersion advantage from Improved Sight.
• Purple Vents gives you about 45% of the accuracy increase that Bounty IAU does (~3.6% vs 8%). It is somewhere in the realm of half as effective as purple GLD for the purposes of effective aiming time (overall effect of reduced dispersion + aiming time). This is on top of all the other benefits to other stats, e.g. reload, traverse speed, view range, crew skills. People frequently don't realize that the benefit to any one area from vents is actually often a pretty significant fraction of the bonus provided by a dedicated piece of equipment.
• Bonuses to Crew Skills (vents, food, BiA, etc.) have an outsized effect on Intuition Switch Time. This is because they reduce base reload time while simultaneously improving Intuition efficiency, and also, the skill works "backwards"; each extra percentage point reduces the Intuition switch time by something like ~0.65% of the base reload time, which is a lot more than 0.65% or whatever of the Intuition reload time.
• Never, ever use the Lightweight Suspension field mod on TDs. Due to the way traverse speed is calculated, it actually reduces traverse speed significantly. On top of this, it also majorly gimps your terrain resistance (for straight line speed and acceleration) and your suspension durability. This field mod is basically a reverse grousers debuff on your vehicle, it provides no performance benefit in any area whatsoever and there is no reason to use this unless you are feeling masochistic.
• HEAT has an autobounce angle of 5 degrees from horizontal (or 85 degrees from vertical) no matter how thick the armor is. Many people know that this is potentially useful for circumventing angles on turret roofs and sidescraping tanks that would autobounce APCR or APCR; somewhat fewer people realize this means it is technically possible for the M56 Scorpion to bounce shots from the tier 9 WZ-111G.
• HESH has no autobounce angle to the best of my knowledge, meaning it can be successfully deployed against the Swedish S-tanks as long as the shell has adequate penetration. You can also use it as a sort of "low pen HEAT round" for highly sloped surfaces, although it's less likely to penetrate armor that AP/APCR wouldn't already 3x overmatch.
• This should go without saying but APCR doesn't always have more pen dropoff than AP. You need to check the particular shell's stats to find this out. For that matter the 2 vs 5 degree normalization makes no difference regarding autobounce mechanics, it's 20 degrees for both shell types unless you have triple overmatch.
• Different guns on the same tank sometimes have different dispersion multiplier values; consult tanks.gg for additional information if you want some help on picking between two options. On a few tanks it even changes the armor model. (The tier 5 M4A1 Sherman, for example, gets a much better gun mantlet on its stock turret with the 105mm M4 than the 75mm M3. Sadly this disappears with the top turret.)