M113A1 (TOW)

M113A1 (TOW)

▄M109G

VBC (PT2)

M113A1 (TOW)

▄M109G

VBC (PT2)

Italy

VI Rank

Battle rating:

AB	RB	SB
8.3	8.3	8.3

Class:

Tank destroyer

ATGM vehicle

Research:135 000

Purchase:380 000

Show in game

Description

The OTO Melara VTC M113A1 TOW is a Rank VI Italy tank destroyer with a battle rating of 8.3 (AB/RB/SB). It was introduced in Update 1.85 "Supersonic".

General info

Survivability and armour

The vehicle profile is literally a rectangle. Only the front is slightly sloped, to increase protection from machine gun fire. There isn't much else worth firing at, but launcher, machine gun and vehicle itself.

Armour of M113A1 barely stops 12 mm machine gun fire, since it's made of aluminium alloy. Anything of higher caliber will very likely penetrate it.

Gunner is standing outside of vehicle, directing the launcher, and thus can be hit. In fact, if someone accidentally hits rangefinder (near to launcher) with APHE, it may detonate right into their face.

Since armour is very thin it often does not detonate shells, and armour-ripping shells cause less than fatal damage. However, only very high caliber shells wont detonate, and you should avoid being hit at all. Vehicle also seems to not have hull break, as ATGM hits to the side in arcade mode only set it on fire.

All in all, it's best to just get out of the way of other tanks and sneak around.

Mobility

While stats say top speed of this vehicle is about 64-71 km/h, in reality it's driving for about 30-40, which is rather slow. The turn rate of vehicle also isn't that amazing, which is further decreasing your ability to react on sudden enemy appearance.

Armaments

Main armament

Vehicle is using TOW missile launcher on it's back to attack enemy. It only has 10 shots.

ATGMs loaded in this launcher have 2 purposes: Be extremely fast, and attack at absurd ranges. As such, of all ATGMs at it's BR, this one is probably one of the fastest with launch and top speed of 300 m/s. It can be easily beaten by hybrid tank ATGMs, but they're mostly used since BR of 9, aside from M551 and T-55AM-1, which is premium.

Standart ATGM you have at beginning is TOW, which has 430 mm of pen at 0 degrees and 214 mm of pen at 60 degrees. It can fly for 3 km.

The first-tier upgrade "I-TOW" changes missiles to have 630 mm of pen at 0 degrees and 314 mm of pen at 60 degrees, and also it's range is 3.75 km now. The drawback is, it does slightly less damage in RB.

The placement of weapon is high enough to fire over cover, but problem is, since in case of this vehicle gunner stands tall outside of vehicle all the time and can be easily hit, it's hardly an advantage.

Launcher has rather limited arc of fire - 45 degrees in either direction, which isn't compensated by missile's characteristics, like in case of Swingfire or armour like in case of IT-1. If you want to fire over cover, you'll probably need to stand far away from the enemy and cover, or right in front of cover, which probably wont protect the gunner.

Machine guns

The single 12.7 mm machine gun can be effective when fighting against open-topped vehicles or to cause some confusion to your enemies as you reload your vehicle.

Technically, you can use it against other poorly armored ATGM carriers, but the idea of them directly attacking your vehicle is rather ridiculous.

At your battle rating, all you can do with it against air vehicles is to keep helicopters from getting too comfy, the rest should be left to the designated anti-air vehicles or your main weapon, if necessary.

Usage in the battles

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Pros and cons

Pros:

• The obscene lack of armour makes it possible for over penetration (combined side armour amounts to less than the shell detonation value)
• It seems as if the vehicle was specifically designed for Realistic mode, where it's weaknesses don't really matter, and fast ATGMs can oneshot tanks before they can even react

Cons:

• Extremely vulnerable against anything better than a standard machine gun
• Rather slow
• Gunner can be taken out by anything

History

Describe the history of the creation and combat usage of the ground vehicle in more detail than in the introduction. If the historical reference turns out to be too big, take it to a separate article, taking a link to an article about the vehicle and adding a block "/historical reference" (example: https://wiki.warthunder.com/Name-vehicles/historical reference) and add a link to it here using the main template. Be sure to include links to sources at the end of the article.

Media

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Read also

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• reference to the series of the vehicles;
• links to approximate analogues of other nations and research trees.

ETC.

Sources

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• topic on the official game forum;
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