Cobra

Cobra is a tier 9 British medium tank. It has decent turret armour but a fairly weak hull, and good mobility but limited top speed. Its main unique feature is its gun with great accuracy and gun handling, and firing only HEAT and HESH shells.

Click the table of contents below to access the section you want:

1. Armour
2. Gun
3. Mobility
4. Equipment, provisions, & consumables
5. Gameplay advice
6. Tank gameplay:
7. Overall
8. Is it worth it?
9. Camo cost:

Armour

(The Cobra in the images is using Improved Assembly)

Image slider may take a few seconds to load

Drag slider right -> to view 240mm AP
Drag slider <- left to view 290mm HEAT

Armour when flat and facing head-on:
Upper plate 215-220mm
Mid bar 133mm
Lower plate 140mm

Turret upper half 250-262mm
Turret lower half 242-375mm
Turret mounts 95mm

(This penetration level represents most tier 9-10 tanks. Only a few like the Sheridan or T-54 have notably less penetration than this.)

Side armour:
The side armour of the Cobra is 50mm, so its easily HE-able when not angled.

The hull side is slightly angled inwards, so it does actually produce quite a high effective thickness, and may troll enemies occasionally if you wiggle and angle.

Armour vs tier 8:
Against tier 8 tanks, the Cobra has a strong turret. Only a few tanks will be able to penetrate it with standard ammo, high penetration tanks such as TDs, T34, M6 EXP, Emil 1951, AMX 50 100, etc. Other tanks will only be able to penetrate it with premium ammo.

The upper plate will be able to bounce lower penetration tier 8 tanks (180-200mm penetration), and angling it will let it bounce some higher penetration tanks (205-215mm penetration).

The lower plate and cupola are weak to all enemies, and various parts on the turret edges are also penetrable.

Armour vs tier 9:
Against most tier 9 tanks, the Cobra’s turret is easily penetrable and won’t bounce anything. Only a few tanks (such as the Soviet and American MT/LT) will struggle to penetrate the Cobra’s turret with standard ammo.

The hull armour is weak to all enemies when on flat ground, but will be able to bounce even most premium ammo if used in a gun depression position.

Armour vs tier 10:
Armour against tier 10 tanks is weak, nearly all tanks can easily penetrate any area of the Cobra’s frontal armour. The only tanks which might struggle are tanks with very low penetration, such as the Sheridan.

The hull armour becomes strong if used in a gun depression position, but more enemies may be able to use premium ammo to penetrate.
(When using gun depression, the upper plate is at 67 degrees, so its not an auto-ricochet, AP and APCR rounds with enough penetration can go through.)

Armour vs 220mm AP

This penetration level represents the lower penetration tier 9-10 tanks (Sheridan, T-54, WZ-120, etc), and average penetration tier 8 HT.

As shown, the turret is very effective, and most enemies with this penetration will need to shoot premium ammo to guarantee damage.

Standard ammo can penetrate the upper half of the turret, but only when the turret isn’t angled at all (and realistically, what tank looks at red armour and then shoots, expecting to penetrate?)

Gun

The Cobra mounts a 120mm gun. It has 2 ammo types only, HEAT as standard ammo, and HESH as premium. It is not an autoloader, and has no regular HE shell.

HEAT:
-Alpha damage is 400.
-Penetration is 235mm, or 266mm with calibrated shells.
-DPM is 2489, or 2315 with calibrated shells.
-Reload time is 9.6s, or 10.4s with calibrated shells.
–Shell velocity is 950m/s.

HESH:
-Alpha damage is 500.
-Penetration is 200mm, or 216mm with calibrated shells.
-DPM is 3111, or 2893 with calibrated shells.
-Reload time is 9.6s, or 10.4s with calibrated shells.
–Shell velocity is 950m/s.

Other gun stats:
–Estimated aim time is 3.0/3.2s
–Base aim time is 1.9s, but it can get down to 1.55s.
-Dispersion is 0.326/0.293
–Gun handling is 0.14/0.14/0.12, or 0.12/0.12/0.1 with Vertical Stabilizer.
-Gun depression is -10 degrees

Overall this is an incredible gun. It has high alpha, with 500 on HESH, making it the highest alpha damage medium tank in the game. It also has an incredible combination of accuracy, aim time, gun handling, and gun depression, all of which make this a very accurate and consistently performing gun.

It also has good shell velocity for these ammo types, which just adds to the great aspects of this gun.

Its DPM is good with HESH, though it sacrifices penetration to achieve this. The Cobra generally can penetrate most enemies with at least one shell type, but there are certain enemies (mentioned below) that are hard to deal with due to having no high penetration premium ammo.

Mobility

-Top speed is 45km/h forwards, and -20km/h in reverse
-Traverse speed is 52.5 deg/s on hard terrain, and 47.8 deg/s on medium terrain.
-In game acceleration rate is shown as 18.8 hp/t, it has strong 969hp engine for its 51 ton weight.
-Actual acceleration rate is 18.8 hp/t on hard terrain, and 17 hp/t on medium terrain.
–Terrain resistances are 1/1.1/1.5

Overall this is decent mobility, its nothing special, but the tank isn’t slow and is able to get around the map like a regular medium. The terrain resistances are great, meaning the performance difference on different terrain types is hardly noticeable. Acceleration rate is good, though traverse speed isn’t so impressive. Top speed is limited to 45km, but the tank doesn’t feel slow or limited.

Equipment, provisions, & consumables

The Cobra doesn’t have any special provisions or consumables.

Calibrated Shells:
The Cobra is not a reload or DPM reliant medium tank. Its playstyle is far more reliant on making each shot hit and penetrate, and delivering that impactful alpha damage.
While playing this tank, you may notice it struggles to penetrate many enemies, but isn’t often under pressure to reload quickly, hence why the gun rammer isn’t as necessary as calibrated shells.

Calibrated shells also just give a very noticeable penetration increase on this tank, increasing the HEAT penetration from 235mm to 266mm, and the HESH penetration from 200mm to 216mm.

The reload time will be increased from 9.9s to 10.4s, and DPM lowered from 2437/3046 to 2315/2893 on HEAT/HESH; however this decrease isn’t too impactful on the gameplay of the tank, and the penetration is arguably far more useful, since the Cobra isn’t a DPM-focused tank.

Improved Assembly:
Enhanced armour does benefit the Cobra, especially on the turret. However, this is only useful against tier 8 tanks, which already struggle to penetrate the turret, even without enhanced armour on. Tier 9-10 tanks will have no issue penetrating the tank, and you’ll face them more often than tier 8 tanks (since Cobra is tier 9, it faces tier 9 more than it does tier 8).

Improved assembly is more helpful, as it allows Cobra to take more hits, and trade more shots (which is a big part of its gameplay). The turret armour will still be effective against tier 8 enemies, but the tank will just have higher HP.
Improved assembly will increase the Cobra’s 1700 base HP up to 1768, which is the highest for a tier 9 medium tank.

Vertical Stabilizer:
Vertical stabilizer is needed on the Cobra since its quite an active tank, constantly moving and flanking enemies to use its HESH. It also already has great accuracy relative to its alpha damage, 0.326 doesn’t struggle to hit enemies at all, especially with the great aim time of the Cobra, hence why refined gun isn’t needed.

Vertical stabilizer will improve the accuracy of the tank when its moving, and also when its aiming in after it has stopped moving. It just makes hitting and penetrating shots much easier, especially since HEAT and HESH ammo types are ineffective against spaced armour and external modules.

Gameplay advice

Cobra has a unique playstyle. Its ammunition and armour effectiveness changes greatly depending on which tier of enemies it faces. In tier 8 matches it can play a standard medium role, in tier 10 matches its more of a support medium.

General gameplay:
When top tier, the Cobra is more of a frontline medium, since it has good HP, decent armour, and penetration to easily deal with most enemies frontally.

When bottom tier, the Cobra hasn’t quite got the armour or the penetration to always be playing on the frontline, and with its HESH and good accuracy, the Cobra can do really well by supporting allies from flanks or taking advantage of distracted enemies.

Utilize ammo correctly:
-HESH should be your primary ammo, this should be the ammo you load when the battle starts, and it should be the ammo you use most often in the battle. It has less penetration than HEAT, and also deals more damage when it penetrates.

-Use HEAT only when your HESH cannot penetrate an enemy. HEAT is best against enemies with armour over 216mm of effective thickness, but under 270mm effective thickness.
Some tanks which you might often face which need HEAT to penetrate are the Kpfpz 70, 50TP Tyszkiewicza, Mäuschen, or Tiger II.
-Similarly, you can’t penetrate HESH on thin spaced armour, but HEAT can generally go through, some tanks with such thin spaced armour are Sheridan, TL-7-120, Bisonte C45, or WZ-132-1.

-Switch back to HESH if enemies have over 260mm of effective armour. Since HEAT won’t penetrate, you just have to use the splash damage of the HESH shell to deal damage.
The most common enemies you’ll have to do this against are IS-7, E 100, E 75, Badger, Type 71, etc.

HESH usage:
HESH is the most effective ammo on this tank, and you want to use it as much as possible for getting damage.

HESH is a HE-type round, so unlike AP or APCR, it won’t penetrate spaced armour, tracks, guns, or viewports; it can’t overmatch thin armour, and it never ricochets. It also can deal splash damage, with a 2.42 meter radius.

When using this shell:
-Avoid shooting tracks, generally they fully absorb the damage, since often they are quite distanced actual hull.

-Avoid spaced armour of any type. Just like with tracks, they can potentially fully absorb damage, either due to thickness (such as gun mantlets), or distance to the base armour (such as on the E 75 TS). Even if the spaced armour is thin and close to the base armour (like on a Sheridan), it will still stop a penetration, so you won’t be able to deal the full 500 damage.

-Aim for flatter armour, if its very well angled or rounded, it will be harder to penetrate. Cupolas, lower plates, flat hull sides, and turret sides/rears are generally easy to penetrate with HESH.

-If you can’t penetrate the enemy, and just want to deal splash damage, still avoid spaced armour and tracks.
Splash damage causes the most damage when the shell splashes close to a thin armour plate. A good example is if you shoot the bottom part of the E 100’s turret front, it deals big splash damage, since the explosion splashes onto the weak 40mm hull deck.
If you don’t know where weak plates are on the enemy tank, the hull deck/engine deck is generally weak and a good one to aim for.

Apocalypse enemies:
The Cobra struggles to penetrate enemies with over 250-255mm of effective armour (if using calibrated shells), since its HEAT ammo has no normalization, and the tank has no high-penetration round.

Due to this, certain tanks are extremely hard to penetrate in most situations, these being:
-Obj.752, small size, strong armour, spaced armour on the sides.
-IS-7, strong lower plate and all-round armour.
-E 100, strong lower plate and hull sides
-Maus, strong all-round armour
-Type 71, strong frontal armour
-T95, T110E3, Badger, all essentially don’t have frontal weaknesses to 266mm HEAT

There are of course situations where other tanks are fully impenetrable (such as hulldown), but the tanks mentioned above are hard to deal with even when they have no cover.

Its good to try prioritise these targets if you have side or rear shots into them, since if the situation changes, and you have to face these enemies 1-on-1, you’ll really struggle to deal damage.

(Note that this doesn’t mean you can’t frontally penetrate these tanks at all, for example the E 100 and IS-7 can be penetrated on the lower plate if they don’t angle, however, the above mentioned tanks are generally the ones that pose a biggest threat to the Cobra, as they have few HESH/HEAT penetrable areas)

Don’t rush shots:
Even though the accuracy and handling of this tank are great, the ammo types are far less reliable than ammo on other tanks, and your reload time is fairly long. Its worth properly aiming to make sure you are able to penetrate the enemy and deal the full damage, rather than miss and go on a 10s reload.

Its especially important in this tank, as unlike most other tanks with HESH, this doesn’t have an AP type round, both its HEAT and its HESH ammo need careful aiming to avoid spaced armour, tracks, and thicker armour plates.

If you just want to get splash damage, there’s less need to aim. The most splash damage will come from hitting close to thin armour plates, but you will never win a damage trade, so its best to avoid being shot than to try get splash damage.

Trading damage:
When fighting an enemy, try to only expose your armour when fully reloaded. 10.4s is the longest reload for a tier 9 medium tank, is is also longer than most enemies in tier 8-10.

Avoid enemies while you reload, since most will try to shoot you twice for every time you shoot them, and this will result in them dealing more damage to your tank. If you trade shot-for-shot, its quite easy to out-trade enemies, since most tanks have less than 500 alpha damage.

Armour angling:
The Cobra has 3 ways to use its armour:
-Sidescrape
-Use gun depression
-Raise the gun

Each benefits the tank in a different way and only has limited use. The tank will never be fully impenetrable to any enemy you face.

Sidescraping works quite well due to Cobra’s side armour being angled slightly inwards. Its base thickness is 51mm, so it can bounce all guns smaller than 153mm. Note that if enemies hit the front track wheel, its likely they will penetrate. Sidescraping in Cobra is mainly useful for using the rear of the tank to bait enemy shots.

Gun depression use increases the thickness of the upper plate, and allows it to bounce standard ammo. The turret will be easily penetrable, but the red upper plate will force enemies to aim for longer. You can also raise the gun, to make the upper half of the turret stronger, making the weakpoint of your tank (lower half of turret) even harder to hit.

Raising the gun makes the upper half of the turret extremely strong and well angled. The gun doesn’t need to be raised all the way to maximum elevation (which is 12 degrees), as shown below.
Raising the gun by 4-5 degrees makes it impenetrable to standard ammo, and raising it by 8 degrees makes it hard for even 330mm penetration to go through.

Shown against 220mm AP (left image), and 290mm HEAT (right image).

The gun needs to be raised more in the right image, as the tank is facing a higher penetration level. In this image, the gun is raised by roughly 6 degrees (at this point it can also bounce 300mm HEAT).
In the left image, only very slight elevation is needed, and the turret front is impenetrable to this ammo. In this image the gun is raised by roughly 1 degree, enough to make 220mm AP bounce off.

Raise the gun (turret) at any time, since it just makes your armour better. It makes the turret stronger against lower penetration tanks (like the 220mm AP shown), and it forces higher penetration enemies to take time to aim (otherwise its a pretty easy auto-pen to most tier 9-10 tanks).

Lowering the gun doesn’t benefit the tank, as the lower half of the turret is thicker, but much less angled than the upper half of the turret.
The upper half really benefits from being raised up, as the angle increases so drastically, even 300mm HEAT penetration can’t go through reliably.

(Unfortunately you just have to cut your losses with the lower half of the turret, its not possible to make it “red” against tier 9-10 enemies.)

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Cobra’s gameplay varies depending on the tier and enemies it faces. Due to its limited level of penetration, and armour effectiveness, the Cobra can play as a frontline tank in the regular medium role when its top tier against tier 8 enemies; however against tier 10 enemies, its armour doesn’t work that well and it can struggle to penetrate some tanks, so it plays more of a supporting and flanking role.

Tank gameplay:

Overall

Armour – 5/10
Gun – 9/10
Mobility – 5/10
Speed – 4/10

Cobra overall is a great tank.

Armour is good against lower tiers, but fairly weak against higher tiers. Armour angling/gun raising does work. Side HE protection is poor, front HE/HESH protection is decent.
Gun has great aim time, gun depression, accuracy & handling, with decent reload rate, high alpha damage, and comfortable shell velocity. Penetration is low, and no AP type ammo on the tank.
Mobility is decent. Engine power and acceleration are decent, traverse speed is mediocre but not bad, and reverse speed is average.
Speed is low for a medium, at 45km/h.

This tank may look like a funny derp tank on its stats, however its extremely effective in battles, and is actually one of the strongest and most competitive tier 9 mediums.

Look at what the tank offers, it lacks nothing.
-It has decent armour. Not against all tanks, but its very solid against certain enemies, and can be troll to all enemies. It also has high HP, about 50 more than other mediums.
-Its mobile, its got great general mobility and generally the top speed isn’t limiting.
-It has incredible gun depression.
-It has high penetration on both HEAT and HESH, with high alpha on both shells.
-It has decent DPM for its alpha.
-It has great aim time, great dispersion, and good gun handling.

The only things you could really fault this tank for, are a lack of AP/APCR shell, or a lack of high penetration premium ammo. Otherwise it just has everything at its disposal.

Is it worth it?

The Cobra is a tank that’s definitely worth getting. Its very unique in what it offers, and many players will appreciate the HESH ammo with great accuracy & flexibility, and the decent armour and mobility that the Cobra has.

Its not an easy tank to play, and since it uses HESH as the primary ammo type, its not the best credit grinder. This tank is more suited to experienced players who know good positioning and armour weaknesses, and will be able to use the ammo types properly.

The Cobra is worth 18,000 gold. Its a great tank, its both strong & competitive in statistics, but also quite fun and unique for a medium tank. Newer players should avoid this tank, as its armour won’t always work, and its ammo types require good game knowledge to use.

Camo cost:

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