In September 2026 Gaijin Entertainment released Sky Odyssey and, with it, rebuilt how every bomber in War Thunder takes damage. On 15 October, Community Update No.13 set out what comes next: cluster bombs for air battles, Man-in-the-Loop guidance for helicopters, a British nuclear bomb, and a system for freezing your login streak.
What changed: Sky Odyssey replaced the bomber damage model across the fleet; Community Update No.13 (15 October 2026) confirmed cluster bombs, helicopter Man-in-the-Loop guidance, the WE177A nuclear bomb and login-streak “Freezes”. Why it matters: Nuclear Escalation, Naval Enduring Confrontation and Bullet Hell are now permanent modes, so bomber survivability and area-effect weapons have moved out of a rotating event and into the live game. Who should care: Anyone who flies bombers or hunts them, Nuclear Escalation regulars, and sim players who judge an update by what it does to the damage model.
What Sky Odyssey did to bombers
Gaijin’s own summary is blunt about the scale of the change: “We’ve completely overhauled the damage model for bombers in Sky Odyssey!” The same paragraph lists the method — several bugs fixed, damage accumulation parameters adjusted, hit zones recalculated, and settings updated for wing spars, tail assemblies, fuselages and engines.
The rework was not one set of numbers applied to everything that flies. Gaijin says it built distinct configurations for piston-engined aircraft depending on whether the engine is inline or radial and on how many engines an airframe carries — from two to six. Jet bombers were tuned separately, because in Gaijin’s words they “require a different damage calculation logic”.
PCGamesN, writing on 14 October, framed the result in player terms: whether you hit an inline piston or radial engine, fuselage, wing spars or tail, “what you hit will always matter, potentially knocking a valuable feature of an opposing craft offline.”
Bomber damage is still being tuned
Sky Odyssey shipped in September; on 28 September the game’s director, BVV_d, published a follow-up on the official forum describing what the rework got wrong and what comes next. He credits player reports, battle statistics and internal observation as the source of the plan.
| Problem BVV_d named | The fix, in his words | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Ramming | Bombers now “take relatively little damage, allowing them to easily survive fairly intense collisions with smaller aircraft” | “already in testing and will be released soon” |
| 20–30 mm HE-frag | Fragments and explosions “do not penetrate the skin reliably, reducing the damage to internal modules” | Components inside the wing and fuselage “will suffer damage if the impact is close to these modules” |
| Fire | Fire damage is not detailed enough — the visual effect on a wing can reach the tail assembly while the tail receives nothing | Fire spread, the damage area and how it grows, ignition odds from fuel-tank damage and remaining fuel, and loss of structural strength near spars |
| IR seekers | Seekers “are guided to the geometric center of the aircraft, which can result in ineffective hits on large aircraft” | Retarget to the hot engine area, making hits “more localized and, for larger aircraft, more lethal” |
He is explicit that this is not a return to bombers shedding wing panels to a few high-explosive 20 mm hits. The fire item has the longest reach: a prolonged fire near a spar would reduce that spar’s load-bearing capacity and lower its destructive overload, which turns an engine fire into a structural event rather than a cosmetic one. The timing is split — some fixes were due “in the coming weeks” from 28 September, while the infrared-seeker logic was pencilled in for the next major update.
Nuclear Escalation is permanent, and still being built
Sky Odyssey’s most consequential menu change moved Nuclear Escalation, Naval Enduring Confrontation and Bullet Hell out of the Events & Tournaments tab and into the dropdown under the “To Battle!” button. Gaijin’s reason is onboarding: finding those options “was quite difficult, especially for newer players who may not have known they exist.” All three are now permanent modes you can play at any time.
Development of the mode did not stop. In the same 28 September post, BVV_d listed two locations in progress: a completely new map of 256×256 km, planned for the next major update if the schedule holds, and a refinement of an existing 128×128 km air location that Gaijin hoped to run as a separate test event “within 1-2 weeks” of the post. He also noted a risk in the smaller map — the concentration of activity may be too intense for top-rank vehicles, though it may suit slower aircraft with shorter-range weapons.
Other work in progress there: early warning radars that finally behave as radars rather than decoys for anti-radiation missiles, detecting long-range targets and marking them in the game environment and on the tactical map; restoring damaged friendly air-defence missile systems via helicopter cargo transport; and rebuilding destroyed airfields.
One reward change is worth knowing even if you never fly the mode. Sky Odyssey credits an abandoned ground vehicle or ship to the nearest enemy, or to the enemy who fired the nearest counted munition — rockets, missiles, bombs, torpedoes and mines only. The search radius is 3 km for ground vehicles and 20 km for ships, and the kill pays half the standard reward, the same rate air battles already use. PCGamesN treats it as an extension of the earlier downed-plane rewards tweak.
Cluster bombs are coming, and Ground Battles will not get them
Community Update No.13 introduces “an entirely new type of weapon” — and then declines to specify it. Gaijin’s own words are that it is “too soon to go into the details fully just yet”. What the post does say is what the weapon is for: cluster bombs are, in Gaijin’s description, “specialist anti-tank bombs generally designed to cover an area rather than a specific point or target”, and will be “perfect for Nuclear Escalation and taking out columns or groups of armoured vehicles”.
The restriction is explicit. They “won’t be available in standard Ground Battles” and will be “a weapon unique to Air Battles, primarily for Nuclear Escalation”. That is a narrower debut than a new vehicle — a whole weapon class introduced to solve one mode’s problem.
The rest of the confirmed weaponry
| Weapon | Platform | What Gaijin says |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster bombs | Air Battles, primarily Nuclear Escalation | Area-effect anti-tank bombs; not available in standard Ground Battles |
| GCS-1 | Japanese aircraft | Locks onto large heat-emitting targets in the IR range, such as ships: released like a free-fall bomb, then it activates a search mode and locks on autonomously |
| Sea Venom | Wildcat HMA.2 (Britain) | Anti-ship missile with an IR seeker, where the AJ.168 Martel uses TV; its datalink enables Man-in-the-Loop guidance. Four can be carried in place of the Martlet and SPIKE missiles |
| WE177A | Tornado GR.1 (Britain) | A free-fall nuclear bomb for Nuclear Escalation, and “the last Nuclear Bomb used by the RAF, with the Tornado being the last aircraft to carry it” |
| Aster-30 PIF-PAF | SAMP/T systems | Side thrusters add lateral acceleration one second before impact, improving terminal manoeuvrability against a manoeuvring target |
| Mosquito wing racks | Mosquito fighter-bombers | A new wing-mounted rack for 250 lb and 500 lb bombs, on a different pylon to the rack on the Mosquito B Mk XVI |
| RP-3 racks | Martlet Mk IV (Britain) | Rocket racks for close air support |
The timing across that table is not uniform, and Gaijin says so rather than promising otherwise. The Sea Venom is described as work in progress for “a future major update (perhaps not this one, but if not this one, the one after)”. The Aster-30’s PIF-PAF steering carries the same hedge: a future update this year, possibly the one after next.
Man-in-the-Loop reaches helicopters
Man-in-the-Loop guidance, which lets an operator steer a launched weapon, arrived for aircraft weapons in the Heavy Cavalry major update. Community Update No.13 confirms helicopters now get it, on a list longer than one nation: all AH-64E variants for the USA, Britain, Japan, France and China, plus the AH-64D-I Seraph, via SPIKE NLOS; and the EC-665 Tiger HAD Block 2 (France), AH-129D, H145M and Israeli AH-60 via SPIKE ER. The Wildcat HMA.2 is listed for SPIKE NLOS and the Sea Venom in a later update, alongside the LMUR on the Mi-28NM and the CM-502KG on the Z-10ME.
Two caveats matter. Gaijin says it is “considering increasing the BR” of every helicopter that receives the feature — a consideration, not a decision. And the mechanic itself is being refined: for both helicopters and aircraft, Gaijin plans to let you adjust the aim point on a target mid-flight, which it notes is useful when targeting tanks and larger targets like ships.
Login streaks can now be frozen
Away from weapons, No.13 adds a feature aimed at retention rather than combat: login-streak “Freezes”. You collect them at a rate of one per 12 days of logging in, with a maximum of 30 per account, and the game spends them automatically to cover days you miss. Gaijin’s own illustration is a six-month daily streak, which yields 15 Freezes — enough to cover a two-week absence without resetting the streak. The feature is available to everyone by default.
Sky Odyssey’s hangar pass matters for the same reason. Presets were raised from a maximum of 18 to 25, the cap no longer depends on which vehicle ranks you have unlocked, and all 25 are available from the start. Map markers can now be switched between War Thunder’s default style, NATO and USSR icons, a setting that was previously confined to Nuclear Escalation. The “Student Pilot” decal is also back via the code STUDENTPILOT, redeemable until 30 October at 10:00 GMT.
The event calendar through December
No.13 is also the busiest roadmap of the year, and it carries Gaijin’s own warning that “events might move around, be postponed, or new events not mentioned here may be added”.
| Window | Event | Reward |
|---|---|---|
| 21 October | Next Battle Pass begins | Two German Second World War premium vehicles — a tank destroyer and a coastal boat |
| End of October | Dreams Come True, plus annual birthday discounts | One vehicle reward |
| Mid-November | A returning “extra” event that ran last year | Not named |
| After Dreams Come True ends | Naval event | A US coastal vessel |
| Early December | Tank event | A Chinese mid-tier tank |
| Mid-December | Silver Lion trophy | Silver Lions |
| December into January 2027 | Winter vehicle event | Four vehicle rewards |
Gaijin hedges least about the Silver Lion trophy: “Save up your Silver Lions, as a fan favourite, the Silver Lion trophy will be making a return in mid-December!” It is the winter event that sets the expectation for the season, though — four vehicle rewards instead of the single reward the other events offer, running into January 2027.
War Thunder’s Battle Pass structure will look familiar to anyone who follows seasonal monetisation elsewhere; the Battle Pass models compared across WoW, FFXIV and Destiny 2 are a fair reference point for how the reward tiers differ between live-service games.
What is still unanswered
No.13 closes by promising the final Community Update news of 2026 in December, and it deliberately leaves several things open. Cluster bombs are confirmed as a class but not detailed. The Aster-30 and Wildcat HMA.2 timelines are explicitly conditional. The helicopter Battle Rating increase is under consideration rather than agreed. The new 256×256 km Nuclear Escalation map depends on the schedule holding. Gaijin’s standing disclaimer on these posts is that announced features and vehicles are “subject to change, be delayed or even cancelled” — which is the right way to read everything above.