It’s funny how crazy effective bombers defensive guns get when they have 20mm HE rounds (well Japanese 12.7mm explosive are also very deadly)
If they were just firing 20mm AP it would hardly be an upgrade in WT but when a single 20mm HE can not only massively damage your engine but simply rip your wing in a single hit, it just becomes ridiculous.
British bombers with Hispanos would use the same 1:1 HEI : SAPI mix for their ammunition belts as fighters. How silly when a single HEI should mean the end for the attacker.
Agreed - but imho the main advantage of ShVaks vs MG 151/20 with mine shells is besides the way better ballistics the way greater effective firing range.
It became impossible to score long range kills at high speeds as the nerf of the 151/20 and MK 108 last June/July triggers the self-destruction of the shell way too early.
That’s why i was so pleased to get easy kills up to 1.3 km at higher speeds whilst flying the I-185…
with a replay of a high speed attack (~980 kmph TAS) vs a high speed target (~800 kmph). It confirms the bug - beyond 800 meters the MG 151/20 is useless at high speeds.
Shvak’s are massively overperforming at the moment. A cannon that was historically weak (as admitted by multiple Russian sources) in game can shred aircraft in tiny bursts.
I wonder if they “sucked” during WW2 but later fixed and gaijin is just using the fixed stats for them or they are just using the paper stats for them and sucked due to manufactoring/maintenance issues and that is something Gaijin does not model, instead they are modeled to be 100% perfect. (which is the easiest and probably fairest way to model things)
Iirc the issue was the low damage output, i remember long bursts unable to kill 190s - and not jamming or something like that.
I mean if we see the general way how gaijin models things i am not really sure that things like “fairness” are even on their list or might have just another meaning for them.
Gaijin is balancing the game to optimize their income, so it seems logical that their understanding of fairness is attached to statistics like average WRs - imho such things like here with overperforming ShVaks happen not by accident.
The only real accident i remember happened around the Bv 155 BP season:
For 6-8 months you were able to kill in Air RB ai tanks like Jumbos and tigers frontally with just one HE shell from a 20 mm aircraft cannon.
To the friends of “Russian bias” - I am not sure if you guys remembered this regarding “Russian bias”:
As Uncle J has stated pilots complained about struggling to reliably down 190F’s with them. Hilariously War Thunder’s own Wiki states the cannon is let down by the “poor power of its HEF round”.
Exactly my thoughts mate. Gaijin caves in too much to whining players and you end up with these situations.
From what I know the initial belt composition at the beginning of 1941 was 2:1 OZ:BZ (HEFI:API) but later it was changed to 1:1 (HEFI-T:API).
The API contained 2.8g incendiary mixture which would be initiated on impact, igniting fuel and blowing some hole into the aircraft, while the projectile continued to travel through the aircraft, potentially hitting a vital component and piercing through armor plates.
While the OZT, which replaced the OZ, only carried 4.13g RDX Aluminium mixture.
The round can also ignite fuel but is most likely less effective. Blast is underwhelming, which only leaves fragments to deal damage to vulnerable components, like radiator system and pipes.
I know the game can’t be a 1 to 1 of real life, but the ShVAK should be the weakest 20mm in game just due to physics. It was the weakest 20mm cannon of ww2, but it shouldn’t do nothing either. it is still 20mm. but for damage, MG151 and Hispano should be the best, as they were, and 20mm ShVAK should hit the weakest. not weak, just weaker in comparison. The ShVAK should NEVER perform better than pretty much 90% to 95% of ww2 20mm guns. And the way soviet fighters perform would work well with this. They can afford to stay on target, and deal damage by volume. It’s not anti soviet fighters, it’s just anti BS m8.
In WT it’s completely misrepresented, nit picked to the absolute maximum performance it never had.
One US sources said it had a RoF of up to 950 RPM, which is what we have in the game, even though that could clearly only achieved while firing the heavy AP rounds.
The actual RoF was 700 with plans to increase the average RoF to 800, which never happened.
Another US source also said that the HE velocity was 740m/s, confirmed by test firing, yet they were recently buffed to 800m/s because of a single Japanese book from like 2013, even though all the information in that book is the same as a US source from 1945-49 that investigated Japanese weapon development after the war.
There was experimental propellant with nitro glycerin that would have increased velocity and thereby RoF but it wasn’t adopted.
Similar to the high velocity ammo from the T-60 tank that never entered service.
And since the gun suffered from reliability issues, due to low quality steel, increasing the stress on the system wasn’t feasible.
So in reality the Ho-5 was practically the weakest and least effective 20mm cannon of the war, entering service way after the ShVAK.
With the main advantage over the Type 99-2 that it could be synchronized.
The only saving graze might be the 20mm fuzeless shell. But you could basically achieve the same with just your regular Hispano HEFI without the problem of heat and strike sensitive ammunition.
You forgot to mention that somehow 80g HEFI from Ho-5 outperforms 117g IT and AP from MG151/20 in long range ballistics, despite 0 indication of any smart design choices that would have enabled such thing happening (7.92 CETME bullet is a nice example of super light for its caliber bullet with excellent ballistics, but it required special design with ridiculously long nose).
Now imagine if Gaijin turned Shvak API into wbat it really was: steel cored HVAP. Now that would have been hilarious, you fire at italian truck, hit the sheet metal roof - shell shattered, go … yourself!
BTW Soviet 23mm API also was steel cored HVAP.
IL-2 attacks Ostwind, fires 60 rounds, ails to pen the turret even once. I would throw my keyboard out the window probably if I did not suffer through 20mm HVAP failing to penetrate Hellcat point blank first.
@KillaKiwi Do I remember it right? If 15mm APCR requires several hits to destroy an engine or kill a crewman because apparently high velocity tungsten core produces no spall and hurts as much as a papercut, why does Shvak API deal full damage?
Still, for strafing actually MG151/20 is better because M-geschoss HE does great and sometimes ridiculous things vs open-tops, while Shvak vs M10 feels like throwing boiled eggs at the crew inside.
My favourite is, pilots can facetank 20mm IT like no issue, because sure as hell 8g of whatever it was of incendiary composition exploding inside your skull is entirely survivable.
Will have to see if 30mm incendiary is survivable too, but I would not be surprised even a tiny bit
in essence, such hit has basically 0 impact on plane flight characteristics in game.
IRL cockpit would look like you threw some heavy-duty fireworks into a huge bowl of tomato soup.
Japanese Type 5 APHE has freaking better ballistic performance than MK 103 APHEI-T.
Just completely made up, just like Ho-5 ballistics.
Makes no sense. Lighter shell, no tracer but better ballistics.
Not to mention that 30mm APHE deals more damage than the supposed SAPHEI shell.
And the fuzeless APHE also has a “fuze” delay of 1.2m while for the German shell it’s just 0.2m, so doesn’t benefit from the sphere of death as much.
