their ability to decimate enemies with a single super short burst and their full HE Tracer belts leave other 20mils in the dust in low tiers
4 Likes
shVAK my beloved, leave them alone and just dodge them bro
9 Likes
not a shVAK user, so unbiased opinion
How do you “nerf” them fairly?
From what you are describing, I do that all the time with 20mm Hispanos on the Spitfire. I would strongly argue that its not that the guns are overperforming or modeled incorrectly, but damage models just suck.
But having endured the “real-sh!tter” days and being forced to use Ground belts in the Spitfire for a higher concentration of AP rounds. I do not want to be back in the days where 20mm Canons do next to no damage and you have to spend 5 minutes firing at an enemy to bring them down.
Reality is, 20mm Canons should shread a small target like a fighter in a few short bursts, maybe just one if its well aimed. It should not take dozens of rounds. A burst of 1 second is approximately 9-12 rounds per gun based upon data i can find online for the Canon, 9-12x 20mm rounds impacting a small, lightly armoured fighter… Is going to do damage and some may have more than just 1 gun.
6 Likes
All HE shells need to get nerfed, while 20mm Kinetic shells need to be buffed so they at least kill a pilot in one shot. While the incendiary effect needs to be reworked because right now it makes like no sense.
But there’s also an issue with plane armor. Right now plane armor is easy to be penetrated by most guns because the game doesn’t include reduced penetration from tumbling rounds.
Planes are also completely hollow for the most part, while in reality there are a lot more structural components or other equipment in the way of a bullet.
So while armor is underperforming or the penetration of round is overperforming, they deal little damage. Armor simply reduces the damage, so you can have a pilot get hit 5 times by 7.7mm AP rounds going through his back armor and he will still live, with no other effect.
In some cases it doesn’t even need armor for a pilot to survive a direct hit by 20mm AP, with Practice and Tracer rounds dealing even less damage.
There’s not a single gun in the game that has any benefit from firing AP rounds against planes, because HE rounds simply overperform. While Practice and Tracer shells deal so little damage that their completely unusable.
If it wasn’t for the restriction of belts, any player would simply load full HE belt for their HMGs or cannons.
In reality a single rifle caliber bullet hitting the pilot would generally spill the end for the pilot, wounding him severly, so that he wouldn’t be able to continue fighing.
You need both legs and two hands to control a plane, which doesn’t leave much of the body left that can’t be wounded without causing trouble.
Plane armor and self-sealing fuel tanks made planes very tanky against LMG fire, since pilot and fuel tanks were much harder to damage.
HMGs made up to some degree by having more armor penetration and carrying more payload per bullet than LMGs, making fuel tanks and pilots more vulnerable again.
20mm cannons simply to the same as HMGs but outperform them in armor penetration and damage potential against fuel tanks or any other system.
In WT you can dive on a IL-2 with a Spitfire Mk 1, fire a one second burst into him from behind and the IL-2 will go down without a tail.
But when a 20mm HE explodes near a pilot or an AP round hits him, he might survive.
Of course in WT HE rounds deal a ton of strutucal damage, so the largest parts of the aircraft are also easy to destroy, which simply isn’t realistic.
So rounds other than explosive ones are simply not necessary in WT.
5 Likes
Completely agree. The overall damage is inconsistent and changes from patch to patch. Sometimes even Minengeschoss barely does any damage to plane, which is doubtful. And I’m not even mentioning that 20 mm cannons had terrible damage for years. The obvious examples of that - Hispano’s and SHVAK’s.
4 Likes
all 20mm canons slaughter ground targets pretty well. although I must say the shvak on the yaks for CAS are pretty toxic
Totally agree.
The ShVak was for years (and imho historically seen correct) the weakest 20 mm cannon in the game; even the so called “Hitsparkos” were far better.
With real shatter 2.0 & 3.0 this weapon was upgraded like hell - together with the ballistic changes (which makes them easy to use) the cannon is now deadly with 1 - 2 hits on a fighter sized aircraft.
In the past the weak performance of the cannon was compensated with lower BRs of aircraft using them. But gaijin somehow “forgot” to increase the BRs of USSR planes.
So instead of nerfing the weapon (which won’t happens because “reasons”) i recommend to adjust (polite for increase) the BRs of the aircraft using it.
I see daily guys in undertiered USSR aircraft scoring easy 3-5 kills even with just 120 cannon rounds by one-tapping their opponents. I flew last year just for testing purposes the 3.7 I-185 with 560 rounds: Disgusting - even with my potato aim thx to HOTAS usage i had zero problems (after spading) to score precise long range kills at ranges >1 km.
And everybody getting clapped whilst extending from a tumbling Pe-8 at ranges > 900 meters is fully aware of the one-shot kill ability of this weapon.
5 Likes
0 days since last “Russian Bias” thread
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I remember that Gaijin many years ago changed Mineshells, made them more “realistic”.
But what they actually did was just make all HE rounds deal structural damage based on the filler.
So your 20mm Mineshell with 30g TNT equivlanet did like 3-4 times the damage than a single ShVAK or Hispano HEI.
When realShatter wasn’t a thing and Japan and Itality got their 12.7mm explosive bullets, they would constantly pilot snipe planes because these 12.7mm rounds would land like 1m away from the pilot but still deal like 1/3 - 1/2 of his health with their fragmentation effect.
Nowadays they have realShatter and deal extreme damage to a planes structure, making you feel like you’re getting hit by 20mm cannons.
When in reality such small explosive rounds would primarely be effective against wooden structures, since wood simply breaks from the blast force while metal structure merely deforms or ruptures at a weak point.
Incendiary filler is completely disregarded by the game in dealing structural damage because most people don’t have a clue that an incendiary charge is also going to blow a plane appart, but like with explosive rounds the effect depends of course on the amount.
The 12.7mm M23 should be so crazy powerful that it should require some additional mechanics to prevent them from breaking the game.
They were infact very heat sensitive, resulting in premature detonation inside or outside the barrel, if the barrel wasn’t cooled down inbetween bursts.
The 12.7mm M3 HMGs would make this even more problamatic due to the high RoF and sometime in the 50s the M23 wasn’t produced anymore because they could never fix this problem, while the M1 Incendiary stayed in service.
They should be super deadly but they aren’t, since Incendiary rounds in general are worthless in WT.
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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.
2 Likes
and now they are one of the worst 20mm
4 Likes
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…
I updated my (ofc unprocessed) bug report:
Community Bug Reporting System
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.
Have a good one!
We need to reset the timer:
3 Likes
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.
The need turning down a notch or two.
5 Likes
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)
2 Likes
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 ai tanks like Jumbos and tigers frontally with just one HE shell.
To the friends of “Russian bias” - I am not sure if you guys remembered this regarding “Russian bias”:
The topic was that gaijin admitted that they “fiddled” with things like RNG - but also stated that if this would be in place they would deny that.
Have a good one!
2 Likes
No they were always weak.
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.
2 Likes
ShVAKs were historically one of the weaker hitting 20mms. In-game the opposite is true.
Simply reverse this trend.
Meanwhile the 30mm Ho-155s have become hideously unreliable.
4 Likes
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.
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.
3 Likes