50m is awfully close but yeah, 100-150m is a good range to get hits and not just spraying rounds all over the place.
1 Like
Unliked from a deflection shot.
The target is very small. It could happen but most likely your dealing the most damage to spars with AP rounds from behind.
Particular unstable rounds that tumble and slash big holes into it instead of making caliber sized holes, which wouldn’t have much of an effect.
Similarly they can slash open the wing surface, which also would be structurally fatal.
But spars and wing structure are generally bad targets since you need to get pretty lucky and have to hit many times to get an effect.
Like by putting your Spitfire or Hurricane convergence at 150m to have even have a chance to cause some damage with LMG bullets.
Realistically most guns should also be a lot less accurate than what we have in the game.
If a plane doesn’t have pilot armor having them at 400m would perfectly adequate with the number of rounds fired.
2 Likes
Gotta love mods:
TNSh != ShVAK
Moreover, even ShVAK has different modifications. The wing, turret, and motor cannon have different barrel lengths and different ballistics, and you’re comparing them to the tank version, which is essentially a new cannon.
Yeah except for the part where it literally says „ShVAK“ in the manual.
And then he pulls out some cope about different barrel lengths and ballistics which has no meaning when the it’s the same shell at the same velocity.
The ballistics are for the shell and have nothing to do with the gun.
3 Likes
You have 12 missed calls by Marseille…😂
|3 Jun 1942|Hans-Joachim Marseille engaged in the longest single aerial battle of his career over Bir Hacheim, Libya, shooting down six P-40 fighters (at 1222 hours, 1225 hours, 1227 hours, 1228 hours, 1229 hours, and 1233 hours), pushing his score up to 75. He used up only 12 cannon rounds and about 360 machine gun rounds in this fight.|
Was a full downtier in a 109 F-4…
3 Likes
More than impressive. But is that confirmed?
Shooting merely 12 cannon rounds by engaging and shooting down six aircraft sounds honestly harder than shooting down 6 P-40s.
Unless he in some instances didn‘t even fire his cannon.
And Lvl. 100 vs. Lvl. 8 pilots 😄
You find these low ammo usage quite often in diaries / memoirs / biographies. The ground crews were instructed to determine the actual ammo usage.
I just pulled this example to show you that Marseille invented “one-tapping” - and that wt and their game mechanic called mouse aim allows you to perform similarly to top aces - and wt allows you 5 kills with 120 20 mm rounds.
Not sure about that - the DAF (Desert Air Force) had a lot of colonial pilots which were like the Brits well trained - and had always a massive number advantage. The Brits and their commonwealth pilots were assessed as equally skilled - and Marseille is mainly famous for attacking alone large groups of enemies AND for shooting down 3 enemy aces in a single fight - this was the same fight with the 12 cannon rounds:
His attack method to break up formations, which he perfected, resulted in a high proportion of victories, and in rapid, multiple victories per attack. On 3 June 1942, Marseille attacked a formation of 16 Curtiss P-40 fighters and shot down six aircraft of No. 5 Squadron SAAF, five of them in six minutes, including three aces: Robin Pare (six victories), Cecil Golding (6.5 victories) and Andre Botha (five victories); the latter crash-landed his damaged fighter.
2 Likes
Good progress being made towards ending the fake Russian supremacy in Warthunder
Because a FI-T round with 6.36g of TNT equivalent should be dealing the same damage as 20mil with more than double doesn’t it?
While recieving a belt entirely made of said rounds while the other 20mils have crap shoved in their belts
Not that easy to find.
I know that German pilots made some after battle report describing how they shot down a plane and what amount of ammunition was spent.
But I haven’t seen all that many of those.
If you get on a six from close range, you can certainly kill a plane with 1-2 20mm rounds hitting their mark.
Or by putting some machine gun rounds into engine and pilot from the right angle.
I’m reading a book about the Bf 109, and it mentions several cases of pilots who shot down multiple aircraft in just a few minutes, firing at close range (40-50 meters) and even causing collisions with the wreckage of the downed planes. It also mentions combat against the DAF (Desert Air Force), and how initially the Germans shot down quite a few aircraft, with German aces commonly taking down two or three enemy planes in two minutes. It’s worth noting that the DAF initially used primarily the Hurricane, later adopting the Spitfire and Kittyhawk, but above all, the DAF pilots used outdated combat tactics, making them vulnerable, until they finally adopted German tactics.
3 Likes
Most aircraft with shvaks either carry one and are good, or carry more and are dog butt.
Most aircraft carrying MG151s same story.
Meanwhile HIspanos? They’re far better, and one single round equals 4 shvaks. And they usually go on pairs, and in no other plane but SPITFIRES. Also, shvaks aren’t anywhere as close to OP right now.
I have video footage of Shvak’s in game one-tapping tails and wings clean off. They’re incredibly broken.
1 Like
all thanks to air belts being high explosive incendiary with tracers. Meanwhile in 151 you have to choose between normal velocity with no tracers or little tracers with worse velocity. and yeah if you want to go full tracers it won’t do any damage because ooops it is all incendiary with zero spall…
1 Like
I recently had an enemy plane shrug off multiple 20mm mineshell hits until my cannon jammed… then vaporize from a 7.92mm API round, damage models are just whacked right now
prob was a yak
those things eat he shells for breakfast
1 Like
And 0.50 cal API-T. A Yak-3 after 11 (!!!) hits:
It took 2 more to kill him…
And yet despite the Shvaks doing great damage barely any fighters armed with them are oppressive at their BRs. The obvious exceptions being the Yak-3U and Yak-2 KABB.
The same can be done with the F4U-4B and it gets 400 rounds more. If you split the guns the trigger time is twice as long too.
What is the actual accuracy in the game files? Both the volume of fire and especially the ballistics can be matched by planes armed with the AM/M2 and Hispano. The reason Shvaks are easier to aim are the tracers and them being nose mounted on many aircraft not their ballistic properties.
From left to right: MG151, Shvak, AN/M2, Hispano
I encourage you to spend more time at BR 3.0 - 5.0 in RB.
3.0 - Yak-1B - i bought the German premium, very oppressive
3.7 - Yak-9M - rare but moderate oppressive
4.3 - Yak-3(e) - common, oppressive even in full uptiers
4.7 - Yak-3 - a pain in the ass, you have to kill them whatever it takes
I am able to beat the first 3 (and #4 when it was 4.3) and your mentioned Yak-2 KABB in a turnfight (Hotas, no instructor) with my 2 Hellcats (UK Rank III, US Rank II) or on the B7A2 but these bloody Shvaks and the performance of their carriers create a death bubble of around 1,2- 1,4 km in front of them.
The issues of ShVaks is exactly the issue of being nose mounted - it kills the convergence issues of wing mounted cannons.
Thx for the graph - but as written above outside twin engine fighters ShVaks are by far the most dangerous long range cannons - if you exclude these insane 37mm like in the ITP.
Besides that: There is an ultra-long and highly detailed thread called “Cannons do too much damage” in which the ShVak was mentioned countless times. You might check this thread in order to understand why a lot of players (including me) see the ShVaks as over-performing - and that gaijin ignores this for 3 years…
1 Like
I do spend quite some time there and all of them have meta counterparts in other trees. Furthermore none of the extremely good sealclubbers (between 3.0-5.0) are in the soviet tree.
Worse than the P-39N (2.7) and not even close to the Ki-44 II Otsu (3.0)
Nothing special about this Yak-9 and is worse than most fighters it encounters
Both get shit on by the Pyörremyrsky and F8F-1
It’s an advantage for sure but there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s like complaing US aircraft have too much ammo. It’s the way it was chosen to be during the war and that’s the way it stays in game.
Cannons overperforming is a good thing and the weak should be raised to the standard of the current meta guns. I want the game to actually punish mistakes instead of having every garbage player be invincible because all fighters turn into bullet sponges.
Seeing your reply as a whole it looks like we talk about different things:
You see it from the perspective of an experienced player able to deal with threats - i see it from the perspective of the average impact of ShVaks in classic Air RB matches when average skilled pilots meet each other and how they influence the outcome.
So alone the exchange about “oppressive” made this clear - it is not about individual strengths or weaknesses of aircraft in direct comparison, it is about their general impact when average players fight each other.
And here the 20mm ShVak allow way too easy kills for plain average users as they are easy to use (see ballistics and placement) and support plain stupid play styles like head-ons in infinite loops beginning at BR 2.0 in Air RB - exactly due to the too high damage output in relation to their BR.
I addressed this topic in a previous BR adjustment round:
1 Like