Cool. I one shot planes with .50s too. I’ve immediately given people engine and fuel fires that they can’t put out.
Yeah but hitting an engine or fuel tank is a bit more difficult than hitting the airframe anywhere.
In-game you can spray down someone from 1km with .50cals and set them on fire because API keeps their incendiary properties all the time and it’s simply based on chance.
20mm Incendiary rounds would be way more effective, but they aren’t in-game.
In one of the training manuals, printed shortly after WW2, they even say the effective range of .50cal is a mere 366m, since the guns are simply not accurate enough to have any effect on a plane sized target at longer range.
They will but you would need to spend a lot of time and rounds to even land shots on target.
Accuracy is actually quite a limiting factor. My previous mindset was that not having the accuracy upgrade for .50cals wouldn’t be a big deal since it had this shotgun effect, meaning you are more likely to hit by chance, which was better than not hitting at all.
But in reality it’s actually a drawback, since in cases where your aim is perfect, your are still limited by the accuracy of the guns, thus scoring less hits then you could with more accurate guns.
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Kinda depends on the plane, tbf
In US testing reports from 1941 they say that.50 cal are ineffective past 400 m since pen value for normal round would be around 3 mm at 450 m.
Peak pen value is 18 mm at 150 m but after that for every 50 m it loses around 3 mm of pen
What type of round? Also, can you cite your source?
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I have a question, is this based off nose mounted .50s? A .50 strapped to a test rig, fired full automatic and then extrapolation based off that performance? If it was wing based, what convergence? Because I have a kill report from a P-47 that stated it was able to strike an Fw-190 from 800 yards (730 meters to save time) away, in two 2 second bursts as he witnessed flashes on the port side wing. This was co-witnessed by another P-47. I attempted this in a custom battles with A.I. in Cockpit mode and I had trouble scoring any hits at that range. If it was a super short conversion range or there was no conversion set (If it was a test done on a flight that), that test would make plenty of sense as at that point you would just have a cloud of rounds bigger than the enemy flying towards the target and you can see that illustrated in War thunder.
In which world? o_O
You must be joking. I want to see that source XD
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Now that I really think about it, this would be completely inviable lol. The US would have immediately moved to a different gun, instead of using them throughout the war AND postwar.
Go to old forum and trawl ,there were official tables posted.
Im not doing your research for you. Bring a link.
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I don’t know. Just what they wrote in that manual.
But there’s this:
Two 4 seconds of trigger time put out 400 bullets. Not unlikely to hit a target but what are a few .50cal going to do to a fighter at that range?
The chance of dealing any lethal damage is pretty slim.
Also that must be the range where he opened fire. So he was probably getting closer.
It’s pretty difficult to see a fighter sized target at that range, and aiming would be even more difficult.
In WT it’s a lot easier when the game tells you the range and your aim is stable as it gets.
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Not proving it will do massive damage, but to find how much harmonization there is between the game and IRL in terms of gun accuracy. I understand the game buffs the accuracy due to it being for the most part, a third person game and the ability to fire extreme ranges is part of the shtick.
Hilariously enough, this was in a War thunder dev blog back over 10 years ago.
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If .50 cal was such great round (talking about WWI/WWII ,same rounds) why was gun convergence in US planes from 1938-1948 set to 370 -450 meters ?
Because the guns weren’t nose mounted on most planes, I mean. I’m %99 sure cannon mounted spitfires had convergence within the ranges they thought they were the most likely to see enemies.
I whole heartedly believe platform affected accuracy. The P-47 was a very stable platform. Look at the cone of dispersion for each side of the gun.
It seems there is a possibility of fixing dispersion (of the cones) by adjusting the convergence of each gun to co-align with what you’re shooting with considering the P-47 shows the dispersion cones completely lined up on the bottom. But for a lot of aircraft, it might be not worth it to do that because you want to have a field of fire for your enemy.
Cause that’s the average engagement range of enemy aircraft…
Convergence =/= bad/good guns & munition.
After all, WW2 was the war of over 400 aircraft in the same 60km airspace.
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I read that Spits and Hurricanes had convergance of 400m early on but then put it at 150m since the 7.7mm MGs were otherwise ineffective.
If pilot armor was never invented, firing 150-200rds per second would have been totally lethal at that range but with armor protecting the pilot, it was pointless to fire at such range, were single bullets had little chance to cause any serious damage.
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I’m just gonna disprove this real quick with the German penetration data for the MG 131 firing a ligther round at less velocity:
You see that the weaker 13mm AP round penetrates 19mm at 100m and still 7mm at 500m, while carrying much lower KE at any range than US .50cal AP rounds, which are also more aerodynamic.
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Do we have accurate data for muzzle velocity etc.? I know how “reliable” German handbooks are.
96g would make it a bit more ballistically superior, I guess. But I would also expect lower MV, and unlike Germans who tested multiple configurations for MG151/20, for Soviet shells it seems like we have some “handbook” or “openly published” numbers, that can as well be unreliable.
Anyway, Shvak is horribly overperforming ballistics-wise and even tracer base bleed effect is not enough to explain this.
If the damage at least scaled down with the distance. But nuh uh.
And on .50 cal ballistics - yeah,. it’s a boattailed relatively heavy bullet, it has all the reasons to keep going at high speed.
BTW Breda should have a lot better ballistics than Mg131 due to better bullet design. Hope it’s reflected in game.
I wonder why did Germans go with the most braindead design for their ammo, while standard kar98k bullet was designed with excellent long range ballistics for its caliber. It’s like they did not care about distance longer than 400m.
Bring a SOURCE. Stop arguing with your feelings.