Basically. Gaijin needs to make planes behave realistically in terms of damage modeling. Or make .50’s insanely cracked with damage as well and have it be a two way street instead of 'Haha I don’t need skill. My 20mm just one shot you.;
not in my experience, when I hit things, wings snap off or fires are bound to happen. except for those rare occasions where i only get a pilot snipe or i get a hit
Fires should happen, in fact, the way incendiary works is completely wrong in this game. In protection analysis, incendiary rounds instantly detonate on impact which isn’t correct. At least for .50’s there is a fuse that is supposed to allow the round to penetrate then detonate. At the beginning of the war there was an issue of fuse sensitivity where bullets would expend their filler on the outer skin of aircraft, making their use functionally worthless until this was fixed later on 1940 and beyond.
the incendiary effect isn’t just a ‘fire bullet’ but is to throw white phosphorous chunks everywhere. the M1 incendiary round in early belts should have around 2.2 grams of filler, while the late war belts with M23 rounds should have around 5-5.2 grams of filler. The incendiary rounds packed enough filler that the Dutch actually considered .50 incendiary as ‘high explosive’ rounds, so in-game regular incendiary rounds should be better than API or API-T
this is a test of a British .303 against a He-111 wing. Note .303 had only 7 grains of less than half a gram of filler in the ammunition.
now imagine having ammunition more than quadruple amount of filler for early war .50 incendiary ammunition, and even that was effectively doubled late war with the M23.
the other part of why you snap wings is due to the damage modeling of the aircraft. The Damage models of planes are excessively weak, with the Fuselage in general being weaker than the wings for whatever reason. This makes it where a single 20mm can split planes in half in 1-2 shots.
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No US .50cal uses any type of fuze. They explode on impact just like in the game.
The incendiary range then, in RL, depends on the velocity and the amount of incendairy filler, which isn’t modeled, thus API rounds that don’t explode but have magic RPG fire modifiers, are inherently more effective then rounds that can never impact a fuel tank before it disapears.
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I’m basing the fuse claims off the British who suggested their .303 and their .50 incendiary rounds were ‘prematurely’ going off and ‘fuse sensitivity’ needed to be checked.
But re-reading it again I think this is more of a linguistic difference as they are referring to having the white phosphorous mixture being too volatile and dumping everything on impact and not burning like it should. I can’t find a ‘fuse’ in the diagrams for .303 british or .50 incendiary ammunition for the british so the error is on my part.
But again, like was shown in the test. .50 incendiary should still penetrate and throw white phosphorous chunks everywhere.
The M1 Incendiary has a hollow steel tube inside the bullet, weighing almost 15g, housing some of the flash powder.
I guess the point is to carry some incendiary deeper into the plane, maybe to protect the flash powder from barrel heat, but it probably has armor penetration capabilities of a 7.7mm AP round.
I don’t believe it’s penetration should be on par with a 7.7mm AP as the test I showed stated above that .50 M1 could penetrate while 7.7mm could not.
More than likely it’s due to the jacket or ‘pins’ the filler was built around that helped it. .50 M1 is already a very high velocity round compared to 7.7 AP
M23 should still be able to penetrate skin, but more than likely, not armor plating, as these were what you can almost call ‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘the high explosive rounds’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’ of .50 caliber in heavy air quotes
The alloy its made of would also help. Antimony has a Brinell hardness of 294-384 (over twice that of mild steel), and as such its commonly used as an alloying metal for lead when hardness is needed. Like here, with anti-material bullets.
You’re not that far off. While incendiary material doesn’t create a strong shockwave like explosives, that would create high velocity fragments or destroy structures, like spars, with the blast force, it does create a similiar or even higher overpressure.
It doesn’t take much to blow a planes structure appart and the pressure created from exploding incendiary is sufficent for that.
M23 is super light, just flash powder packed inside a thin copper jacket.
Someone once called it an Incendiary-Mineshell, and they weren’t wrong with that.
Of course it’s still just a 12.7mm but the structural damage to wings and everything that is hollow and susceptible to pressure, is still going to get damaged substantionally more than from M1 Incendiary.
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Neither lead, antimony or lead-antimony has any application for armor penetration.
Animony is too brittle, lead is too soft.
The only point of hard-lead is to balance out the projectile, or give it some structural strenght and weight, in case of M23 for example.
A lot of AP rounds have lead-tips, increasing their weight compared to API, which replaced the lead with incendiary compound.
Being heavier, the AP round will have superior ballistics over long range, hence why heavy Ball ammo was generally used for machine gun bullets on the ground.
Both Italy and Japan switched back from a relatively light and easy to handle infanty rifle cartridge to a bigger caliber, due to logistical reasons and the fact that the heavier bullets were prefered for use in machine guns.
hmm, ye no. If you can aim around a played for a month level they hit just like 20mm just instead of getting only 200-400 ammo you get 1200-3000, I’ve used a lot recently on things like the G.91, the P-47D30, the F4Us, the P51s etc. and they gotta be the best in game gun I’ve ever used, then when I use cannons on things like the Mig 15. G.55, G.56, RE 2001’s, Bf109s and more and they hit just like 50. cals but have WAY less ammo still plenty for an ace but you absolutely gotta spare ammo which gets me killed way to much
Read things carefully before you post.
It says that the. 50cal Incendiary DOES NOT penetrate the target even at 100yards.
The. 50cal bullet that DOES is the A.P. one, not the Incendiary.
I had my wing shot off by a bomber from 600-800m, who can only fire 2-4 .50cals at most.
They can rip of wings way to often. One match in the F-80A-5 I parked myself behind La-200, a big bus of an aircraft, as he was climbing away. I shot at him from 600m, missed most of my bursts but then at one point I got the aim right and hit him with a good burst and took his wing off, using default ammo.
Based on that damage, it takes 2-3 .50cal hits to destroy a wing spar.
Testimony why high caliber AP in the game is a waste:
Of course when you compare it to what 20mm cannons can do, it’s probably in the same ballpark.
But at the bottom it says the M1 Incendiary penetrates the dural armor sandwich.
Only the British .50cal Incendiary fails to so.
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You have six guns firing at once with a high rate of fire. I don’t think it’s 2-3 rounds, but more like you had around 6-9 rounds hitting your target at the same time in the same localized area. The P-36G has a singular .50 and API and regular AP basically does the same damage (I might be wrong on this as I’m actually noticing more structural damage with AP in protection analysis), besides of course the RNG fire capability. Taking the Stealth belts—so things don’t get muddied up by tracer rounds and give the best results in terms of potential damage and then I tested with universal for more AP rounds.
I tested on the P-40s in the test map in attempts to snap the wing at the wing root. It’s not the most scientific test on the matter, but I’m finding that around 7-9 rounds is what does the killing and this is entirely rear aspect where I am striking the spars the entire time, no deflection shots where AP passes through near harmlessly
so having a good burst of nose mounted .50’s is obviously going to have a lot of damage. Also note. YOu have this much lead coming out of your plane
And you say a good burst, that’s easily around the 50 round mark if you do a 1 second burst with nose mounted .50s, especially that close. No duh that’s going to hurt a crap ton.
But jet damage models are weird to begin with as a singular hit from any gun can heavily affect aerodynamics instantaneously to the point your plane can enter a spin at over 800kmh.
F8U’s have this happen a lot. Clip their wing tip, they lose all lift in that wing tip and then they will pull so many G’s the wing snaps in a split second.
prop aircraft DMs are wet paper mixed with insanely overperforming 20mms that can split planes in a single shot is an issue.
I’d like to add after testing with the P-47D and using ground target ammunition, which was utter misery. Incendiary ammunition. Not particularly API-T, but pure incendiary is doing the heavy lifting for damage, which is why stealth belts crap damage.
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You’re striking your targets for the most part with AP in your 20mm belts which is the biggest culprit for why your 20mm doesn’t do damage, and mixed with your slow rate of fire you can also have enemies fly threw your rounds. This can happen with .50s, but 20mms can have this especially happen to them. Does your belt contain anything other than HE as well? because regular incendiary shells can also do minimum damage.
unironically, the ‘realistic’ ammo belts for planes aren’t meta. You’d want them with the most explosive ammunition as humanly possible. Strangely for .50s, incendiary damages wings more than AP while AP damages the fuselage more. I dun get it, but I hope the addition of custom ammo belts comes out because I do want to see what a full ‘Incendiary belt’ with no AP behaves like.
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the “ACcURaCY” argument is honestly one of the stupidest arguments Warthunder players have made for their favorite nation to stay OP. You can see from the footage that the B-17 took over a dozen HE hits and showed 0 signs of critical damage, unlike Warthunder where just one or two shells will rip off entire tails and wings.
It doesn’t matter that aiming in WT can be more accurate when the pilot in the footage hit more shots than most WT players and the B-17 was fine.
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I wouldn’t argue ‘fine’ as more than likely the crew was shredded, but the plane would’ve definitely been able to fly for more than at least 5 minutes from that amount of damage.
The engines were definetly gone, but it was still flying straight. In Warthunder, just one or two hits would’ve completely ripped the wing/tail off or at the bare minimum leave it black and ruin your flight performance.
Irl they would’ve eventually had to bail out, but in Warthunder they would be considered fine as you can glide back to airfield.
Oh definitely I agree. Gaijin puts all this care into how damage modeling works for tanks, but the second planes are involved “OOPS ITS ALL PAPER”
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