.50's deserve a buff

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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306

.50cals are already overperforming on damage. Plus, they always have far more ammo capacity than 20mms.

Every single 109 has, AT MOST, 200rds of 20mm. On a SINGLE cannon.
La-5s and 7s get 340-390rds of 20mm across two cannons.
The completely overkill J6K has 1200rds of 20mm spread across 6 cannons.
A Ki-61-I otsu or Ki-44-II hei, both with 4x 12.7s, have 1000rds on board.

Now let’s look at the US and their .50s.
All P-47Ds get 3400rds across 8 guns, the N gets even more.
P-51s get 1880rds on 6 guns across most models, Corsairs get 2350rds for the same guns.
P-51C and Bearcat have 1250-1260rds, with the same burst mass and gun count as for the two 12.7mm-armed japanese planes above.

The P-47 gets a higher burst mass than everything I mentioned, except the J6K. It is better than most Fw190 models (only 2 or 3 are better, and those are even worse aircraft than the P-47), or a 109 G2 WITH gunpods. And you get that as low as 3.7.

The P-38 has a very good 20mm and you can fly it as low as 3.0. Due to how unreliable it was, not many other US aircraft got a 20mm cannon at all. The US also has what is probably the best armed plane at 3.7, the P-51A with its 4x 20mm cannons. Unlike comparable aircraft from other nations, it is low enough where its speed is relevant.

At 5.7, the F4U-4B has more 20mm ammo (and arguably better guns) than anything else I could find on a fighter near its BR and with comparable ammo load. N1K2s, J2Ms, Fw190s, Tempests… only the N1K2s get close with 900rds, but the cannons have much lower RoF and the plane itself is quite bad.

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307

Shooting from that angle into a B-17 in-game will yield you about the same results. The only time you’re gonna shoot someone down in very few hits is by coming from above or below and targeting the wing root or pilot.

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It’s just incendiary mixture:
40% Barium Nitrate
10% Potassium Perchlorate
50% Magnalium (50:50)

The only difference to the M1 Incendiary is the 10% Potassium Perchlorate, which is a stronger oxidizer than Barium Nitrate, increasing the heat of the flash.

You also forgot the fact that the rounds will actually prematurely detonate when firing at long burst or from a hot barrel.
One of the issues that led to the round stopped being produced.

In the 12.7mm M3, the high RoF would increase the chance of rounds getting too hot even more since the higher RoF would induce more heat in a shorter time.

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They overperform on strutucal damage, fire chance and range. (probably accuracy as well)

Of course all guns overperform to some extent but .50cals and 20mm are probably both the strongest contenders for being much more capable than in RL.

But when it comes to ammo types, all types of Incendiary ammo is severly underperforming, if it doesn’t have AP or HE in the name as well.

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310

The entire argument of burst mass makes no sense, especially when it’s one second burst mass (Look at the video of the P-80 above) In any match. You’re not going to get a full second of burst onto a singular enemy unless they are flying completely straight and unaware or AFK.
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The majority of the time, you’re going to get glancing blows that do nothing in deflection shots. They achieve no major loss in lift nor do they heavily affect the flight characteristics of the aircraft.

Compare this to a single 20mm being able to snap a P-51C in half. The P-51C snaps in this location. Making it where cannon rounds magically have the explosive filler of bombs. This why the ‘ammunition amount’ argument makes no sense. You can literally 1 tap aircraft, if you run out of ammunition. That’s your fault. I regularly go in the Fw-190 A-1 and I will point-and-click-adventure La-5s, P-40s, Ki-43s, Ki-45s, P-38s, and even P-51s and P-47s with one round from either cannon smacking one of their wings instantly splitting them into two or magically combusting their wing tip to pieces, and vice versa for most other country’s cannons
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second clip a B-17 is being peppered by a Bf-110 G-2 yet the wing isn’t mysteriously flying off nor is the tail splitting in half. I wonder what gun the Bf-110 G-2 has?
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According to war thunder. 1-2 hits is what kills the plane. Lol

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Good thing that you can scale burst mass to whatever time you want, until you have to consider gun overheating or running out of ammo.

Even if your firing window is just 1/4 sec, the P-47D still puts more lead in the air than almost anything else.

Plane in video is firing its 20mm cannons, not 30mm. We also don’t know what ammo is used, so retest with AP-I or IT and see how little it does.

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You’re just telling me what I’ve already read in the document. I don’t really care about the ammunition bursting because—honestly. Who cares? Gaijin isn’t going to add that defect. If they did, then they’re going to need to add sabotaged Me-262s and the La-5 can’t go above 3000 meters because the pilots would be gassing themselves with their own exhaust fumes if they close the canopy doors

The thing with the M23s is that it’s mentioned multiple times that the ammunition does penetrate and that there is over double the amount of filler compared to M1 incendiary, Yes, it does detonate on impact, but it still penetrates. Like I mentioned in the previous post. The incendiary for .50’s should behave like SAPI on hispano cannons but instead of penetrating and exploding like an HE or APHE shell (Which is incorrect as pointed out by another user on the older forum) it should rely on the impact of the cartridge hitting the aircraft as the means of “detonating” the ammunition.

Like the .303 incendiary test posted above.

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Tearing quotes and stuff out of “Flying Guns of World War II; Development of Aircraft guns, ammunition, and installations 1933-1945” by Anthony G. Williams and Emmanuel Gustin.

"The Luftwaffe saw considerable variations in belt loading, as follows:

The 7.92mm MG-17 used in fighters were loaded with 50 percent AP, 40 percent API and 10 percent HEI (a Beobachtungsgeschoss, or observation round, which exploded on impact to show the pilot he was on target). For ground attack and for the MG-15 and MG-81 felxible guns, the sequence typically changed to equal proportions of AP, AP-T and API; v-munition loadings were only used in the MG-17. The 13mm MG-131 was loaded with one or two HEI for every AP/T. Official loadings for the 20mm belts and magazines varied at different times and places. Three types of projectiles were usually mixed in the belts: HEI (M-Geschoss), HE/T and AP/API or APHE. Ratios quoted include 1:1:1, 3:1:1, and 2:2:1 respectively.

Generally speaking, the more powerful weapons were able to provide sufficient destructive power with only one or two projectile types, so belts were less varied. As we have seen, an equal mix of HEI and SAPI became standard in the RAF’s 20mm Hispanos, whereas the 30mm MK-108 principally relied on the M-Geschoss HEI it was designed for. The .50 in Browning fighter belts in US service started the war loaded with 40 percent AP, 40 percent Incendiary and 20 percent tracer. The tracer fell out of favour when it was realised that it was providing more help to the enemy. By the end of the war, fighters were primarily loaded with the M8 API (which appeared in service in spring 1944), as this proved to be a good general-purpose projectile, although the M23 incendiary also saw some use."

So overall, the luftwaffe was using high explosives for their cannons. I have no clue why you want to go “Mmmm But do it with AP!” as if they ran full AP against bombers for some reason. Sounds like you’re moving the goal post.

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First, you’re using the wrong caliber of ammo. Second, you’re extrapolating the damage from one hit, with the cartridge that can be as little as 1/3rd of the belt (as per your own information, and that’s without considering ammo shortages), AND from the worst angle possible.

No, despite all your crying about it, a B-17 will survive about that much fire in-game too.

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The problem is not that the 151 is doing too much damage. The problem is that it is doing too much structural damage

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If you wanna look at 20mms, there’s plethora of 20mm gun cam footage with long streams of fire on the target showing it’s not magically blowing planes apart like we see in War Thunder. My whole point is that a single HE 20mm round in game has enough output to be on par with straight up bombs. I also love how you use the as little modifier to describe the minimum being 1/3rd of their ammunition belt being high explosive. Bro, it’s still 1/3rd of your ammo. That’s still a crap ton of shells in your plane, especially in attackers like the Bf-110 or fighters like the Fw-190. I’m ‘’‘‘extrapolating’’‘’’ off of one hit because for most aircraft in War Thunder. One hit is all you need to take people down. But IRL you’re seeing aircraft shot multiple times with 20mm.

Footage of a B-24 being attacked from the front is in the same video. Secondly, what do you mean worst angle? All the modules and parts are lined up, especially for AP where it does it’s damage from hitting spars and modules. You’re just making up stuff now!

The problem is that you’re moving the goal post.
‘W-well, it’s using 20mms! Not 30mms!’
Okay well, if that’s the case, here’s all this information showing that 20mm splits planes in half with 1 cannon round when it shouldn’t be.
‘Buh-buh! What if they’re using AP!’
Well here’s an excerpt from a book showing that high explosive ammunition was more than likely preferential to pilots because the mission entails shooting down bombers.

I have shown multiple times, that 20mm is doing too much damage. You can test it yourself. The amount of fire you need to take down a B-17 is absolutely miniscule as you can send the B-17 down into chunks in game while IRL it took considerable amount of fire. The thing is, this just doesn’t matter to the B-17. It matters to everything in the game as 20mm cannons in general are doing insane unrealistically large amounts of damage, mix this in with paper DMs, you get a complete recipe for disaster.

Nice joke. Literally look at any war thunder video of the B-17 (Or most bombers in general) and it’s collapsing from the air, split in two by a split second click of rounds and you go ‘Yes, this is accurate’ in fact, what blows my mind the most. People for years have been complaining about bombers being too weak. To the point that they are almost unplayable. Yet here you are basically going ‘Nuh-uh, my 20mms should be able to 1 click people’

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Remove 3-plane stabilization from the gunners, and we can talk.
Also try to spread your fire around B-17 - it’ll happily tank 30 20mm rounds and keep flying.
Sometimes ridiculous things happen and wings/tails break super easy. But many times bomber requires prolonged clobbering, most of my bomber kills come from fire/pilot snipes.

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318

If there is stabilization for the gunners, it doesn’t help pretty much at all. As it is the bullet spread, ammo belts, AI gunner range, and AI gunner accuracy are just bad. Not to mention the AI gunners appear to be unable to shoot at multiple targets at once (from what I can tell).

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You can tumble through the air with broken wing and your gunners remain rock steady.
I’ve been sniped by a bomber with no wing quite a few times. The gunners are perfectly stabilized, I can make a video if you don’t believe me, and it greatly helps bomber users to snipe the fighters

Good B18B griefer is virtually unkillable, and decent B-17 user will usually land a few hits too.

I don’t care about AI gunners, I’m talking manual gunners.
Fighters are more accurate than IRL, but bomber gunners with their perfect synchronisation, great accuracy, ability to perfectly handle 40kg gun in a bomber rolling and tumbling around are just simply broken.

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And there’s other 20mm gun camera footage, as well as multiple eye witnesses that say planes were brought down by very few shells, especially if one is reading about Marseille and his sorties in Africa. The vast majority of pilots missed pretty much ALL their shots.

https://youtu.be/Iew9cu_9nf4?si=ICPGuyYRZDZy_sT6&t=1805 (timestamped)
When they DO hit a high deflection shot in the right place, as on the timestamp in that video and as we would in WT since we have MOUSE AIM, a single hit is enough to bring it down.

Which is quite bad if that’s your “good” shell.

I wish I had clipped a battle I had yesterday where a 109 tanked like 5 short bursts from my Ki-100.

We had that during the great RealShatter fuckup, and everyone disliked it. I don’t remember seeing a single player whose opinion I even slightly value saying they enjoyed needing to fire for 5x longer on something while .50cals were still stupidly overperforming and doing MORE DAMAGE THAN CANNONS at the time.

Of which we don’t see the aftermath. Who’s to say that B-24 wasn’t set on fire and didn’t go down? Also, as I said above, IRL pilots were far more inaccurate than we are in WT.

Go on, shoot a B-17 from straight 6 in a real match with just two MG151/20s. Or better yet, do it with sim controls so its more relevant.

Since when is pointing out the obvious flaws in your argument = moving the goalposts? IRL pilots were notoriously inaccurate, with hit rate in the single % digits. Of course with aim like that, you’re gonna need a lot more than just a handful of 20mm ammo to shoot anything down.

And pilots like Marseille DID shoot down plenty of aircraft with minimum ammo usage.

It’s a claim made by every room temp IQ bomber main that claims that the gun camera that is right in the middle of the Bf 110 G2’s MK108s is somehow recording the supposedly 30mm tracers coming from far below it, and not from the pair of 20mm cannons below the gun camera.

Also not what I said, but nice try at actually moving the goalposts.

You can replicate the exact situation in the video in-game, from that angle and range. Especially if you do what this pilot did and spread your damage around the tail and wings.

And here’s you here, complaining your .50cals with 4x the ammo capacity, comparable burst mass, and often 2-3x the number of guns on board are NOT onetapping people.

Bombers are perfectly playable in Sim (and arguably very OP there thanks to all-seeing 3rd person gunners) as you don’t have the accuracy to just put a stream of 20mm shells all in their wing root.

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321

Why should the manual gunner’s position be even worse? It’s barely viable as it is, and the AI gunners aren’t viable at all.

Bombers should be more than XP pinatas, though.

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  1. is MG ofc 20mm gonna be stronger
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Wdym, 50’s need a buff? But I do agree with that.

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fundamentaly the problem is not damage models (though those do need some work. tail snapping is pretty BS), but the fact that bombers are implemented in an incredibly stupid and counterproductive way.

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The .50s in War Thunder are one of the most effective, most ammo-heavy and easiest to use weapons in the game. It only takes one well-placed burst on any fighter to render it useless. They also have no bullet drop or recoil and are very easy to aim at both long and short range, thanks to their high convergence, unlike some guns whose recoil causes the plane to move, making aiming difficult. In short, if you find the .50s to be bad weapons, especially the American ones, it’s not a Gaijin problem, it’s simply a skill issue.

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