.50's deserve a buff

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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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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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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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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This is sarcasm, right?

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It’s not a joke. A good burst at any part of the enemy plane with the .50 will surely set it on fire.

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It will also depend on the ammunition you use, as another player said earlier in this same debate, do not expect to split a plane in two with an anti-armor tracer.

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Shouldn’t be worse. Gunners should be more realistic. So no stabilization, and no iron-armed gunners who can shoot.upside down no problem.
But since they aren’t, bombers shouldn’t be any tougher than they currently are.
Bombers are useless in Air RB. So are some fighters. Such is life.
How do you even imagine a mode where bombers are useful and not completely broken?

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Spoilered since it's long

PS respond in the linked thread if it’s about the bombers

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I haven’t read the whole thread, but just lowering the TU-4 to 6.3 is a nonsense. And also raising the spawn altitude of the bombers? Do you want the games to be only Russian TU-4s against the Chinese TU-4? Bombers need a change, but this is too extreme. If you are such a fan of realism, you shouldn’t complain about a B-29 fighting a Mig-15, since it happened in Korea.

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Put the Tu-4 at 6.3

LOL

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So in essence, make attacking bombers a goddamn suicide. Only planes armed with MK103 and 50mm have any chance vs Tu-4 and that’s only happening after several minutes of climbing. Everything else Germany and Italy have will be swatted out of the sky from beyond their gun range.
Attacking G8 f.e. is already borderline impossible with most popular German and Soviet guns, as that bomber is flying high and fast, and you can’t tailchase, and remember - bomber hunting is late game activity, so the bomber is already at 7000m, and to have a reasonable chance, you have to attack from above. GL HF.
Bombers even right now are extremely dangerous. Luckily most bomber users have no idea how to use their 3-plane stabilised gunner robots.

Bombers are far from paper. Meanwhile a single Type 99 Mk2 or soviet 23mm shell will rip F2Gs wing clean off.

Attacking bombers is already more dangerous than attacking fighters and requires extreme ammo and time expenditure to not get clobbered. Bomber can almost always return fire. Fighters have to point their nose at you.
And if bomber wants to, you’ll never get close to it, unless you invest entire round trying to get in position to attack…

…only to get 1-shot by AI gunner from outside your own gun range.

Sounds fun!

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When I still has PTSD for 2016 Tu-4 💀

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2016 all over again baby

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