no
The plane in the picture is a spitfire not a P47
P47 is under “spoiler”. It even says P47 in the picture.
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Don’t even need to know how to read, the big cowling and slotted flaps are a dead giveaway. The P-47 itself was probably THE toughest single engine fighter of WW2, and even it didn’t fare too well.
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My fault
yes it shows the effectiveness of sustained fire from multiple cannons on aircraft. There are videos of bombers collapsing and Fw-190s having ammo explosions from sustained fire from .50 rounds. They’re not underperforming.
Honestly, if 20mms get insta-collapsing action with their 20mms, then american .50’s need to get back their 2016 flamethrower status.
Bombers collapse as a result of the wing spars being hit, not holes in the skin of the aircraft being hit by a .50 cal. .50 cals don’t leave very big holes, their damage comes from hitting critical components, like engines, fuel, and wing spars, and this is already modelled. They are, in fact, significantly better at that in this game, not just because of mouse aim like most cases in this game, but because the .50 cals are significantly more accurate than in real life (even when just measuring a single .50 cal shooting in a straight line, this is without even considering the box setup on .50 cals that would have them spraying all over the place if they were modelled accurately).
Cannons, in particular when firing HE shells, do their damage very differently. They use the explosive power and the subsequent force of air resistance to blow huge holes in the skin of the aircraft. .50 cals can already accurately hit targets as far as 1.8km away without too much trouble, whereas cannons are restricted more to 1.2km, or even as close as 600m at most if you’re talking about the German ones.
If you get hit by a burst of .50 cals from an early P-51, that’s four .50 cals firing around 10 rounds per second, so at most it’s likely 30-50 rounds hitting. 30-50 hits is an optimistic estimation, assuming a full second of accurate fire (which is longer than you might think). 50-80 assumes more than a full second. While .50 cals leave a larger hole than a rifle calibre bullet, it’s not by much, so even with 30-50 holes in your wing you’re not going to have a very significant aerodynamic effect. .50 cals require hits on important components to do significant, let alone crippling damage.
On the other hand, a set of German 20mms from an FW 190 is four cannons firing 11.5 rounds per second. With the comparative inaccuracy, fire rate, velocity, and range, we can assume that there’s maybe half a second of accurate fire, meaning 5.75 rounds per second between four guns, which is 21 hits. That’s 21 hits with 2/3 being an HEI round with around 30g of TNT equivalent, which, if I recall correctly, is around 3/5 of a hand grenade. For context, this means 14 HEI rounds (on which the incendiary effect isn’t even modelled, to be clear), equaling the effect of 8.4 hand grenades exploding directly on the surface of your wooden/aluminum ww2 aircraft. This is before factoring the subsequent air resistance of high speed flight flowing against the new holes in your wing, and also before factoring the turbulence effect of a ton of air suddenly rushing into the vacuum of space caused by the explosion pushing the air away from your wing. Realistically, if those shots didn’t tear your wing off instantly, they were extremely likely to do so around five seconds after, which is not currently modelled in the game. Compared to the .50 cals, this does not need to hit critical components to do crippling damage, which means if you nick a wing instead of the engine it’s still likely to tear the wing off, or at least the control surfaces.
If anything, cannons are underperforming and .50 cals are overperforming.
EDIT: Formatting and adding context.
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We’ve already shown the guncam footage of Bf-110s sitting on the direct rear of B-24s and B-17s not instantly sawing their tails off with 2 shots and the damage tests Britain did with their spitfires showing that 3 shells shouldn’t be splitting planes in half with the high explosive shells
Even when taking a belt that carried the least amount of mineshells in game, we still get wing snapping action. within the single digits while IRL, it took substantial firepower to take down a bomber in the way we see in War thunder.
Like what @KillaKiwi said. Everything is overperforming, but 20mms are overperforming moreso than .50’s.
I can score a snapshot on a P-47 and split the plane in half, just ignore that most of it’s fuselage is consistent of a massive turbocharger and large exhausts, while with .50’s I need a sustained burst even though historically, .50’s were able to very easily set fires with an M23 incendiary round having a 60% chance of lighting a fire with a single round, yet we don’t see that in game.
.50’s are ‘overperforming’ in structural damage, yes. But so are 20mms to a cartoonish degree.
the best option is to bring back the 2016 .50 flamethrowers where .50 incendiary rounds practically guaranteed a fire.
20mms are overperforming in damage not because of actual stats, but because mouse aim lets us be more accurate than you could be in real life. .50s get this advantage as well, arguably to an even greater degree when you factor in the range you can fire them at. If you want to see realistic damage with .50s and 20mms, look at gameplay from IL-2 Sturmovik, which is widely considered to have more realistic damage with those rounds (though I know at least the mk108 rounds underperform a lot in that game).
Most people in ww2 considered the .50s, while good, to be solidly inferior to cannons. The Allies tried repeatedly to replace them with cannons but could not due to reliability and jamming issues. The primary reason American aircraft have .50 cals is that they were unable to replace them, not because they were considered desirable by comparison. As for the chance to set fires, I haven’t checked the 60% chance figure that you state, but I guarantee that’s only going to be for fuel tanks and engines, not for simply hitting the fuselage (where there would be some chance if it’s paper or wood, but far lesser).
KillaKiwi’s post is almost entirely correct except for the statement of the two 20mms. You are almost never just getting hit by 2 rounds. As I stated in my last post, with 4 German 20mms, at the ranges you can actually fire those, you’re hitting 20 rounds or so if you’re accurate, though 10 is more likely. 10 20mm rounds with 28g of TNT equivalent will cripple a wing.
If that P47 in KillaKiwi’s post was actually hit by a German 30mm rather than the service crews merely thinking so, then it is exceedingly lucky to have taken so little damage, because usually those shells will just tear off entire wings or tails with a single round.
.50 cals are far easier to hit with than most 20mms, especially German and Japanese cannons. If you make them flamethrowers again, there will literally be no advantage to using cannons despite cannons historically being the much preferred option.
EDIT: If you want to talk about rounds that should be flamethrowers, the incendiary round on the German 30mms is supposed to have 140g of outright thermite, but in practice I do not believe an incendiary effect is even modelled.
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laughs in swedish akan m/39A
Which involved 20mm fire with unknown ammo loadout being spread across the entire aircraft, with most of it missing. I wager I could replicate that exact situation in-game.
Which were stationary and not subject to any aerodynamic forces of flying at a few hundred kph.
Of which nothing is modeled
The few planes that did get them (F6F-5’s inner pair could be swapped out, P-38) always had a catch. F6F crews even when issued one with the cannons, would often replace them with .50s since they just weren’t at all reliable. The P-38 I believe had a recocker for its 20mm, afforded by the extra space available with the nose installation.
Late war cannons were reliable enough to be issued, though still not perfect.
I don’t think I’ve read any complaints from crews about the MG151s jamming, which is quite interesting given that it was a ‘clean slate’ design instead of iterating on the Hispano.
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Logistics too.
U.S aircraft had to perform very, very far from the home front and being able to reliably use the same ammunition for multiple platforms, multiple weapons cannot be understated in a prolonged, protacted war where you’re also providing lend-lease to your allies.
For this, I find 20 mm cannons quite powerful even without mouse aim. With the P-51 cannon mustang, I find it takes ~20-40 rounds per enemy to get a killshot in from 300 meters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F88uZ922gU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRtKK1TavSE
Also mention of aerodynamic forces seems fairly important.
I find I only tend to shred wings with my 50 cal aircraft if the target is trying to turn heavily. Otherwise they can eat a hefty burst and be seemingly fine.
They would jam if you tried to fire them while pulling more than 8-10 Gs, I think, though I’ve always assumed other cannons shared a similar flaw with G forces. That’s the only case I’ve heard of them having a “reliability issue” so to speak.
That’s very much in-line with other aircraft. P-51s were notorious for this I believe, maybe even at a lower G load due to the ammo feeds being on top of each other.
The argument of mouse aim and accuracy has been rebuked on this thread already, of which I’m not blaming you for not reading the entire thing. This thread is huge enough as it is. So I’m just going to quote the whole thing for you. Me and Killa already went out of our way to determine how much AP roughly it would take to saw off a wing in War Thunder. Look at the Aug-7 posts on this thread. Similarly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmVDExnysHY
You can see where there are clean 20mm hits on bombers. In game, this would destroy them and these are sufficient bursts.
Loofah already made posts on 20mm effectiveness on here as well. I’ll also need to find the other gif I showed, demonstrating that a 20mm to the P-51C’s fuselage can snap it with one round.
No, they’d still have a purpose. As one shot machines. Like they already are. but the incendiary function of .50’s are missing heavily on hits that would set an opponent alight. That’s the whole point:
Leave 20mms alone as they are in game, you hit me. I snap.
Buff .50 incendiary effects to 2016 level. So everyone has cartoonishly OP weapons now. So when I hit your oil, or when I hit your fuel. You burn.
20mm cannons can split planes in half or severely cripple them with singular hits but as we saw with IRL british testing, 20mm cannon fire shouldn’t be doing that large amount of damage. The gun footage shows an 190 A-7 shredding a B-24 and it did nothing.
1/3rd is not “most” of it missing, and you’re taking the worst case scenario. Not only that, you’re forgetting this portion of the source information
“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…”
You’re using the 1/3rd argument as that was a generalized amount for how little they might put in their planes depending on the mission. I.e. ground strafing lightly armored targets. But you try to push this to the worst conclusion possible, while trying to ignore the information literally in the next paragraph as it stated that cannon armed aircraft carried less varied shell types and relied on what would be their bread and butter ammunition types.
To assume 20mm armed aircraft going to interdict bombers are going to be carrying the utter minimum of high explosive ammunition and incendiary when their whole mission is bomber interception, is insanity, and to make your point, you have to actively bank on pilots and their ground crews being actively dumb.
You’re trying to argue to strengthen your point while ignoring what the resource said literally a paragraph later. Your whole 1/3rd argument you’re banking on is either done out of case of arguing in bad faith, or you literally never read past the first paragraph. At which, I’m heavily inclined to believe the former.
Of which only popped holes into the side of which british testing concluded these would be dangerous but survivable (Unless you assume you’re smarter than the countless engineers testing the ammunition)
LOL… They were never one shot machines… Ok… If you hit the pilot, maybe…
Actually, I´m trying out the US tech tree. And it is way easier to hit your target. The “lack” of bullet drop is a broken advantage in every aspect of a fight. Every degree, you have to pull up the nose of your plane less, lets you keep more energy… More energy, the more likely you are able to win a fight.
And the range of these things is just unreal…
In most situations, I managed to hit the engine. 1 hit and your enemy has to rtb…
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To be clear, I’m not sure on the 8-10 Gs. It might be more or less, that’s just the number my brain conjured, which might be actual memory, or could just be the brain spitting up something random that sounds right.
Gotta disagree here. Especially later belts contain 80-100% API and with how API rounds are implemented, they are simply far to effective in setting fires.
One time I set a He 111 on fire from 1.5km using early war belts with 1/3 Incendiary rounds, which don’t even have that infinite incendiary range like API bullets. And the slower a round, the closer the incendiary flash happends near the impact area, instead of getting it inside the plane and near the fuel.
Fuel tank fires will kill a plane in, I would say more than 66% of times, and .50cals used to be so good because 20mm cannons wouldn’t instantly rip a wing or tail off.
Thus .50cals felt very strong in taking out planes, since they could set fires so frequently and from practically any range or angle, which they still can do.
Only difference now is that explosive rounds, be it 12.7mm or 20mm are now so effective in destroying wings that you don’t even need to rely on incendiary effect to take out planes.
So 20mm used to underperform in effectivness compared to .50cals, even though the damage was much more realistic back then.
Now both are more effective then they should be.
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Black sections are never a guarantee of death.
This was in Sim, my tail took a lot of damage, was blacked out, and I lost tail controls. Still landed.
Self explanatory, landed
Won a head-on against an M13 and put out a fire
That really depends on what your enemy is doing, seen plenty of times where enemies or myself survived 20mm hits.
Well you need to rewatch that Bf 110 gun camera video then.
No, you are.
For starters, I’m not assuming anything. I am pointing out an unknown variable, relevant to a country that had shortages of just about everything, for a plane on which the 20mm cannons weren’t even its primary damage dealer against bombers.
(that I’m not making)
Dangerous implies they COULD have resulted in deadly damage.
Sounds plausible, and good enough for an internet argument lol.
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got that backwards