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
Ok… whats your point?
Many of the US planes have 4 or more .50 cal. They have literally no bullet drop, and fire at 1.5km distance and more, and are still powerful enough to destroy an engine at this distance…
You do not need much aiming to hit more than enough rounds to damage an aircraft… even at more than 1.5 km…
What else do you want?
Just click at a random position on your screen, and you get a kill???
The BF 109 has one… ONE!!! 20mm… and if someone iis able to hit you with it, the kill is more than deserved.
Here… I show you how “bad” the .50 cals are… My crew was at Level 6… And I’m not even familiar with that plane…
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20mms are better in everything except max firing range.
I agree the implementation of API makes no sense in regards to the amount of filler it has and it’s relative effectiveness, but I would regard the infogram you posted as generalized. Again the M23 round has a %60 chance to light a fuel tank, even whilst going through the Bf-109 armor plate, meaning that one penetration has a high likelihood of alighting a target. A long winded way to say “M23 is a decent exception to the rule.” But my argument isn’t from the point of realism but just weapon balancing. We already had this discussion if we balanced off realism:
Unless that’s what you want, at which point you’re asking a complete overhaul of the damage modeling system and I doubt Gaijin would do that, no matter how interesting the results may be.
I agree in the fact that 20mm rounds were less effective back then than they are now. But the .50 flamethrower effect was a real thing and was such an issue that a stray .50 would light you instantly. That’s why around 2017 Gaijin nerf batted .50 incendiary effectiveness so hard that they were effectively useless for several months, making U.S. props nearly unplayable, for most of that year, that was when Ground target belts became ‘meta’ for a little while
You are right both are more effective than they have any right to be, but Gaijin is balancing damage on ‘fun’ for them, not realism. Which is why I believe if they’re going to buff cannons to cartoonish levels, .50’s should be given some cartoonishly strong incendiary capability like in 2016. Or gaijin rearranges how ammo belts work as API shouldn’t be the primary round in the belt, but regular incendiary.
You’ve used the source information I offered multiple times as an argument point to use against me, in bad faith.
There you go. You’re arguing in bad faith again contradicting your own statements. I’m not replying to you again as you already confirmed that you literally cannot make any argument that isn’t in bad faith.
Going forward let’s remember to keep all personal arguments in PM, and to keep threads on topic.
Cool but that was 3 months ago. Get with the times.
Also that wasn’t even the argument I was making. I said it COULD be as little as 1/3rd of the belt, not that it WAS. Again, unknown variable.
But now I AM talking about hit rate, not belt composition:
Also, I just showed you that it is very possible to survive multiple 20mm hits in a fighter or bomber, yet your only pushback is on an entirely different reply I made THREE MONTHS AGO.
If anyone here is arguing in bad faith, is you.
They can one tap
The 0.50 has a gazillion rounds and lazerbeam ballistics
Seems fair to me
Except 20mm Shvak reaches nearly as far as .50 despite have a less aerodynamic round, and less powder than German 20mms but can almost hit 1.5 km for some reason. The good range is the same for Hispanos reaching over 1km out.
Only reason for most of this discussion we singled out Mineshells is the damage potential of them. But in general, 20mm cannons are overpowered cartoonishly in terms of strength.
Square cube law, rifle bullets have very good coefficients but are meaningless vs HMG.
Mineshells, esp 20mm have incredibly bad ballistic coefficients. You can look at the real tables, they really drop harder than LMG rounds.
Damage is cartoonish for everything, it just happens to benefit 20mm. German 30 just blows up planes half the time.
In real life, a 0.50 can barely pen 0.524 inch armor steel past 500 yards. But in game it’s an instant erasure.
It’s all fake.
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Was talked about before in the thread and agreed upon. Everything is cartoonishly strong. But cannons in general are leagues and bounds better than .50’s to the point they can kill with singular cannon rounds. Almost every cannon in game can one tap people while with .50’s you need to get a sustained long burst enough for structural damage. Fires are already much rarer in this game compared to before and less lethal now as well compared to the guaranteed death sentence they were back then.
It’s why I suggested buffing .50’s incendiary to near 2016 levels of flammability. So .50’s have the incendiary capability, and cannons keep the insane structural damage they can output. Another option being giving the U.S. a dedicated air-target belt where it’s basically just the stealth belt but with the API replaced with API-T. the M23 in game kinda acts like a miniature HEFI and with wings, it damages them a decent amount for a single round. Basically, no stat changes. Just a new ammo belt. That way even a glancing blow can actually affect performance, and not just make it the lightest yellow because API passed harmlessly through your wing.
API-T striking the wing
M23 incendiary striking the wing.
American planes are already leagues and bounds more difficult to play than a Yak-3 or a Bf-109 mixed with the shortened match timer, the patience required to climb, and then trusting your team to not instantly melt. it gets nightmarish when a vehicle focused on patience also has to sustain a long burst on an enemy that knows your presence while the enemy can essentially tap you out of the sky if he gets one shot in.
Check the USA pick rate in MM. I think it’s entirely bearable, if anything 6x HMG > 2x cannon.
Most players bring gun pods so like 3x cannons on the 109s, 4 (default) on 190, you’re not instagibbed.
it’s picked a lot simply because it’s America and America was a massive player in WW2.
This is what the U.S. saw it as, roughly 2-3 .50’s per cannon in terms of destructive potential when making comparisons… But that’s IRL, not how Warthunder makes it out to be.
Cannons readily melt planes even when armed with one of them and in singular shots. If armed with 4 .50’s you struggle to match the damage output of a single cannon.
Wasn’t .50 cal pretty damn bad when it comes to penetration after going through aircraft skin, while MG131 with its crude bullets did surprisingly well?
I think I’ve seen such claim in this forum, but it’s hard to verify.
That’s some pretty hard armor. Almost FHA level.
But they also shot it directly. When the round gets destabilized first, it probably has little chance to have any effect.
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Yes. According to German data. It’s because jacketed bullets, will get destabilized very easily after impacting any material at oblique impact.
The German 13mm round doesn’t have a copper jacket but is like a miniature cannon shell made from hardened steel with a driving band.
The center of gravity is also near the front, due to the large tracer cavity, which keeps the round facing forward instead of turning sideways.
The downside are the worse ballistic performance, since the .50cal is both more pointy and also boat tailed. But the tracer makes up for that to some degree. 13mm API was only used for a short period. I suspect because it must have had unusable ballistic performance, since it would have even worse ballistics than AP-T.
German 13mm AP-T
13mm AP-T compared to 12.7mm AP (from German document)
Numbers in brackets are the armor penetration values at 100m, for a high hardness steel plate (450 BHN), 2m behind a 2mm dural plate sloped at 70°.
A 7.92mm or 7.7mm AP round will penetrate 4mm in comparison.
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Wow, that really is shaped just like a tank shell.
0.50 cal AP is massively overperforming in general.
Real thing had limited impression on even T-26.
As for German 13mm… That is trash.
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