The ability to down a plane with a .50cal is insignificant compared to the power of the force (of a 20mm).
It’s pretty much known what a .50cal can accomplish, particularly in comparison to 20mm and larger cannons.
Especially since Soviets had a similar .50cal with API and HEI bullets, which was still less effective than one of the weakest 20mm cannons.
Theoretically, multiple .50cals tumbling after impact might be able to rip enough holes into a wing spar to weaken it enough for it to break in flight , but it’s still an unlikely scenario, as these hits needs to be very close together. Basically sawing through the spar.
20mm cannons as AA were probably very effective during the interwar years where planes were still mostly constructed from wood but against metal planes the effectiveness was greatly reduced.
It’s not very likely to hit a fighter-bomber more than once with a single 20mm, which isn’t all that likely to bring it down.
Hence why Germany mounted them in a quad mounts but favored 37mm cannon development in later years.
I’ve seen some picture of .50cals leaving some pretty long scratches in the wing of an aircraft.
So in theory they should be able to cause enough damage to the skin to have it bend and rip off.
But we’re talking about 2-3mm thick plates.
Not very likely for a round to impact that and leave more than a hole or a 10cm long scratch.
But in general the killing power effects pretty much everything but the structure of the aircraft.
Engine, pilot and fuel are going to be 99% of the causes for a .50cal kill.
Unless we‘re taking Biplanes vs. explosive bullets.
The big puff was just created from the airframe breaks, not directly from the M8 API hit. Simple.
Almost all cases of wing ripping off clips in gun cam I saw, were came from 50cal shots. Haven’t seen any footage of German or British 20mm tear off a wing from a S/E fighter. The number of samples and lower hitting rate of the 20 do matter in the case. One theory would be that 20mm HE round do most damage to the skin rather than the spar.
Yes you certainly saw cases where 109/190 been absolutely punched in 50cal long burst while leaving no structure damage. That do happen more often when the aircraft was steady and with little load. When the aircraft taken such punishment been thrown into a dive latter, the structure would likely to break apart, that would be outside the gun-cam range. When the aircraft was having air-load/ maneuverer, an AP round hitting the spar that accumulated a lot of stress, would be catastrophic. Specifically in Y29 air battle, P-51 pilots saw that FW-190 could took a lot of punishment when they flew steady, but its both wing could be shredded and flip like an carrier aircraft when exposed to 50cal fire in a sharp turn.
This 109 was trying a little neg-G roll, when 50cal hit the spar, the wing ripped off.
The 50cal HMG is definitely weaker when comparing with 20mm, but US planes often carry 6-8 of them, so that would still be very lethal. Again in lot of clips, it was not known whether the pilot shot all of them, sometimes the pilot would just shoot a pair of them. The amount vibration in the clip may tell.
In WT the structural breaks seems to be irrelevant to the airspeed and acceleration. This reminds of IL2-1946, where the JAVA code allows the spar been shot off more frequent when the speed and acceleration was high.
HE explodes on impact and the pressure rips the skin apart while fragments are tiny compared to .50cal bullets.
.50cal bullets fly through the entire airframe, tumbling after impact, which creates large bullet shaped cuts in the spar.
If one area receives enough hits the spar will break under the stress of flying.
Spars are also much stronger then the rest of the wing.
When 60g of various explosive filling was detonated in front of a Spitfires main spar the spar was intact, with only a hole blown through in the middle.
While the skin was blown apart from the pressure.
Still the chance of .50cals causing enough localized damage to a spar is relative low.
Especially considering the accuracy of .50cal rounds.
You have to be very close to even have a chance for them to hit a spar in a localized area.
There’s a lot of footage of .50cals or 20mm armed fighters where simply nothing happens.
That and the fact that spars accumulate damage over their entire length.
Which makes spars in WT way too weak against kinetic damage, in addition of taking too much damage in general.
I’ve shot wings off from B-17s with a couple of .50cal rounds from a P-39s two .50cals.
Just targeting the center of wing.
Against AI planes from close range.
While the other day I had my Ta 152 H lose its wing while attacking a B-29 in GRB from a distance of 400-500m.
With bullets flying all over the place.
I would say the US 50cal in the current game may be some 25-50% more destructive (depending on the case) when compared with real history.(You have to consider most time in history they shot something equivalent early/middle 50cal belt in the game, and with larger dispersion on gun convergence setting).
But considering that 20mms are doing at least 200% more, and Japanese/Swedish HE 50cal doing possibly 400% more. I think that’s acceptable for US 50cal to be at the current level.
A lot of time I see ki-61/84, yak3, and bf109k4 absorb at least 50-100 shots from my 50cal but still be able to fly normally. In the historical record, I can barely see some guy (S/E plane) fly back after being hit by more than 50 shots of .50bmg, excluding those who count fragmentation scar into account.(Iwamoto claimed received 200 shots on his A6M, simply impossible).
On flipside though, I don’t think I’ve ever ripped a wing while maneuvering a damaged aircraft without follow-up hits, while in real life you’d expect a weakened spar to give out more readily - especially in dives/pullouts and high G turns.
Which I do think would be cool if wing structural damage translated more to reduction in maximum g-loading before more damage, and if high G loading could cause structural damage by itself (I wish I could find it, but I recall reading RAF reports of horizontal stabilizers getting damaged when pulling out in a dive in either the earlier models of the hurricane or the typhoon). It’d create an interesting dynamic in defensive flying where hits were less immediate death (unless the damage was sufficient to reduce g limit to below 1 or so).
Having reduced max G on a given part of an aircraft when damaged could maybe satisfy issues with “X does too much/too little damage!”
I think it would be cool, if structural damage affected flight performance more heavily instead of simply blowing a wing off.
If bullet tumbling was a thing and effect armor penetration.
And if maps and matchmaking were more historical.
Like Japanese fighter armament was weak until the the end of the war, but if you’re flying in the pacific with carriers and airfields hours away, any engine related damage could be fatal after some time.
It’s odd. That 7.92mm solid shot projectile should have been quite effective but it doesn’t seem to have been used.
Like other than the ballistic and penetration table there’s no indication of that ammo being used.
Even though it was known that the SmK was practically useless for defeating aircraft armor plates.
Well, it probably didn’t have a lot of range.
Only ~9mm penetration at 100m compared to the same at 300m for the 13mm AP-T.
But at least it had a chance to go through some armor.
On the other hand no other nation tried to develope a solid shot bullet for their MGs.
Even though it would seem like the effectiveness of high velocity .50cal rounds that could penetrate a pilots armor from long range would be incredible effective against fighters.
Basically a Spitfire Mk I, if planes never had any armor and could be shot down by sending enough bullets into their direction to knock out the pilot.
No, jacketed rounds have generally better ballistic.
The solid shot round has that driving band sticking out which makes the aerodynamics worse and tracers have generally better ballistics.
So it would be worse than the SmK aerodynamically while also being lighter.
We can see from the ballistics tables that it rapidly loses speed.
Oh and the penetration table says it’s for the Pz-v. Which would have higher velocity, though unknown.
From the weight probably 875-900m/s.
Reducing the max Gs that a lot of airframes can stand in game in general would be more realistic. As you say though, reducing the max Gs as a response to airframe damage would be a good way to implement this sort of structural weakness without involving overly complicated calculations for the server hamster to juggle. I’d definitely like to see less cases of shots immediately blowing wings off, but then 5-10 seconds later the wing comes off from a harder turn than the damaged airframe can stand.
-Game says “lost control of flap” while you can physically his flap fall off (not an elevator) after a pile of rounds peppered their way down the entire length of the aircraft, causing him to trail a big thick line of black smoke (which is never caused by an Elevator, or even flap being shot off) and as I come around you can hear that his engine has also shut down as well, which would explain the black smoke.
Well thankfully I did hit anywhere else, I hit pretty much everywhere else in fact. He flew through a literal wall of lead.
I dont know what video you watched, because it wasnt mine. And I dont know what game you are playing because it clearly isnt War Thunder Realistic Battles
