If the incendiary effect is your main concern, then I think it’s worth mentioning that in the video you sent, you didn’t appear to hit his engine or fuel until the same burst that killed the pilot, so in all likelihood you wouldn’t have caused a fire.
I’m not sure whether the incendiary factor of .50 cals is currently accurate. Some time ago I saw a reference to the incendiary factor being overstated in the code, but since I can’t remember the source or context, I can safely disregard that. What I can attest to is that .50 cals in-game are significantly more accurate and farther-reaching than in real life, and that’s before factoring the convergence settings on the guns.
If the incendiary effect receives a significant buff to put .50 cal damage more in line with 20mm guns, the .50 cals should receive a corresponding nerf to their accuracy and ease of use, lest .50 cals entirely outpace 20mms in effectiveness. I think I said this somewhere earlier in the discussion (it’s been a while since I tuned into it), but the US used .50 cals because they were strategically convenient, not because they were actually more effective than 20mms.
Never said they were more effective. The issue is that the amount of damage that .50s dish out compared to 20mms especially in terms of realistic damage is a huge disparity with 20mms acting as if they are 88mm flak able to blow planes apart when that simply isn’t the case.
Like the guncam footage posted above, even when the guns were converged to have a box pattern, not like the convergence we have in game where it’s pinpoint. .50s were able to snap and destroy bf-109 and japanese aircraft wings with ease. But in game, as shown here. I completely flooded his wings with rounds and yet his aircraft was able to take hits but still maneuver well unlike P-47 or P-51s where a single black wing makes the plane completely uncontrollable. Like with the I-185 screen cap I posted. My shot only pilot sniped, not set the aircraft alight. The incendiary we have acts like tiny crappy HE when it should also have a penetrative effect. You can scroll up and see documentation showing that M23 was insanely effective. But in game? It does jack crap.
Look at german guncam footage of them shooting P-47s and how tanky they are. Some P-47s taking up to 20 rounds of 20mm and COUNTLESS rounds of 7.92.
If it was war thunder physics we were working with. The aircraft would’ve been shot once or twice and explode.
Why is gaijin doing all this effort when they tried to completely rework how APHE behaved. Give new modules to modern tanks so there’s more things to damage. But for aircraft it’s basically. “If you have a cannon, it dominates”
I dont think they are significantly more accurate in game than IRL. 0.50s are known to be very accurate when they arent very wornout. the big issue with game is the convergence settings being for a convergence point instead of a more complex pattern and there being no vertical convergence.
I believe it was a mix. where the 20mms the US had tested had many jamming problems and had many 0.50s but it was known that against the fighter targets that US planes were often shooting at a few hits of 0.50 were often enough to disable them or at least force them to disengage and while using 0.50s they could have more volume of fire and trigger time per a weight of armament to ensure they get hits on target
Oh please no. 20mm are already a big pain for us bomber mains, but a buff in .50cal? sure it’ll benefit US bombers and Fighters, but it’s a pain for German/Italian/British/and every other nation bomber mains. Just a mini 20mm with more ammo and less weight.
Are you working under the assumption that setting the target on fire is the expected result of a solid burst from the .50 cals? Almost all of the footage I’ve seen has shown plenty of fuel and radiator leaks when shot by .50 cals, but only the occasional fire. Whether the incendiary effect should be buffed or not remains to be seen, but if it gets to the point that it’s your main method of killing an aircraft, then it will have been buffed to an unrealistic extent.
I’m not sure about other 20mms, but I know at least that German minengeschoss rounds should blow planes apart, and you can see it doing so with some regularity in the gun camera footage. I find your mention of 88mm flak funny, because to my knowledge British analysts did actually misidentify damage done by 30mm minengeschoss as being direct impacts from flak, but that’s mostly besides the point.
Notably, you don’t get very many solid hits on his aircraft for most of the video, and those hits land on the less structurally important halves of his wings. It’s only toward the end that you hit the front end of his aircraft, which is when you hit the engine/fuel, pilot, and the first point where I see a decent number of rounds hitting the wing spar areas. This correlates with the footage I’ve seen, where .50 cals tear wings off only when a very significant number land on the same spot in short order, or preceding a sharp turn.
As for damage models, it ultimately comes down to two things. The first is that we’re mainly discussing ww2, and Gaijin has unfortunately largely abandoned ww2 content in favour of modern vehicles. They have little interest in updating old models. The second is that aircraft, believe it or not, are mostly made of empty space, and while the control lines and a few other modules could probably stand to be a little more pronounced, that wouldn’t make them any more vulnerable to .50 cals than to 20mms.
I have thus far not found any direct footage of P-47s being shot by 20mms, though I’m still looking. Even preliminarily though, I can almost certainly say that they would not be surviving anywhere near 20 minengeschoss rounds, which are very noticeable by the large clouds they form on impact.
m23 incendiary had a 60% chance to light fuel tanks on fire with a single round. meaning that you had a coin flip and a bit more to light the enemy.
There’s a reason why at the end of the war, Germany went to 30mm. The 20mm mineshells weren’t cutting it when it came to explosive damage, especially for bombers, and with british testing on spitfire air frames, 20mm mineshell essentially just blew a hole in the skin.
This P-47D had a 500lb bomb explode directly underneath it while trying to land. The bomb couldn’t be dropped and couldn’t be forced off, so the pilot landed hoping the bomb wouldn’t drop. it did, and it exploded underneath him. The bomb split the plane in two, and the wings are still attached.
I just had a match where a few shots from Japanese .50s split me in two.
What I don’t get is why does Gaijin allow these machine guns like the Swedish 13mm and japanese 12.7 spew out so much damage while our guns are gimped in comparison? In fact, our guns should be very alike to japanese 12.7s since the Japanese 12.7 is based on our .50s
Those puffs are from U.S. Incendiary rounds. The amount of damage I laid in should do something other than “Lemme just tank these shots”
Airframe variability was massive during the war. It’s why some aircraft seemed to just get bodied by a few guns, while some could just eat shot after shot and still truck on.
Another example I made showing how Gaijin handholds other machineguns but not the U.S. https://youtu.be/kQiBG6PPFuA The match I spoke of where a Jap machine gun just splits me in two.
Literally within the first shots. My entire tail splits into two
There are gun camera videos of .50s going nowhere near their target.
I do not think this was a significant factor as the US spent the entire war trying to put 20mms in planes that could support them, and large production efforts had been undertaken by 1941 - these produced cannons that were UNUSABLE. The P-38 got away with it by having a re-cocking system in the nose.
Even the later AN/M3s and M24s had severe issues.
Both swedish and japanese guns have actual explosive shells, not incendiary ammo.
So you want .50s to hit harder than a 500lb bomb?
.50 cals are a point and click experience, I don’t see anyone struggling to get kills with them provided they’re actually hitting their target.
You ignored what I said after just to make a snarky comment. Airframe durability was VASTLY different throughout the theater’s and countries. My aircraft’s airframe somehow dies while being sneezed at while I struggle to even rip the flaps off another fighter with my guns.
Now how did their “High explosive rounds” actually work? Because the dutch called our incendiary ammunition ‘High explosive’. Because there was a large amount of filler, and that was the old incendiary ammunition.
They’re not. @_Zekken proved our point by showing that to achieve the same damage. You’d need to have a full 2-3 second burst on the enemy while someone with a 20mm or japanese machinegun can just click at you and instantly kill.
Yes. That reason was that they were shooting at bombers. There was no need to move beyond 20mm if shooting at fighters, because the German 20mm was more capable of killing those than any other gun of the war, to my knowledge.
I can’t yet speak on the chance for the M23 to set things on fire, it’s mostly a postwar round, so I’m having a bit more trouble than usual finding data on it, but that is still contingent on it hitting a fuel tank, which typically involves hitting the same places you should already be aiming for, i.e. the pilot and engine. To call back to your video, you didn’t actually hit the fuel until the same burst where you killed the pilot.
As for the 20mm mineshell “blowing a hole in the skin”, you’re right, but I don’t think you quite realise what that size was.
Attached below are the entry and exit wounds of 20mm minengeschoss. I have a photo lurking somewhere that shows the holes were about the size of the pilot’s face.
They’re not. @_Zekken proved our point by showing that to achieve the same damage. You’d need to have a full 2-3 second burst on the enemy while someone with a 20mm or japanese machinegun can just click at you and instantly kill.
…yeah? If you’ve been watching the guncam footage, which you apparently have, you’ll notice that almost all kills with the .50 cals involve at least three seconds of sustained hits (and several more than that of shooting), whereas high explosive cannon rounds tend to tear chunks of an enemy aircraft even if it’s not turning. .50 cals shouldn’t be achieving the same damage as HE 20mms.
If you want .50 cals to be better at killing things, ask for the maps to be larger and the games to be longer. That way, when you puncture radiators or damage engines, you don’t need to rely on repeated passes for the enemy to die, they just won’t be able to make it back. It would even help with the situation of American planes having heavier fuel loads, since everyone else would need to take additional fuel as well.
EDIT: That’s not to say checking over the M23 and other pure incendiary rounds isn’t worth it, just that it isn’t the main method of helping .50 cals, not that they need helping.
Everytime I’ve played an american plane with “just” .50cals I’ve had zero issues killing other fighters. I suggest you aim better.
Last time I used some was on a stock F-80A-5. I pointed, I clicked, I was rewarded with a kill. It’s just that easy.
The dutch did not design and produce them, did they? The japanese army called their 12.7mm machineguns “cannons”, seems like that’s working exactly as intended then.
Not my experience unless I just miss most of them. But as Wolfgang said, that’s also the case for gun camera footage. Namely, the quite popular video of an N1K2-J caught on gun camera - it took a burst, put out a fire, and kept flying. Do that in-game and it’ll likely just die to the fire due to lack of fire extinguishing equipment.
The “sustained” shots were also done in a square boxed convergence pattern meaning, meaning that a large portion of the .50s were missing as well sailing over the enemy aircraft. Thankfully, I like using universal, so I have incendiary rounds in my belt. You can look at my previous video with the P-51H and a part of every non tracer round you see hit would be an incendiary round, in fact. I’d argue that I hit that Bf-109 MORE than what you see in the gun cam video. In the footage you see literally 2 puffs of incendiary hits and the wingtip flies off.
Not only that. If that’s what’s realistic. Why the heck am I having to literally rake .50s over an enemy just to get a simple crit while with a Japanese .50 they click once and I explode? Or 1 20mm can somehow make me melt? Where’s the realism? Do you literally not see a problem with this?
Lemme show it even further to you. Here’s me raking a Yak-9T with .50s and doing basically jack all to him. Just for a crit. If this was literally any other gun, the aircraft would’ve exploded in a fiery ball of glory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBneIMtPoTk
His whole WING was lit up. Literally. This isn’t balance. If I have to hold 2-3 second bursts on people while everyone can click me out of the sky. the .50s are then at a DISADVANTAGE.
Note how I literally swiss-cheesed his entire wing and struck his fuel tank several times as well.
First, statements on the image, compare this with IRL images of hispano cannons damage. Mineshells had an issue of not having enough material to actually fragment anything. it was more like a thin copper spray everywhere. Hispanos had actual fragmentation and the otherside would look like a shotgun pattern. 20mm Mineshell wasn’t that impressive compared to 20mm hispano.
I used Spitfires as a baseline to show that 20mms shouldn’t be insta-oneshotting like they do now as they easily can split a spitfire in two. But the thing is, even the Spitfire is a pretty lanky airframe, you can scroll up and see the damage from a 30mm mineshell on a spitty as well It’s not pretty. But, this damage is not analogous to the P-47D. Go ask Robert S. Johnson who came back home after at least 20 20mm cannon rounds and hundreds of 7.92. We don’t know the full extent of the damage as he just gave up on counting. Seriously. Take out a Bf-109 F-4 or whatever and fire the cannon for 20 rounds to expend. That’s a long time. In-game You’re only gonna get that lead on target if you get an absolute free kill from a dude who stalls out right in front of your guns and at that point. Yet in game… Almost every gun melts it in a few hits.
That should be the main method as realistically for U.S. air… Pilots were using primarily incendiary rounds. Especially the during the pacific.
Would be nicer it wouldn’t fix the problem that almost everyone else’s cannons and their machine guns being massively better. But they won’t add large maps. Adding larger maps would be the exact opposite to what gaijin wants. Fast matches that end quickly that’s their bread and butter. They were more than happy to remove the 45 minute timer when people complained about bombers.
Players complaining about the top-tier slug fest where a billion people launch missiles at each other and it lasts for like… 6 minutes? Gaijin grinds their teeth because if they reduce team sizes to 8 v 8, guess what? People will be coordinated and space out more, causing players to actually search for one another and then the matches will be much longer.
You proved my point. Gaijin only listens to verbage, and not the actual performance of the round. Japanese 12.7s get an unrealistically strong HE stat for no reason.
He was still in the air. I hit him more after that too. The fact there are more sparks, than there is visible wing shows that .50 damage is legitimately garbage.
And what ammo was being shot at him? Do you know what the shooter’s belt composition was? Are you even sure those were 20mm hits to begin with, and not the earlier 15mm which was even used as a nose cannon on some 109 F-4s?
The US did a big study at the end of WW2 on the effectiveness of different calibers. The .50cal was wholly outclassed.
It’s about the same HE filler as Berezins, which are equally devastating. Those didn’t stick around as it was a very heavy machinegun and the ShVAK (and derivatives) ended up being lighter.
This is a replay with notably bad hit registration.
This was a live match, in a stock F-80A-5 with the Default belts. A single burst went straight into that Hornet. I won’t ask you to count the bullet holes, just know that I didn’t need to shoot again.
Also a single round is meaningless. Even a short burst can put some 50-100 rounds downrange in something like the F4U-4
Stop shooting the wings then?
Shoot targets at your convergence range and shoot them in the fuselage. Aim so that you hit the engine block, so that if your lead is insufficient you hit the pilot or the fuel tank. Most props have their fuel tanks near or just behind the pilot. Some have wing fuel tanks - these are good to shoot in the wings but that requires remembering what plane has what tank layout.
Shooting the wing can also be worth it even if it’s not a killshot. A lot of planes lose their ability to roll (and consequently: jink and dogfight effectively) with just a small amount of yellow/orange near the wingroot. This makes it much easier to line up a shot that actually hits the fuselage and deletes the enemy plane.
There are exceptions of course, some planes can take a severe beating before they lose combat effectiveness but most of those planes happen to be american and british.
What happens if you actually aim on the other hand:
I hope your not basing your entire logic on a single clip where a Bf 109 lost its wing tip from getting hit by very few .50cal hits.
It’s just a single clip.
That doesn’t mean that every time you hit a Bf 109 with 5 .50cals the wing tip should fly off.
Explosive damage in WT makes no sense.
The US never used explosive bullets because there’s no point to them.
A .50cal is too light to create effective fragments so filling them with explosives is a waste, since incendiary filler has the same blast performance as explosive while a much better chance to cause fires.
Any nation that fought in WW2 ended up replacing their explosive bullets with Incendiary or at least filled their explosive bullets also with incendiary mixtures.
But Gaijin doesn’t understand that Incendiary filler explodes in a hot fireball that also rips a planes skin apart from the hot expanding gases.
If M23 didn’t simply detonated itself when fired from a hot barrel, it would be absolute devastating to aircraft’s, structurally and also due to causing fires much more frequently.
6 .50cals firing API-T bring less incendiary into a target than a single 20mm firing just Incendiary shells.
Firing M1 Incendiary, it’s in favor to the .50cals but the damage caused by 20mm Incendiary would still be more severe.
With M23 on the other hand it’s no contest.
But you are basically limited to 1sec bursts with cooldown in between, which limits the effectiveness.
I used Bf-109 as an example as it has a single firing 20mm just to show how long it took to expend 20 rounds.
But during the event, he was already damaged, but was fired at by a Fw-190. and was already severely damaged before the interaction. U.S. pilots were required to circle and detail bullet holes in their aircraft after landing as well in their report. Which report are you talking about? I have the optimum caliber program report that even tested the .60 caliber prototype ammunition.
Or… I actually hit those shots and you don’t want to count them.
Goes back to the initial P-51H video Zekker put out. You put a concentrated long burst with anything, you’re going to rip a plane apart. You’re not showing anything new. The only difference here is that it’s nose mounted. Shoving 60 50 cals into someone’s engine is obviously going to rip their engine apart. The issue I have is that you can just click at them with a single 20mm and delete his plane or a few clicks from japanese 12.7mms and you blow his wing off. As like what @Irregular23 said. The incendiary ammunition is acting completely wrong anyway and needs to be completely reworked. It shouldn’t be having that little amount of damage
M23 should have a filler value but it doesn’t. It carries around 5.2 grams of filler. Roughly half of it’s filler is oxidizer that should help the round burn and “ignite” more being slightly explosive (mostly to throw the chunks around), and whilst entering the aircraft, the pieces would continue to burn.
Considering how it behaves in game? it does jack squat.
I’m not sure what you want here, or are trying to say? That because the result of the kill wasnt a wing rip, they suck? despite the fact every single one of those planes died to just as short of a burst as I would usually do with a 20mm armed aircraft?
why does the way the enemy died matter? they still died in short bursts. Im genuinely confused as to why its a problem that they didn’t lose a wing, if the rest of their aircraft was left a burning wreck?
As for how many rounds I used, yes. a one second burst with 6 guns will habitually use more ammo than a one second burst with two guns, which funnily enough, also is one strong point of US .50 cals.
Also the BI wasnt just a pilot snipe, that turned into a ball of flames as well so he was dead even if I didnt hit the pilot.
The discussion wasn’t about the aircraft performance. It was about the guns themselves as to whether they do enough damage. Even if I had more time on target, it would be a solid argument if I did have to spend more time dumping rounds into the enemy to kill them, but I didn’t. I was finishing them in the similar amount of time I would with a Cannon burst.
This is completely incorrect. The only kills in that compilation on unaware enemies were the 2nd one on the IL2, 3rd on the Tu-2, and the 4th one on the FW-190.
All the other kills were on fully aware enemies that were manoeuvring to fight or avoid me, and had been engaged with me before.
If you are wondering why many of them were on slow moving enemies, Its because I physically PUT them there. I showed the few seconds of the kill, not the dogfighting and manoeuvring it took to put them in a position where I had them dead to rights.
This was especially true for the La-9 and La-7, and the SU-9 and BI clips. In both of those clips I was fighting both of them at once. Especially the La-9 and 7, I was fighting 3 on 1 at that point.
Half of the whole thing is putting enemies into a position where they can’t escape and you have them in a shooting gallery.
heres a breakdown:
Spoiler
I-16: had turned to avoid me and then was pulling up to try and get shots on, but It was an I-16, no real threat.
IL-2: flying straight
Tu-2: Flying straight
FW-190: Trying to bomb, was unaware
La-9: Forced him into a Vertical turn fight, Energy trapped him and reversed him, left him with no airspeed and an easy kill
La-7: Same thing, doing the same thing with him, dodged two passes from him on me, energy trapped him and deleted him .
Ki-61: Dodged a head on from him, climbed, looped over while he looped under. This one definitely was due to the gap in aircraft performance to be fair.
Do-335: He was trying to run away from me, was trying to turn around to get guns on me or avoid me, failed.
BI: Had taken multiple passes on me, and me multiple on him. He had already been in combat, gone back to land, and come back again at this stage. He had been constantly forcing me to dodge him the whole game, and I got lucky to snipe him as he was running away after his latest pass;
Su-9: ending of a drawn out turn fight, he realised he had lost and tried to run for his SPAA to force me to bail off the chase. (was dodging the BI while fighting this guy btw, the clips are backwards)
I’m just seeing a lot of missing here my dude, bullets don’t do damage when they don’t hit the enemy.
I’m genuinely unsure how it does? I was firing bursts just as short as I do with cannon armed aircraft. The damage being dealt was just different to cannons, And the way I was USING the guns is different.
As for incendiary effects, well, I was using pure incendiary rounds, and in that video as I said, EVERY SINGLE AIRCRAFT I killed ended up in a giant fireball. I don’t know what you are on about when you say they don’t do anything? they were definitely doing everything here.
In fact, I think the problem IS that you are using them wrong. With a cannon armed aircraft, you want to hit them pinpoint because you don’t have lots of ammo, you want to conserve rounds. So you need to aim accurately.
With .50 cals, you can use them slightly different. What I do is pick a point slightly over leading the enemy, fire ahead of them, but hold that firing angle and let the enemy plane fly through a wall of lead. This means you end up peppering the entire length of their aircraft with bullets and completely decimating them. Having lots of High RoF guns like the US aircraft do is great for that. The best examples of this in my video were against the La-7, Ki-61, and Do-335.
It doesn’t matter if their wing is still attached if the rest of their aircraft is a burning hulk of scrap metal
No. You’re right. But I’m showing that the the exceptions you see here don’t happen at all in war thunder. I’ll tear an enemy to shreds but they can fight along all day just fine while they click once, and my entire aircraft explodes into pieces.
Please educate me on how a Japanese plane with 4 12.7s instantly bisects my plane, snapping me in two.
Versus my plane out right shredding another plane and he can still perform. My issue is this:
20mms can smack everyone out of the sky with ease. Doesn’t matter how tough IRL the airframe was. Click click. Dead.
The same thing with japanese .50s. “Click click dead”
When I fire at someone, I’m having to ensure I get a good burst. Especially when I’m in a fat P-47 with it’s terrible roll rate and have it be enough to kill. but then it turns out I have to slice through multiple times when some shmuck can click me once and melt me.
