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.
The Ki-44-I has 2x .50s and 2x .30s. And the .50s are in the wings. The Japanese Ho-103 .50 cals also have access to HEF rounds.
[quote=“dovah4, post:493, topic:85850”]
Versus my plane out right shredding another plane and he can still perform.
[/quote] In the video you sent you didn’t shred that Bf109 though, you missed most of your rounds and only hit a couple of stray ones. Look again at my clips, and where my rounds are going versus where yours were.
You have to get a good burst in with Cannons too. Cannons don’t do damage when you miss either. And I can click once with 8x .50 cals in a P-47 and melt people too, I just aim properly.
so wait… Hold up… one of their rounds has around a gram of filler. Let’s go with the top end and I got hit 8 times or so Tell me 8 grams of filler. is equal to…162kg of filler?
Again, we don’t even know which 190 variant was firing at him, and the version of this story I heard is that the 190 only fired its 7.92s and presumably had run out of 20mm ammo.
It will likely be that one. There is a reason why there were countless attempts by the USAF and USN to replace .50cals even at the start of WW2, and the Korean War drove the final nail in the coffin.
Maybe you did. But from that angle, MG151/20 mineshells don’t even fuse!:
…but the Type 3 IAI, Berezin IAI and Akan m/39A HEF-T do:
Somewhat amusingly, none of the Type 99’s HE shells fuse, but the APHE shell does.
It was a pretty short burst.
At the range and speed I shot him? Ho-103s would have dropped out of the sky. 200m/s slower and with far more drag.
They are basically flamethrowers. You hit anything important and it is instantly on fire. Any time I take fire from .50s, even minimal hits whether from aircraft or tanks, it is almost always a fire unless it’s just wingtip/tail damage.
They also have comparable ballistics to the MK103. At 1km, .50s will each their target about half a second sooner than Ho-103s.
And jeez, if you are so hung up on the Ki-44s guns why dont you go play the thing and find out for yourself? Its right at the bottom of the tech tree so it’d take you like an hour to research even if you haven’t started the tech tree yet.
Having spaded both the Ki-44s (and the entire rest of the japanese air tree), the Ho-103 has definitely never felt like a gun to write home about. It was acceptable and thats about it.
https://youtu.be/kQiBG6PPFuA I am hung up over that. The only thing I had was a hit on my rear horizontal stabilizer and then the next shot. I was completely obliterated. I had no other damage on my plane.
The reason I’m focused on it… Is that we know how much energy it takes to blow the tail off…
Which are notoriously inaccurate. You might have heard the story of american soldiers in Vietnam who thought .30 Carbine was unable to penetrate the wool clothing of the north vietnamese soldiers because they never found the bodies.
Or for something specific to pilots, any of the extremely exaggerated kill claims which are usually 2x as many as what they actually shot down.
A nuke would blow the tail off too. You don’t know that it took a 500lb bomb to remove it, just that a 500lb bomb succeeded at doing it. Very different things.
And he fired a 2.5 second burst at you, going by the timestamps the first hit was at ~12.10.600 and your tail seperated right about at ~12.13.00. his burst was a second longer or so from his first misses.
