The 35mm has a explosive mass of Fat Man.
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
2 Likes
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!:
And neither does Ho-103 HEF-I:
…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.
3 Likes
Again, I’m also including the fight before as well, and his statement that over 20 rounds of 20mm hit it.
I genuinely have no idea what you are on about.
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.
The M2 browning is a better gun in general IMO.
1 Like
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…
A 500lb bomb exploding directly under the plane.
We don’t know what the extent of the damage was.
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.
2 Likes
So it was the Ki-44-II Hei with the 4x .50s.
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.
Thats a lot of rounds he wasted in killing you
is that from pilots not being on target? or it could be from convergence because IRL they ran very wide convergence patterns unlike those we have in game.
there is a reason that even as late as the early sabers US air force fighters could be armed with 0.50 cals (the navy and marine corps went to 20mm for increased effect on ground targets)
Guess this guy was lying too:
Just forget that Robert Johnson is considered a good resource on the P-47, and we have pictures of his damaged aircraft but alright.
He didn’t fire a long burst. You can hear him fire intermittently. Not continuously. And when it hit 12:13:00 He fired once and it instantly bisected my plane. He fired once, fired twice, realized he wasn’t hitting and held back until 12:13:00 where he fired clicked one more time and instantly bisected my plane
No, you see ther tracers going in every direction in a wide cone, centered on the target.
Because all their attempts at making reliable 20mm cannons largely failed. Even those which armed the Scorpion and Sabre Dog had reliability problems and did not last very long.
Anecdotal. If we want to go down that route, Col. Neel Kearby (which I believe at the time was the leading P-47 ace) was shot down by a mere Ki-43 with its two nose-mounted .50cals. Clearly these guns worked very well.
1 Like
yes, that is what convergence does
maybe its because they were happy with m3 0.50s until then
If they were happy with them, they would not have been trying for so long to replace them. They served well enough for their convenience in logistics and the reliability issues of their replacements to mean that replacing them wasn’t urgent, but there was a definite and consistent effort to replace .50 cals with 20mm guns. 8 .50 cals weigh more than 4 20mms, while delivering less firepower.
2 Likes
The fact that the majority of the kills were from relying on a fire to do passive damage (or just dumb luck in the case of bomb explosions and the pilot snipe) is bad, yes. If you remove any way to show how the 0.50 cals are bad then they might appear ok, but I’m not ignoring that the 0.50 cals are unique in being forced to rely on fire rather than doing actual damage with bullets.
Here is the argument I’m hearing:
When a .50 cal kills an enemy aircraft by setting it on fire, destroying it’s fuel/cooling, or killing its pilot, this is a bad kill, and inherently inferior to the damage done by cannons. The only scenario where .50 cals can be called equal to cannons is one where they have an equal ability to deal structural damage, including tearing off wings, control surfaces, etc. to the cannons that have HE filler. We want this capacity to do structural damage while still retaining the good accuracy, rate of fire, ballistics, and ammo pool provided by the .50 calibre guns. Anything less than this puts the entire American air tree at an inherent disadvantage.
Do I have the right understanding?
3 Likes
Yes, quite literally yes. 0.50 cals in real life were less effective than 20mm cannons, but the gap was not as massive as it is in game currently. With a comparable amount of mass of bullets being shot out, 0.50 cals should not be several times worse than cannons or even 12.7mms with HE shells.
0.50 cals should not have to rely on essentially RNG in order to get kills.
Except that currently the accuracy, rate of fire, ballistics, and ammo pool do not mean anything when 0.50 cals are much, much, much worse than 20mms in terms of damage. Gaijin could increase the damage dealt by 0.50 cals by 50%-75% and they’d still be just equal to cannons.