.50's deserve a buff

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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518

I dunno what Speclist is getting at. But to avoid all this talk about ‘muh realism’ and ‘Gubment said boolet deeid theiiss’ or ‘this plane flown by Joe Michael Bob survived by his scraped anus’ I wanna get to the gist. my general point is this:

20mms are insanely overpowered. They can obliterate vehicles that shouldn’t be obliterated the way that they are and Gaijin needs to fix the insane discrepancy in damage models and I think everyone agrees to some degree. (Fly the P-38 using only the cannon. It’s possible and the only thing you have to mess with is the velocity and that’s it.)

If they refuse to do that (because y’know. It takes effort). Buff .50s to be akin to Swedish 13.7mm guns or slightly below. Cannons take invariably less skill to use, glancing blows will either melt your enemy, if it doesn’t, it cripples them, and if that didn’t happen. You were plain unlucky which I find rare, but it does happen. There has barely been a time I have taken a hit where I go “That’s okay, I can return from this”. even in aircraft that’re supposed to be ‘tanky’.

You’ll need to put a considerably large burst (90% of your rounds hit target) on an enemy all on a focused area to actually make a hit that matters or… You’re lucky. This is difficult when one: You’re usually in an inferior plane. A Yak-3 will utterly gank me, A Ki-100 is nightmare fuel, and spitfires make me gag. While I’m in a P-47D or a P-51D. I can’t really do anything. I don’t turn good, I don’t climb good, I don’t even really roll good, my matches will either end up with me dead or I’m stuck doing like in the japanese aircraft replay. I’m running and running and running to get separation only to take really really risky headons at them and repeat the process while my guns basically do nothing and I pray I hit the engine while my enemy just has to hit me literally anywhere. For a good chunk of U.S. planes. You get very little if any chances. While with other aircraft. You can screw up and make it up.

If I decide to get ballsy, even with my better altitude performance, it’s a massive risk to take as one round will utterly end me while I need a good burst to hurt them or else I am now scrambling to get away. All this while fighting the clock as well.

Think about it. Like what Zekker said. “You need to fire within convergence and hit the fuselage”. Think about that! Your guns will be WAY WORSE, if you do not fire within that specific range in your convergence and if you go outside you will do PIECEMEAL damage. Even in wing mounted cannon armed aircraft, you’ll know that at least 1 cannon round might do something important. You can only do—for sake of argument—equivalent damage of a cannon within a SMALL window while most of the aircraft you fly are usually inferior in most ways compared to the enemy you’re fighting.

Like with any aircraft, performance can make subpar weapons ‘work better’ because you can position yourself where you’re more likely to get hits compared to your opponent. A-36 (Though this is partially due to nose mounted .50s allowing that square pattern–this makes me believe custom convergences is required in this game but I digress) You can go almost 600kmh flat while having six 50s in a favorable config.

P-51H. Literally one of the best props in the game because you basically have a crap load of options for yourself. You can make those guns work, because their performance is so great. I may take 3-4 passes. But I know I’m in control and have great performance and can position myself as I please. Like boxing. Weak arms, but great legs.

The same can be true somewhat vice versa. F6F-5N. Good armament, but the performance sucks BALLLSSS. I feel like I have nuke blasters on each side but the plane has the performance of a covered wagon. Weak legs but strong arms.

I don’t think it’s fair to have an aircraft that you have to play the complete opposite way Gaijin built the game while having guns that are atrociously finicky and you need to be PINPOINT PRECISE to succeed in when you fly aircraft that punishes you greatly for even the slightest misdemeanor in performance where your foes beat you in most ways while also fighting the clock. While on the opposite side of the fence. You can fly quick climbing, relatively fast, aircraft with great gun performance where even at altitude you’re still seen as a threat where you can be confident that you’re going to get several kills. (cough cough yak-3) That’s not to say there’s nothing REDEEMABLE about .50s as they have a few distinct advantages but the advantages they have do not seem much better than getting good quick kills with a cannon.

This is my whole Shtick.

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519

I don’t agree with you, but I can get where you’re coming from with this. I’m soon to bed, but I’ll try to answer a couple things here so you’re not left with nothing.

20mms are insanely overpowered.

It is better to say that .50 cals are a bit below average in damage. If you know how to use them, and if you set situations up right, they still work well, and there’s things you can do with them that can’t be done with other guns, but the damage isn’t going to be as good as most 20mms, and that’s just how it is to compare an HMG with a cannon. Ultimately, 20mms are generally the standard, with .50 cals a step below that, and 30mms a step above.

This is difficult when one: You’re usually in an inferior plane. A Yak-3 will utterly gank me, A Ki-100 is nightmare fuel, and spitfires make me gag. While I’m in a P-47D or a P-51D. I can’t really do anything. I don’t turn good, I don’t climb good, I don’t even really roll good…

“You need to fire within convergence and hit the fuselage”. Think about that ! Your guns will be WAY WORSE, if you do not fire within that specific range in your convergence and if you go outside you will do PIECEMEAL damage…

Until about a year and a half or so, maybe two years, I was an Fw 190 main. At that point in time, it rolled quite a bit better than US planes, but climbed about the same, turned worse, and had about the same speed; I say this because this makes them relatively comparable for the purposes of this conversation.

Yaks, Spitfires, Japanese planes, and all the other UFOs are always annoying and cancer to deal with. You can deal with them, but one of the perils of shorter games is that planes like the Fw 190 or P-51 that fight with speed are disadvantaged, because with a longer game you’d be able to win almost 100% of the time, but with a short timer you’re forced to take risks you shouldn’t.

That said, having flown the Fw 190 quite a bit, and more recently having been flying P-51s over the last month, it’s definitely doable, just incredibly annoying. I won’t get into the specifics of it now, because it would take too long for my exhaustion to tolerate.

The armament I can discuss more briefly though. In real life, 20mm minengeschoss was objectively, on the balance, the best A2A cannon in ww2, because in real life pilots were usually shooting within 100 meters, which means the poor ballistics didn’t matter. In-game, you tend to shoot around 600-700 meters, or you do a lot of deflection shooting, and in both cases the German rounds are too low velocity and too high drag to be convenient. In addition to this, other cannons do comparable damage while being much easier to handle, resulting in MG 151s being below average in the game.

This does, however, make them fairly balanced compared to .50 cals. While the MG 151s tend to need to be fired within 500 meters or at stalled targets to hit in the first place, .50 cals tend to need to be fired within 500 meters or at stalled targets to do consistently good damage. .50 cals are easier to use, since you can hit longer shots, which gives you an extra option, but if you want to be certain of a kill it has to happen sooner. Having played the P-51s, especially the C-10 (which only has four, not six guns), this is entirely doable, because against a slow target, or one within 500m, it is fairly easy to line your shots up on the engine and canopy, which will kill or cripple the enemy.

To end this, and I may well extrapolate further on BnZ stuff tomorrow, since that’s my bread and butter, I really like both the Fw 190 and P-51. I haven’t played the Antons since the overheating nerf, but before that they were both awesome planes. The case you describe where you have to fly with great precision and not make any mistakes is the reality of a high speed, slow turn plane in this game, and having good guns doesn’t fix that.

The dynamic of it is that, while you can’t afford to make any mistakes, if you do play it perfectly you will not lose. A turnfighter has a much easier game, but even if he does everything right he might still lose. A speed-fighter can’t make any mistakes, but if he does it right, he’ll win 100% of the time (excepting carry situations).

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520

There. I got all I wanted from this. That’s it. I don’t care about anything else. In a million years I’ll be happy again when Gaijin adds custom convergences (I have no clue why that was accepted) Just so I can also get a flat ‘pan’ of gun fire.

521

I highly disagree with that, 20mms are fine. The damage they do over a single 12.7mm is consistent with the size in round. Plus its only the HEF shells that do the damage, 20mm AP shells often fly straight through and do nothing.

a P-38 with only its 20mm is gimping yourself, you are getting rid of a whole lot of volume of fire that you want have in order to delete people quickly in single passes. the RoF on the cannon isn’t high enough to make up that volume, and you can miss simply by having the enemy fly between your rounds. It is an issue on many especially single cannon armed aircraft, since cannons normally have lower RoFs which make having MGs as backup beneficial.

Swedish 13.2s have an HEF shell in their belts. Find a source where the USA used HEF in their belts during WW2 and maybe they’ll add them. But I dont think they will as the M2 brownings are fine in their current state, and adding HEF to a group of planes that already put out more 1 second burst mass than most 2x 20mm + 2x 7.7mm aircraft is gonna make them OP as hell. a P-47 is firing 6000 rounds a minute, you think the Ki-44s HEF rounds are broken, oh boy wait until you see that lmfao

I completely disagree here, Cannons require good trigger discipline and accurate aim. Theres a reason the best advice for learning to fly in RB is to go fly an American .50 cal armed plane, they come with piles of ammo that you can spray as you please and learn how to aim. You can’t just spray cannons as you’ll run dry in a few seconds of fire.

As for getting back to base, a Cannon is going to rip a wing off, but .50 cals are going to pepper them with lead. I’ve seen more players get back to base and land missing a wing than I have players that have been crippled by a burst of .50 cal rounds.

The Yak 3 is busted yes, But the ki-100? really? That is one of the most average of average planes in the game at its BR lol. of all the planes in that BR bracket, the Ki-100 is not one I’d point at to make a point.

Spitfires are strong yes, but its not because of the cannons that they are strong, they’d be just as good with a set of .50 cals as well. Meanwhile, as I said in the other thread, a high up P-47 is a stupid scary opponent to fight. I definitely wouldn’t call them inferior to most other aircraft at the BR (with the Yak 3s being a blaring exception)

Based on the few videos I’ve seen of your gameplay, I genuinely think you just need to learn how to aim better. Or put yourself in better positions so you get an easier time aiming.

I didn’t say that, someone else did. They aren’t wrong, but you don’t NEED to be right within your convergence, close to it helps, as it does with every gun, but isn’t absolutely necessary, a bit of spread can even help. You just need to use the guns differently to how you use a cannon. Its not even hard to do. Fire slightly ahead of them and make them fly through your bullets. If you are flying most US planes, you have 6 guns with a combined RoF of 4500rpm. That’s a LOT of lead in the sky. You also have lots of ammo, so make use of those major advantages! Make them fly through it all. You aren’t trying to hit one specific spot on their aircraft, you are making it so you hit EVERYWHERE. Its flat out easier to do than firing cannons. You use more ammo but WHO CARES? you have 2000 more rounds where that came from.

the P-51H may be an extreme example, but you can do this with Most American aircraft.

Look, here is me doing the same thing I was doing with the P-51H, but in a P-51C:

This is a positioning and tactical issue on your part more than the fault of the guns IMO.

The F6Fs have had borked flight models since day 1, Its been reported and reported and reported ever since OBT all the way back in 2012, but they have never fixed it. No one knows why.

You don’t need to be pinpoint precise, thats the whole thing. You have so many guns and so much ammo that you can afford to miss and still succeed. If anything thats one major disadvantage to the Yak3, its got barely any ammo. you have to be VERY conservative with your trigger time in that plane if you want to make the ammo last the distance, which means more time spent lining up a perfect shot, whereas in something American I can just go dakka dakka dakka, make them jink to dodge and bleed their airspeed, and set them up for an easy kill.

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522

The issue is that ~13mm explosive bullets are overperforming just as any other explosive round.

If US fighters had a strictly explosive .50cal bullet, they would suddenly have the strongest armament out of any fighter.

No fighter has more than 4 HMGs that also fire explosive bullets and the J-22 which have high velocity HMGs with explosive bullets are complete trash in terms of flight performance, just because how effective the guns are.

A buffalo would go from 2.0 straight to 3.7 because how much the guns would shred other planes and it would be the same with any US fighter.

6 .50cals with explosive rounds would shred planes harder than 4 MK 108s, against any target because they also can hit bombers from so much greater distance than MK 108s.

I mean a P-47 could survive a 30mm Mineshell to the wing, even when it was unable to fight any more.
But 3-4 explosive .50cals will rip a P-47s wing in War Thunder.

It’s simply insane how effective smaller explosive rounds have become.
To the point where 20mm cannons would basically lose in terms of weight and number of rounds carried to 12.7mm HMGs, yet having equal killing power.

523

Basically that having to rely on fire damage in order to get kills is not balanced and makes most fights with 0.50 cals boil down to RNG as to whether the fire will spread fast enough, damage enough, or damage the correct components enough. Meanwhile cannons can just hit anywhere and win instantly without praying to the fire gods (only slightly sarcastic).

524

Rewatch the video, at least two of the kills were from bomb explosions.

525

Not only have I watched the video multiple times, I played the damn games.

The only bomb explosion was the 2nd clip with the IL-2, Unless you are counting the funny one at the end with the FW-190, which I thought was pretty clear wasnt part of the compilation and I just added it because it was a funny thing that happened. I didnt even get the kill, it counted him as a suicide.

526

I gave you 10 clips in a video, only one of which relied on a fire for them to die, and not only that, Ive been playing more today, though this time Ive been playing the chinese prem P-51C in 6.0 GRB while playing the M64 to grind that out. (Its my highest BR plane for china) And I did not have to rely on fires for a single kill in that aircraft either, with only 4x .50 cals, still at 6.0.
I saved the recordings of some of the kills, but dont know if I can be bothered editing them into another compilation for you just for you to say “noo you only killed them by destroying their engine and all their flight surfaces, and setting them on fire, not by ripping a wing off so it doesnt count reeee”

And thats before we get to the simple fact that fires arent RNG, they’re damage over time and the only real fires you are going to actually put out are the occasional wing fires if they burn through whatever fuel is in the wing tank before it breaks the wing.

Fuselage fires? Almost impossible to put out unless it burns through all your fuel. (Which only happens when you are already on very low fuel) And if it does you now have like 10 seconds of fuel left and are dead anyway, so its like who cares?

Splitting hairs about exactly what damage causes the plane to die is idiotic when it dies either way and barely even requires you to fire any longer of a burst than it does with 20mm cannons

527

I was talking about the Tu-2S, where the non-fuel/fire explosion visual effect (the same one seen in the IL-2M explosion) shows up after you take nose, front cockpit, and some right wing damage all of a sudden.

I didn’t count the one at the end since it wasn’t meant to be a part of the main compilation.

It’s not idiotic, because you need to separate what is caused by passive fire damage from active bullet damage. Pretty much all guns in the game have either incendiary or just can cause fires with HE shells hitting flammable modules, but non-0.50 cals are able to do damage outside of fire or the lucky pilot snipe.

Additionally, the planes don’t die either way because you need to get lucky with what the fire damages. There isn’t any visual identifier for 0.50 cals on whether something has truly severely damaged the vehicle - wings aren’t flying off except for the most optimistic of scenarios, and due to the fire visual effects you can’t see if all of their ailerons have been burnt or broken off (even seeing the elevators is difficult a lot of the time).

The issue with the first paragraph is that where fire spreads is essentially RNG, or rather random or inconsistent if they aren’t based directly off of random number generators (I don’t know if they actually use RNG in the technical sense). A fire on a wing is most likely just going to go away in a second or so due to them not coming in contact with anything flammable, or it will burn whatever module or wing skin segment it is on but then go out without snapping anything.

The second paragraph is just another disadvantage of 0.50 cals having to rely on fire damage, since in most scenarios the enemy will have ~15-20 seconds of flight left where they can turn in on you and fire. When a wing gets ripped off with a cannon, the enemy cannot do that. But this all goes under the assumption that the fire actually reaches and is able to burn through all the fuel, which as you point out takes a long time if they aren’t already low on fuel.

528

The Tu-2 wasnt a bomb explosion, it was him desintegrating. The damage I took was from his rear gunners.

It is Idiotic, fire is part of the damage they do, and its painfully obvious that they do cause damage outside of fires. The fire is just icing on the cake. Again, an entire video of kills, only one of which died due to fire damage specifically. Even if you try and say the fire is what killed them, it only hurts your own argument because if the fires ARE doing the damage (which they aren’t) they must be doing a heck of a lot very quickly.

As for visual indicators, funnily enough I dont need to see a wing falling off when firing .50 cals at an enemy to know they are dead, normally the giant fireball that used to be an aircraft falling out of the sky is enough of an indicator dor me.

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529

Yeah, 2x the Explosive filler tends to do that, however the 30mm grenade launchers were mostly used for anti-bomber duty. Obviously in game isn’t isn’t the case, but yknow.

Some piss off .50 cal isn’t going to rip the B-29/TU-4’s wing off, it might do minimal damage, and at a most, if you go head on you might get a few good rounds into the cockpit and kill the nose crew.

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530

Not when most of the shots are missing and going away from the target. All those tracers were diverging from, not converging on the target.

Which is why the M1, M2, M3, M24, Mk12, and finally M39 20mm cannons were all made, with only the M39 sticking around for a significant time?

The M1 20mm wasn’t even used at all despite an entire production line being made just for it. These guns were entirely UNUSABLE due to how unreliable they were.

They’re supposed to be worse than cannons and this is accurate. Before deciding to start production of the M1 20mm cannon (HS.404 copy), the US found that a single one of these would have equivalent firepower to 3x M2 .50cals while being under half the weight.

There’s a reason that literally everyone switched to 20mm guns the moment they had a dependable design and it isn’t because .50cals were “just as good”.

Yes as we can see this is apparently “literally no damage”.

shot 2025.05.02 22.23.54
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Just ignore B-239s which combine those exact same .50cals you’re using (and just 4 of them!) with a maneuverable airframe and are absolutely decimating low tier since their introduction. Point and click adventure.

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531

The IL-2M:
image

The Tu-2S:
image
image

The damage you took was from a bomb, going off of the full circle damage indicator and the simultaneous nature of the damage to your nose, cockpit, and right wing. I’m not talking about how you already took damage on the nose by the gunner (I can see that you did, and the bullet impacting your plane can also be seen), but the damage you took that had the full circle was not from a gunner.

It depends on what you mean by “a heck of a lot” and “very quickly”.

  • The first destruction was due to a fuel explosion, which is likely helped by the incendiary rounds but is still possible without them.
  • The second and third were bomb explosions
  • The fourth was from at the very least destroying on of their elevators when they were pointed at the ground at a steep angle, but likely also the fire snapping the control cable to the remaining elevator (due to them not pulling up at all, basically)
  • The fifth one (going off of the second replay you gave) happened due to three 0.50 cal rounds hitting the left wing spar at a near perpendicular angle, which was very lucky. The fire on the fuselage and right wing wasn’t necessarily fatal yet
  • The sixth one was damage to the fuel tank/fuel explosion
  • The seventh one was damage from fire breaking at least the left aileron and flap, likely going more damage as well (the airframe as a whole was intact, though).
  • The eighth one was due to fire breaking the tail control surfaces or just snapping off the tail
  • The ninth one was a pilot snipe
  • The tenth one was likely just pilot error, the guy still had elevators and ailerons but just rammed into the hill

Most of the kills that weren’t just bomb explosions (or the pilot snipe or pilot error) relied on fire to break control surfaces/snap the airframe after a while.

Except a lot of the time (most of the time, really), a plane can be on fire and still be fully capable of controlling their aircraft. Them falling out of the sky without any control is the visual indicator in the scenario that you’re describing, and determining if they actually aren’t in control takes more time than seeing a shorn off wing.

I think you’re talking about how the US found that 20mms put out more damage than 0.50 cals when both guns put out the same mass of bullets, which I know, but that isn’t what’s happening currently (and I was implicitly saying how 0.50 cals would be just equal in terms of competitiveness).

A fire to a single engine? Is that supposed to counter my argument? If you showed me the wing getting shorn off, the tail getting obliterated, or something akin to that, then I’d say it wasn’t “literally no damage.”

532

I didn’t need to shoot again, but it was at that moment that I remembered I absolutely DESPISE Hornets and shot him again.

In a single pass with DEFAULT belts: one engine completely destroyed, a fire that is not extinguishable, a radiator completely destroyed and another one leaking badly, extensive airframe damage. He wasn’t returning to base nor staying in the fight.
image

The second burst from closer up just detached the wing that was already on fire. Entirely unnecessary.

533

One engine destroyed, one radiator destroyed (not that it really matters since the engine is destroyed), and nothing else broken? He could’ve 100% made it back to base. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything in the fight other than try for one or two headons, but that’s still more than what would happen if a wing or tail was ripped off.

534

Engine fires are not extinguishable, and the Hornet is still a wood plane. He’s not making it back.

Half the belt is straight AP. No incendiary whatsoever.

535

Not sure what you’re trying to say. The B-239 is a Buffalo but with 4 Belgium Browning guns which have a RoF of 1100 compared to the US AN/M2s 750.
Which is almost like 6 AN/M2s.

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536

And yet despite using the same ammo they’ll delete anything in the blink of an eye.

538

Well, they can easily knock out engines.

Damage against engines is somewhat exaggerated in WT.

A Stuka can melt your engine in a seconds with its MG 81Z, even though British tests showed that .303 MGs have no immediate effect on a Bf 109 engine firing from 200yd.

It takes 3-4 .50cal to kill an engine in WT and at low tier planes are slow meaning more time on target.

4-6 .50cals is practically peak armament at that BR other than a ShVAK with 120 rounds.

French Hispanos are of course also very effective but have merely 60 rounds while MG FF/M and Type 99-1s suffer from poor range.

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