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.
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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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.
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).
Rewatch the video, at least two of the kills were from bomb explosions.
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.
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
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.
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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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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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”.
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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The IL-2M:
The Tu-2S:
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.”
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.
The second burst from closer up just detached the wing that was already on fire. Entirely unnecessary.
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.
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.
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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And yet despite using the same ammo they’ll delete anything in the blink of an eye.
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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you clearly dont understand how convergence works, because if the target is past the convergence distance then the shots are diverging
yes many of these were made because the navy and USMC wanted 20mms for effect on ground targets like I said earlier
This entire list is literally “.50 cals doing damage”
It is again splitting hairs as to what causes the damage.
You are literally saying “it wasn’t the bullet doing the damage, it was all these other things caused by the bullet hitting the plane that did the damage”
I could make the exact same argument you are about 20mms by saying “it wasnt the round that did the damage, it was the explosion the round caused that did the damage”.
Your argument would make more sense if it wasnt entirely based on pretending that all of the ways that .50 cals do their damage didnt exist.
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