A list of lucky hits and fire doing damage.*
You mean the explosion that was straight up from the round, and not fire randomly deciding to actually do something?
Except it isn’t the .50 cad doing damage, it is fire doing damage. Other guns don’t have to rely on passive effects.
Its not luck if its consistent, which it is. You are clutching at straws now
yeah, just like all those control surface and engine damage from the .50 cals that was straight from all those rounds.
2 planes. 2 planes at most died due to fire damage. And if you MUST insist that these planes ARE dying to fires and not the rounds themselves, then fires disintegrating aircraft in ~2 seconds max must mean those fires are doing a substantial amount of damage very quickly which makes your complaints about them seem strangely incoherent.
The point is not to show that you should ONLY use the cannon, but that you can succeed greatly even if you DECIDED to go only the cannon. A small burst on a B-17 watching him completely go completely undone just throws out my suspension of disbelief.
Because when the rounds get smaller and smaller. It becomes a matter of verbiage of ‘what’s considered high explosive’ Like I stated before. The Dutch with U.S. M1 incendiary considered it high explosive. and I don’t blame them if API does this . Now imagine M23 with over with 5.8 grams of IM-28 filler. The round equally should explode and throw hot fragments all over the aircraft and those fragments hit fuel tanks and especially those with thin and weak spars. The question is, and lets use Japanese ammunition as an example. How does 1 gram of PETN compare to almost 6 grams of incendiary filler? Because Incendiary ‘explodes’ just as well. I mean…
The ammunition should throw chunks. But according to gaijin. Just because Japan called their rounds ‘high explosive’ even though they technically have less explosive mass, two shots from a jap .50 is enough to completely blacken your wing.
Similarly. it should be honestly expected that airframe durability differed A LOT during the war. This isn’t today where you really do need to make a tough airframe to withstand supersonic speeds. You’re having planes with different design philosophies even from the same country. Compare the Fw-190 to the Bf-109. Or the P-47 to the P-51. The very way parts are built are completely different. The P-47 was built more like a purpose built tool, and it showed during the war. Same dealio with the A6M. Build to have as long range, and be as light as possible. So you wind up with A6Ms during the war going utterly obliterated later on as faster aircraft emerged and .50s tore into them.
Some countries stuffed as much as they can in as small and light of an airframe as possible
That’s if we go by M23 being entirely consistent in the belt. And you’re mixing IRL with war thunder physics. Currently in game. even 20mm can segment P-47s into 4 pieces.
If you look at swedish and japanese ammo belts, it’s roughly you’re throwing out all ‘HE’ rounds with one AP being there just to be tracer while in U.S. (late) belts and early belts, unless you straight play stealth, you’re having a lot of filler AP and API-T rounds using universal. with only two incendiary in the lineup. and with early belts, it’s even less with only ONE incendiary round.
Gameplay wise, I don’t see the problem with having two rounds maximum in a repeating belt of 5 being able to actually affect enemy aircraft structure while the rest act as filler or for fuel tanks.
Fires do extinguish. This isn’t 2014 anymore where .50 flamethrowers were guaranteed death and instantly melted your plane. I can’t even count how many times now I lit an enemy on fire only for them to still try and kill me and nearly succeed or the enemy was able to recover from the fire and fly back to base as I now have an entire enemy team flying back to me, and in general, twin engine vehicles are easier to catch alight. Big target with more things to hit. It’s not hard to catch any enemy on fire when they’re literally covered in fuel tanks and two massive engines.
I pointed before that .50s have redeeming qualities. But being reliant on “I hope I catch this guy on fire” while when everyone looks at me and they just go ‘I just have to hit this dude.’ is a different feeling. When I play any other country. That’s my general mindset.
Similarly, why is the argument “.50s can do fires!” even an argument? Every plane can start fires, and do so reliably. They’re not some hidden mechanic only done by .50s. Almost every single time I’ve gotten ganked by a 20mm I was lit on fire.
M23 is just a thin brass jacked filled entirely with incendiary filler.
There’s no real fragmentations and the velocity of the fragments wound be super low due to the lower brisance over real explosive.
Dude, that is certainly not the result of simply 2.2g of incendiary filler.
M1 incendiary is enclosed in a steel tube, that will focus the flash to the front of the bullet.
There are also images of Incendiary rounds being tested by US researchers and they don’t go off in a 1m wide fireball.
German 20mm FI-T carried 2.1g Thermite, Hispano HEFI 5.7g flash powder, 20mm Mineshells 3.7g aluminum.
All would create a much larger fireball.
Yet you don’t see huge fireballs appearing constantly in either US, British or German gun camera footage,
unless fuel was ignited.
US planes with 60-100% API or API-T and 6-8 guns just throw out the most rounds that could start a fire.
And since 20mm don’t have any advantage in setting fires and .50cal API is just as likely to start a fire as 20mm API, they simply have the best chance to start a fire.
The combination of ballistics and number of rounds always has made US .50cals the number one fire causing weapon in WT.
20mm will always always rip your wings or planes and only in a few instances is fire the actual cause for being destroyed.
90% of times your plane suffers so much damage that fires merely finish the job.
.50cals dealing inherently less structural damage benefit much more from setting fires and in a lot of instances fires are the main killing power of .50cals.
6 .50cals API-T over a single 20mm HEFI are not likely to cause a kill unless hitting the engine or the pilot.
And fuel tanks are an additional factor that can lead to the plane getting killed.
Factor in the better ballistic of .50cals over most 20mm cannons and were probably talking about 10-12 .50cals for a single 20mm hit, for a single 20mm cannon.
So the chance of causing a fuel fire is pretty high and let’s not pretend that fuel fires aren’t lethal least 50% of times, unless it’s Ju 288.
Countless times I suffered minimal damage from .50cals and my plane was destroyed from 2-4 .50cals lightly damaging my fuel tank from 800-1000m.
With four .50s in the nose, you could also succeed greatly without using the cannon at all as well, so the point is kinda moot here I feel
Okay so heres the thing here, I think this whole topic is in the wrong direction. The thing you are debating isn’t whether .50s should be equal to 20mms, because the answer is obviously no. But I think the real debate here is whether the US M2 Browning .50 cal is under performing compared to OTHER nations .50 cal MGs.
I will say, your part of the debate is much better and makes more sense than SpecialistMain’s mental merry-go-round.
I did give the Ki-44 a fly, checking its HEF round, we do actually have 3.06g of TNT equivalent - about half what the HEF-T shell on the 20mm Type 99 Mod 1 cannon the A6M2 at the same BR gets. And I admit, if you look at the two clips in the video below, it does snap wings like it did to the P-51D, but also it does do things like it did against that P-63, that was a lot of hits for a whole lot of not much. He did lose control, get stuck in a flat spin, and would have given me the kill had my teammate not gotten some hits in right after, but in this scenario, I’m willing to bet that the same number of M2 brownings would have ripped him to bits and set him on fire as well. I think the Brownings are slightly more consistent in that regard. (and have better ballistics than the Ho-103 to be honest)
I think a lot of this has to do with the Ki-44 being an extremely strong aircraft in terms of flight performance at its BR, more than the guns themselves
I already talked about this in my realShatter topic but HMG explosive bullets can literally deal no damage on impact, just based on RNG →
The rounds are simply bipolar. They can either deal insane damage or just hardly any to no damage, simply based on RNG fragmentation dispersion.
Are you consistent with bomb hits and pilot snipes?
There was a lot of single elevator damage, not much in terms of engine, though.
The number of total kills: 10
The number of kills that weren’t bomb destructions, a pilot snipe, or the enemy dying for no reason (the Su-9): 6
The remaining four kills:
That is 1/3 fire damage, 1/2 likely assisted by fire damage, and 1/6 direct hits to the wing spar.
Except fire damage is inconsistent nor is it as powerful as HE filler.
Do you have more information on the explosive used in the .50 cals? I’d like to look it up some so I can see if we can get an HE modifier/code added to the .50 cal rounds (at least internally).
From a microfilm from the USAAF, it seems like the gap between 15mm, 20mm, and 30mm destruction was pretty considerable (for German shells): 50 cal (high rate of fire) vs 20mm cannon (hitting power) | Page 3 | Aircraft of World War II - WW2Aircraft.net Forums
Bk-5 mentioned. Wohooooo!!!11elf!
oh no the smaller bullet is doing less damage what could possibly cause this!!!
how has this thread lasted a year
I’ve been today years old when I learnt that killing planes by getting them torched is not actually killing them.
This was one of the most awful revalations I’d have ever learnt…
Ki-61-I Hei needs a serious buff because I think at least 2 out of 3 kills I have with it were due to the enemy plane catching on fire and the pilot getting roasted rather than cutting a tail off or severing a wing.
I never realized I left so many of my targets alive!
yea them being on fire doesnt garantee they cant limp home. Ive been able to fly home on one wing after a burnout hundreds of times.
.50 incendiary is amazing but you need to keep on them until you see them fall apart
you know what does need buffs MG-151 they have 3 times the explosive filler of Shvak cannons but do less damage they have 18Grams of HA-41 and shvaks are Filled with 6 grams of Tetryl which is weaker
I dunno man. I trust the gubment book more than your intuition. Like I stated before. Airframes were exceptionally varied throughout the war, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just a showcase to how thin bf-109 airframes were compared to most U.S. airframes. I also consider it highly unlikely that it was M23 as well as that was used REALLY late into the war
Right, and having a weapon bank on aircraft having an easily accessible fuel tank to hit is really fun. I love shooting at a Bf-109 only ticking his wings even though I shoved easily 50 rounds almost in it at that point.
Basically. I even said in the OP to have it be like swede ammo or a little bit less. If everyone else can have stupid damage. Let U.S. .50s get stupid damage too. U.S. .50s are at one of their weakest points now compared to when they literally had near 100% fire rates and fires were death sentences until Gaijin tried to course correct. Due to the fixed ‘real shatter’ cannons, and to be fair anything that had ‘high explosive’ in it’s name, are now at their strongest. If you wanna go for realism, then hilariously enough, the ‘bugged’ realshatter was more realistic as they were no longer 1 shot guns that instantly obliterated people, but you needed to burst with. But considering Gaijin is balancing damage purely off of gameplay. It makes no sense to me why every country usually have a multitude of aircraft with guns that kill with Minimal effort while U.S. (The planes with some of the hardest play styles in the game) have to be very specific with how they use their guns and get either fuel fires or pilot snipes.
12.7mm HEF can blacken a wing in two shots. Now from other angles, it can be a bit iffy but it’s mostly consistent that a good chunk of your shots will do a lot of damage, and I believe that some rounds not doing anything is not ‘as gaijin intended’ but a weird quirk as I believe most of the damage is coming from fragments that strike the same surface, doing more damage. This explains why you’ll sometimes take shots that do minimal damage while others you out right obliterate the guy.
As KillaKiwi showed, some rounds can do jack all and I believe that’s due to the fact that the filler amount is small enough that the game runs into trouble calculating fragmentation damage. You can see this happen a bit on the swedish 13mms though not to such an exaggerated extent. But the absolute minimal damage you can get should not be taken as the norm.
This seems consistent with the damage on my other surfaces from this replay. I was tickled with two shots and it instantly blackened a section of my wing.
thats hitting fuel or something very ready to go kaboom.
Incendiarys blast is more like this video
don’t expect your .50 cal to do that when hitting nothing flammable
If that’s the case. Why don’t we get explosions like that?
Is it so hard to understand that this fireball is caused by fuel blowing up, and not by the miraculous power of 2.2g flash powder?
What are trying to argue here?
Pump a plane full of .50cal rounds and it’s going down. We know that.
So what are you trying to prove here? That everytime you hit a Bf 109s fuel tank with M1 Incendiary it should cause a catastrophic fuel explosion?
I’m not saying that this should be normal damage or this is “What happened” all the time.
But obviously we’re seeing destruction here that can’t be achieved in-game with how .50s are. I have NEVER in my life of playing war thunder seen a full on fuel explosion from a .50.
Because since day one of the game we still didn’t get proper HE blast (any explosion type) simulation yet they use very simplified solution - sphere.
