I have taken a B-17s wing off with a single 20mm a few times tbh.
To be honest, I don’t have much occasion to shoot at them, I just see a lot of people confuse visible rounds for all rounds.
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You’re right it’s not realistic. But the question is. How are you going to change it? Aircraft airframes during the war were insanely lopsided. A single Bf-109 going to engage a B-17 would be suicidal, and currently, bombers have no place in the game so you’ll find issues with them just gun shipping.
If you went with realistic damage, you’ll find people dreading trying to fight different aircraft because they’re just plain hard to shoot down mixed with their performance and so on.
Then with the current game structure you’ll run into issues at which point you’re asking gaijin to overhaul the game, which they won’t do. Because it’s been the same since 2013.
So the way they’re doing it is best in their eyes with the current per view that they don’t have to shake things up too much. Bro. They’re grinding their teeth when it comes to people’s demands of 8v8 matches for top-tier.
I don’t see how giving incendiary a slight high explosive effect would honestly change much to the game besides actually make it easier to use U.S. aircraft, most of which don’t even fit how gaijin designed the game.
must confess i do go into gound battles with the direct intention of just bullying CAS bombers by literally firing a single hispano shot and deleting a wing. Gotten better at it than I often like to admit.
Ive even one tapped nuke bombers on many occasions by laying in wait above the path to the battlefield in a mk24 spit as soon as I heard sirens. Scummy I know but its very effective
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Breda safat is once more forgotten and left behind :c
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If you went with realistic damage, you’ll find people dreading trying to fight different aircraft because they’re just plain hard to shoot down mixed with their performance and so on.
Not really. This has been discussed a lot in the past, but the primary thing causing planes to die faster in-game is mouse aiming, not the durability of damage models. Bombers really weren’t that survivable in real life, they took massive casualties when they sortied, and it was lucky when a solid strafe didn’t destroy one. That’s without the extra time on target and accuracy you get in-game.
Apply that to fighters, and you’re going to end up with things dying about as quickly as they do now. Storied of P-47s surviving 20 minutes of being shot stop applying when you have that same P-47 taking actual HE cannon fire in the middle of a high-G turn.
As I said earlier in the discussion, if you actually want .50 cals to do better, then making the maps larger and the matches longer is the way to do it. As well as probably making radiator damage kill an engine faster on most planes (because a lot of air cooled planes are genuinely resistant to cooling damage).
If you want to add an explosive effect to API rounds, then you should be ready for a buffed incendiary effect in HEI rounds (which I know, at least in the minengeschoss rounds, is lacking compared to real life; they removed some of the HE filler in-game but never added in the incendiary that should have replaced it).
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Wait they removed HE from the shell which was made legend by its HE?
To my knowledge, they were actually right to do so. They removed a few grams of HE from the MG 151 minengeschoss, because in real life those few extra grams were incendiary, not HE. They just never actually added the incendiary in. This was, if I remember right, caused by someone making a report that MG 151 minengeschoss was classed as HEI, not HE.
EDIT: There’s a chance this is outdated information, but I think it’s still accurate.
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I disagree with this somewhat. I used to think this in the past when I was very bad at gunnery in SB, but now that I’m mediocre I do find myself agreeing that some damage models are busted.
B17s do legitimately go down weirdly easily. On the flipside, B25s, Il-2/Il-4/Il-8 Ju-288s, B26s and Me264 seem to eat a lot of shells and just keep on flying. Especially the Ju-288 and B25.
Oh and PBMs. Those things seem to take a weird amount of punishment without a care in the world.
I’ve had plenty of games where I dove on a Il-4 in my C205 s1, got point blank and fired off a 2 second burst into its engine, did a lag roll and repeated some three times in a row until it finally caught on fire. Another time, counting frame-by-frame, I unloaded 6 rounds of mg151/20 into the right engine and it exploded into fire, raked the tail section with another 8 rounds and it kept on flying for a fair few minutes while burning.
Whereas I’ve intercepted a japanese B17 in my F4U-4B and lobbed a single burst (so 4x20mm) onto its wing and it went down promptly.
For fighters,
RB does make fighters tankier due to mouse aim. In SB, I’ve plenty of kills AND deaths where damage to a wing caused assymetric drag & lift which caused one wing to stall significantly earlier than the other wing and promptly enter a spin which due to the damage ruining stability might be irrecoverable. An orange wingroot or black wingtip - even without severing the wing - can become a death sentence.
Earlier today I flew out the C205 S1. It’s a plane that feels awfully stable in turns and I never depart flight with her when I’m not damaged. Well, I decided to try and shoot down a yer-2 and got all kinds of holes knocked into me. Result? When I tried fighting a Yak-9 I stalled out and spun into a tree because I didn’t realize my left wing was that badly damaged!
thats obscure to say the least. somebody probably whined about dying to that bullet in just the right way for the dev to accidentally not make it burn, id speculate it was a upset dev but that would require the devs to play the game
RB does make fighters tankier due to mouse aim. In SB, I’ve plenty of kills AND deaths where damage to a wing caused assymetric drag & lift which caused one wing to stall significantly earlier than the other wing and promptly enter a spin which due to the damage ruining stability might be irrecoverable. An orange wingroot or black wingtip - even without severing the wing - can become a death sentence.
I’ve had the same experience, but I think this can be attributed to the flight instructor making it significantly easier to fly with a damaged plane.
Some of the damage models are definitely messed up, I just think on average the mouse aim is a bigger factor. That said, when you see things like Yak-3s or premiums in general seemingly never wanting to take damage, you can’t really ignore that damage tends to be a bit lopsided.
I would partially agree but I think the answer is more nuanced on mouse aim as Adam the Engineerd had tested Mouse aim vs Sim cockpit with a stick and showed the two are more closely matched.
All these shots with a single 20mm would kill a P-47 in 1-2 shots in-game. when IRL we’ve seen how much damage they could take.
I think that it’s more of a factor of a plethora of unmodeled effects and the pilot factor that you simply cannot emulate.
Similarly, I find that the game gets flight damage wrong and how it removes lift makes no sense to what we’re currently seeing. At the same time. The flight instructor is suicidal when it comes to damaged aircraft. there’s times where I’m actually fighting the flight instructor to save a plane where when I swap to full real controls I will wind up with better chances.
Gonna add it tomorrow but it will make Italians player cry
P47s can take a pretty serious beating if your shots don’t hit the spars.
(that one replay where cockpit view broke legit turned out to be useful footage lol)
They were definitely more rugged in real life, as were a lot of radial engine aircraft, but probably not by as much as you’re thinking. Most of the irl reputation is in regards to flak, fragmentation, and rifle-calibre machineguns. Cannons would still be able to kill them consistently without too much more ammunition than against normal targets.
EDIT: And some of it was probably the engine being powerful enough to pull the plane ahead and ignore some of the aerodynamic damage.
You were barely striking the tail end surfaces, elevators, flaps with a good chunk of your MGs making it look like you were doing the majority of your work with 20mm.
You’ve said it’s enough for 1-2 shot to hit to kill P-47s.
Those MGs do very little unless they hit an engine. I’m quite certain they weren’t the cause of much of that damage.
It was me. Before Mineshells had 20g of PETN, which is mentioned a single time in a German source.
But that value doesn’t make much sense.
British examination’s of German shells showed that Mineshells were filled with 17g PETN.
But in late 1942 or sometime in 1943, Mineshell we’re filled with HA 41 instead, which is a 4:1 mix of phlegmatized RDX and aluminum dust.
The aluminum releases additional heat which makes the round have a better incendiary effect but more importantly increased the blast performance.
Because aluminum has higher density the weight of the filler increased from 17g PETN to 18.6g HA 41.
The 20g figure was either wrong or was due pouring the explosive instead of pressing, which increase the density.
But I’m not sure that PETN can easily be poured.
The Soviets at one point replaced their separate explosive and incendiary filler with just A-IX-2.
Which like HA 41 is a mix of RDX and aluminum.
Resulting in good blast and decent brisance and incendiary effect.
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My problem is that we have good documentation of cannon armed damage, from pilots reporting the damage they received to images of the aircraft and even military studies.
I trust Greg on this matter when he states that ‘he has hasn’t seen a reported loss of a P-47 from wing loss’ compared to planes like the P-51. I’m not saying it can’t happen. But I find it very unlikely.
The general metric that planes crashed was either due loss of controls, fires, or the pilot was killed. As the Optimum caliber program showed. What usually took a plane out was a specific shot that hit something extremely important, taking the aircraft out. As I’ve shown, the P-47 kept it’s wings even after directly taking a 500lb bomb directly under it. as well as reports showing the aircraft sustaining multiple 30mm cannon rounds.
If you struck directly the flap, you took it out. If you struck the wing you damage the wing and maybe the flap.
Gaijin in general designed control surfaces very easy to break, and the P-47 is a big aircraft with large control surfaces
Look at your video. Use the < > keys and count your cannon rounds compared to your MG rounds in the top left compared to your MGs. You’ll be surprised by how little you fired… You struck the left wing maybe once with a 20mm, struck the right wing’s flaps, you hit right behind the cockpit which it’s seat has an armored plate and then what killed him was you cannoning his elevator. The vast majority of the sparks you’re seeing was just your 7.92 pelting him. Which plenty of aircraft can tank.