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.
Do you know if they ever did fix it after they removed the excess HE?
I don’t think anything was changed other than the explosive type.
My issue is that damage to the wing is utterly minimal and for your rounds to do anything functional you have to hit within a very specific convergence.
Japanese, russian, and swedish machine guns take little effort to garner any kill because they score a boat load of damage onto the aircraft. If your idea is to change matchmaker to suit U.S. planes better then you’re going to have to pull Gaijin’s teeth on that. They really don’t want to make changes like that, especially to suit a single nation.
The issue is that unless you strike within a very specific convergence or you get lucky. Most of your shots are not hitting the engine, but instead swiping at the wings. This makes it difficult where some of your shots will get away doing jack all even though you sprayed the guy down. It’s annoying to fight La-5s only for my shots to barely do anything unless I direct nearly everything I have into a small fuel tank in hopes it alights or RNG decides to bless me.
I’m not event talking about API. But our normal incendiary round actually doing something. a plain incendiary round doesn’t even penetrate.
You can see it even spawns fragments but it’s hilariously enough being affected by the real shatter bug where the fragments spawn inside one another canceling eachother out.
My issue is that damage to the wing is utterly minimal and for your rounds to do anything functional you have to hit within a very specific convergence.
Damage to the wing should be minimal. No argument where you change that will go anywhere. I’d say the main arguments you could make, having seen everything so far, are that pure incendiary “I” rounds should penetrate more than they do, or that the other .50 cals which are overperforming should be brought down to the US .50 cal level. That won’t do anything for you against cannons, because with the way gamemodes are currently set up cannons are performing about as well as they should compared to .50 cals, with some exceptions.
Then 20mms should be nerfed as well. The damage they do is absolutely massive compared to what they should realistically be doing. Would you not agree?
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Ju-288 should go down easily being late war German, probably not the best construction.
But B-25 are solid aircraft afaik, and it seems like the B-17 is just too weak. The Ilyushins had a reputation for toughness but anything German or especially Japanese shouldn’t be very durable
Some of them do more damage than they should. Generally, though, I think you somewhat overestimate the punishment a plane can take, and how quickly a 20mm will get it to that point.
I mean F4F and F6F didn’t earn Grumman Iron Works nickname for nothing
Again, “heres all the ways that .50 cale were doing damage”
The Su-9 had lost control surfaces. He was dead anyway.
Would you like another video? Heres some more: and these were 2 kills in the french P-39Q-25 running Ground target belts (no Incidiary) at 4.3 I think it was, and the rest with the 3.7 chinese P-51C, which I was flying with a 6.0 GRB lineup using the M64. Both of these planes only have… FOUR .50 cals. (The P-51C has the same belts as the P-51H, which is what I was using)
I also made the clips a bit longer to give more context of the fights.
Su-6: just got ripped apart, no fire.
Spitfire: Ripped his wing off+engine fire (non extinguishable)
IL-10: ripped his tail off, no fire
Do-335: crit probably his engine, left him to die as the 190 was engaging me. (Put it in there just so you could see where the severe damage assist in the 190 clip came from)
FW-190D: Engine fire, non extinguishable.
F4U-4B: ripped his wing off, no fire.
The last two I forgot to save for some reason, so went into the replay and included the whole thing:
First pass, tagged the Yak9K and damaged his engine+flap which apparently counted as severe damage, but looped back around, and went for the P-51D since he wasnt crippled, short burst into him resulted in engine and wing fire, left him to burn out. Looped back on Yak, missed my pass, looped around again, followed him in and ripped his wing tip off to finish him, no fires.
And honestly, these kills havent even been cherry picked. These were back to back games, with the kills in chronological order. I didnt include 2 pilot snipes, and there was one or two I forgot to save because I was too focused on flying and fighting.
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The other part of this is angles, in real life high angle deflection shots deflection shots were some of the hardest to make. In war thunder they are one of the easiest to make, and give you the best possible profiles to hit.
Yeah. Even beyond joystick vs mouse aim, it’s extremely difficult to hit a high deflection shot when you’re looking through the cockpit, because for most of that time they’re hidden by your own aircraft, and you usually have to start shooting when you can’t actually see them.
I think I’ve only hit two or three proper high deflection shots in Sim battles; almost everything else is either catching someone by surprise or getting them too slow to manoeuvre (or one person loses track of the other and flies straight to reorient, allowing for an easy shot).
Su-6 was a pilot snipe. His tail was still there. Game I know said you took off his flap, but like before. The game will always favor saying you ripped off a flap even though you may have completely blew him to pieces with a 37mm. That’s just a game thing. After matches, you need to check your hits. That little button you click to see where the bullet goes. Because that was a definite pilot snipe.
But your F4U-4B clip is honestly a good crux to show the issues I have with your videos showing Ground RB matches is that it’s ultimately easier to get kills in these matches when you’re attacking people who are unaware or they’re at extremely low altitude. The enemy is focusing on ground targets or they’re focusing on another enemy close to the ground. So you have shown yourself having a massive advantage over targets time and time again. I’ve taken P-36’s in matches and stomped on Yak-3s simply because I had more energy and I came down on a dude who’s only 400 feet in the air. So he can’t really do anything besides just take it. Anyone on your tail is a massive threat and will be hard to shake off. Especially so when you’re skating the dirt
Repeat these in a match where everyone is at altitude and you’re fighting Yak-3s who are hell-bent on killing you while you have multiple people around you who also want you dead and they know where you’re at.
I’ve too much of a headache to comment on anything else, but I think Yak-3s should be removed from the discussion as a point of comparison or enemy, because they’re just too far beyond anything else to be comparable or useful to the discussion.
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I’ll keep bringing it up because it shows my point. Zekker is playing a gamemode that intrinsically forces everyone to the ground with no name tags. So you’re almost always going to have an easier time.
A concentrated burst with almost every gun in this game will kill anybody when you’re in an advantageous position at all times.
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