Maybe if you are trying to get snapshots yea , cuzz a solid spray on target will likely down any fighter, I just showed you above.
And Japanese .50cals have a decent amount of HE filler unlike US .50cals. So there’s many differences in how they behave. Also US .50cals are not affected by realshatter since they don’t use it… so there’s no fragmentation bug.
I mean, you get a couple shots on target and your wing is painted Yellow / Orange /Black depending of the accuracy, how does that not do anything in the dogfight?
I’m not really sure how saying this is disproving anything. Any round can do pilot snipes, any round can kill the engine. The issue is that .50 cals - outside of those lucky cases - have to really on a mechanic that takes extra time, is inconsistent in damage, and inconsistent in even doing any damage, while also not being able to do basically anything to structural components despite how blatantly illogical that is.
Because at best half of the kills he showed weren’t pilot snipes, engine hits, bomb explosions, or fuel explosions - with the majority of the remaining half relying on an inconsistent mechanic that is just straight up worse in every way than how HE shells are modeled.
I-185 (M-71) - Multiple direct hits to the wing spars at a perpendicular angle. I’m glad in the literal most optimal circumstance you can get .50 cals will do structural damage sometimes, even if getting the outcome in the optimal circumstance is inconsistent.
Bf 109 G-6: I’m extremely surprised the tail came off, extremely. If the outcome was anywhere near mildly consistent that’d be great.
In other words, this is much less likely to happen than the instant kill condition for a cannon/HE 12.7mm, even when factoring in the increase fire rate of .50 cals. This also means .50 cals cannot do structural damage except for extraordinary circumstances.
But thats not correct, American planes are mostly pretty fairly BRd. You are fighting aircraft with usually pretty similar flight performance.
I played an air RB game in the P-51D-5 last night, with a friend. It was a 4.3 game, I got 7 kills, my friend in his P-51D-20 got 3. (I didnt record it, would have to give you the replay) I admit I wasnt expecting to get that many, but I did not once during that game feel in a disadvantage airframe wise nor firepower wise. For example I went head to head with two different Bf-109 G-2s. The first had altitude on me, he dived, I dodged, and forced him to burn his energy which let me kill him. the 2nd was a climb battle. I was able to out climb him despite starting from lower down, and when we merged due to the more well rounded performance you get in the P-51, I won the turn fight.
I even took a load of cannon rounds from him, which contrary to popular belief, did not instantly end me. They oranged the rear half of my fuselage and broke an elevator off. I was still able to out turn him with this damage, and as he tried to run away to reset I sprayed him with MG fire starting at ~800m away, and he got to about 1.2km before I got an engine fire on him and let him burn out. (More examples of botu the advantages of .50 cals over cannons, and fires being beneficial and not any worse than wing snaps) cannons would not have been able to do that.
Ive already both explained and shown this multiple times, you can afford to be LESS accurate with .50 cals. Cannons require MORE precise aim.
Im up to I think nearly 20 different kills now Ive shown in this thread. Look at where I am aiming. Im not aiming for any specific spot, Im aiming to hit the plane. Because when you have lots of high RoF guns, you have A LOT of lead in the air, and some of it is going to connect.
Again, aim ahead, let them fly through the rounds. You aren’t trying to hit specifically the engine, you are trying to hit the plane. And you WILL hit him. You’ll hit along the whole length of his aircraft.
Im not sure why I have to explain to you a third time now why this isnt true.
With cannons I make sure I am lined up and use as few rounds as possible, heck even with other nations .50 cals (such as the Ki-44) I have to do that due to still having lower ammo counts. I dont have to do that with American .50 cals. Just fill the sky with lead and they die. Its that simple.
You cannot expect .50cals that have 0 explosive filler to chainsaw wings like that man.
I wouldn’t have issues with Gaijin getting incendiary rounds to work properly ( I believe there’s a report on it btw) but you cannot have the same punch as a 12.7mm filled with HE or 20mm round does. It makes no sense.
Speaking again as a former Fw 190 main, changing the guns will not make this aspect of US planes easier. That’s the nature of it. If you do what I described, then even them following you to the ends of the earth gives you a decent chance at worst, and a definite chance at best of killing them without dying in the process. If you’re fighting enemies at a higher BR, then that’s just the nature of an uptier, .50 cals vs cannons still won’t change that.
My favourite planes are all Fw 190 variants, the He 162, recently P-51s, etc. I find consistent success in these planes that are high-speed, low-turn, and if anything I’ve been having an easier time with the P-51, because it has better performance BR for BR, and the guns are significantly easier to use. The only times I have trouble are in uptiers, against Yak-3s, or when my entire team dies, and all of those things will apply to all other aircraft.
A .50 cal should not be doing essentially no damage when not in the perfect circumstance when hitting a wing spar directly, that just doesn’t make sense. Regardless, setting a fire is still inherently worse than HE in game because at best you’re waiting for a fire to maybe do something. I’m not really sure how you’re disproving me here.
You can be less accurate for hits, but you have to be more accurate to actually do damage.
It’s no P-38G, but it’ll happily climb quite high.
They are some of, if not THE best climbers at their BRs.
“Good” isn’t good enough to compete with P-38s and XP-50s. Other trees have plenty of aircraft with bad climb rates, e.g. Ki-61s and Fw190s.
The Italian D-30 is a very good plane. China gets it too, with the only fast climbing backup being the P-38L.
They are not. I haven’t played the P-38G much as it’s too easy for my likes and spading it was exceptionally quick. P-38J only brings a challenge thanks to the horrible teams - so far a 36% winrate despite having a very positive k/d and k/b.
They are also competitive, and bring a change in pace to the USA tree with decent maneuverability.
The P-38 is closer in performance and use to a single engine fighter, unlike the overweight Brigand and other heavy fighters.
Wow, seems like XP-50 players really hate it when their plane gets nerfed and goes from the best 4.0 to the best 4.0.
Here’s the thing, .50 incendiary bullets were explosive too.
When bullets get small enough, it’s just you packing explosives and slapping it against a wall to detonate.
This is what it looked like on the inside of a plane’s wing when you smacked it with incendiary.
To my knowledge, this is the M1 incendiary round.
Now, the game isn’t balanced off realism when it comes to damage. That was a Gaijin admitted thing.
The U.S. doesn’t have any functional belt that would take advantage of the incendiary round, while at the same time, the filler is balanced so astronomically bad it actually suffers the real-shatter bug and gaijin doesn’t consider the fact that the round physically exploding against an object even though that’s the semi mechanism of detonation russian and jap 12.7s and swedish 13mms work.
0.6 grams of PETN can magically cause fragments to strike other parts of the aircraft with 5.8 grams of incendiary filler doing basically nothing.
As above.
Ignoring any talks about ‘realism’
To fix the issue, give the U.S. an ‘Air-targets’ belt. Fix incendiary filler as it’s affected by the real-shatter bug where U.S. incendiary fragmentation can’t even leave the ‘explosive’ it creates.
Other trees have a handful of aircraft have poor climb rates, the US has a handful of aircraft that climb well.
Then just play the planes that climb well.
They are not. I haven’t played the P-38G much as it’s too easy for my likes and spading it was exceptionally quick. P-38J only brings a challenge thanks to the horrible teams - so far a 36% winrate despite having a very positive k/d and k/b.
Playing the devil’s advocate here, heavy fighters like the P-38 do tend to be a lot more floaty, which can make it harder to actually secure a kill if someone know how to dodge. That still leaves you in a position where you’re consistently able to always be in the advantage though, even if it is more difficult to follow through on an attack.
Although that’s true, you’re still preventing them from climbing and if on the offensive, forcing them to dive away from you because at that altitude the P-38 holds almost all the cards. You don’t HAVE to kill everyone, just make them avoid you and go to lower alts where they’ll be easier targets.
edit: of course, forcing enemies to lower alts only works if you have a team which while playing USA… you won’t.
This is why I asked if you usually play on low graphics
Those puffs are NOT fires. If you are not used to seeing them in your game (because you play on low graphics and its not rendering them for you), I can see how you’d maybe assume that seeing them on my footage (which is with graphics fully maxed out) would be a fire, when they aren’t.
Doesn’t matter if he took a while for the game to consider him “dead”. He was out of the fight and no longer a threat right as my rounds hit. Sure this was GRB and so he could have nosed down and maybe gotten some suicide bombs/strafe off, but in ARB that wouldnt be the case. He was out.
This is the exact same case for every other plane that didnt immediately get “aircraft destroyed” in all of those clips. It doesnt matter what (limited) control they still had. They were out. The only one that was not true for was the Yak9K, which as I said happens just as often to cannon armed aicraft and honestly I think is a glitch with the severe damage system rather than the guns of the plane - I myself have been considered “severely samaged” just an orange wing before.
More bullets? Yes. More time? No. Less options? Also no.
You have 2000 rounds in 6 guns. Who cares if it takes 100 of them to kill, you have 1800 left. You are talking about conserving ammo as if you have 20mms with 120rds each, and applying it to .50s which you are SUPPOSED to spam. Yet again as I have said before, you are supposed to use them differently!
You have to test it properly in-game with somebody to say that for sure it does 0 damage.
Protection analysis cannot be your ultimate source for this.
For example: Enter a custom battle with a friend and tell him to tap fire while turning or going straight or simulate a Air Rb scenario, up to you. There’s no way .50cals do 0 damage.
Protection analysis also show that MG151/20 does nothing when hitting wooden built aircraft which is not true at all. But it’s concerning.
But I will say that if anything deserves a buff its the MG151/20. It still uses the old formula but even if it’s intended by Gaijin, they should atleast buff the values accordingly cuz it’s performing worse than pretty much any other 20mm while having 5x the explosive filler.
Yes cuz it uses realshatter, it has HE so realshatter will make that happen. Idk why they even implemented it in the first place, it’s very messy.
But am with you when it comes to fixing Incendiary rounds, I saw somewhere that they are practically useless. So ofc am down to fixing it.
And they don’t get affected by realshatter at all, they don’t use it. It’s probably the incendiary rounds just being poorly implemented.
I just cannot vouch for making .50cals have the same punch as a 20mm. It would be absurd.
They literally do not.
You literally don’t
We’ve gone away from the misinformed and reached fantasy land. Of all the US props, only the P-47s are not good climbers within their BR. And the F6F. Though as we discussed that things flight model is borked and has been since beta
Never said make .50s hit as hard as 20mms. Just have U.S. .50s match the .50s of other nations.
Some don’t that’s true.
But U.S. .50s do get affected by Real Shatter. For some reason.
You can see the fragmentation.
Speclist is right about this again. Unless you get a lucky fuel fire. You don’t have enough incendiary to actually do any sort of meaningful damage to the structure of the wing. You basically have to hit the fuselage or else you’ve achieved nothing. compound this with the fact that API-T is not as much of a firestarter as it used to be, you’re banking on getting your convergence right and hitting the guy where it hurts, or you’re reliant on lucky fuel fires.
The only time wing shots are detrimental is if you hit your opponent with multiple incendiary. You can see this with Stealth as wing snaps are a lot more common and you’ll damage your opponent’s wing a lot more quickly.
Ok I finally found something that could maybe give the .50 cals good damage. Going off of this suggestion for IL-2, flash powder (a similar compound to the Ba(NO_3)_2 used in IM-28) has a RE factor of 0.36±0.12, with the highest actually being 0.56. The TNT equivalence for the US incendiary rounds would be:
M8 API and M30 API-T (0.97g for both):
M1 I (2.2g):
M23 I (5.8g):
Meanwhile for the Japanese 12.7mm round: (PETN’s RE factor is 1.66)
In summary, API and API-T in the best case scenario would have a little over 50% the effectiveness of the HEF 12.7mm shell, the M1 I round would have between ~50%-~124% the effectiveness, and M23 I round would have between ~140%-~326% effectiveness
They don’t, the code still uses HitPower (old formula). I can link you the code to them.
There’s just not any sort of fragmentation applied to any of the rounds. What you are showing me is just the hitpower, I think any ball round behaves the same way.
Rounds that use realshatter have a specific line n code to them. So guns that do not use it cannot be affected by it at all is what I mean.
