Only counting prop fighters/interceptors/etc with 20-23mm guns. Heavy fighters generally not counted if they’re just flying bricks (Dorner 217 and the likes); Hornet and F7F still counted; Wyvern also counted as an exception because it’s the fucking Wyvern
One 20mm: 41 planes
Two 20mm: 91 planes
Three 20mm: 14 planes
Four 20mm: 41 planes
So no,
Out of all the aircraft that could plausibly take on a fighter role and have 20mm-class guns, they are most often armed with TWO 20mm cannons.
For those armed with four, many are cumbersome to use even with me already ruling out the worst of the worst like the night fighter Do 217s - anyone who has tried to use an F7F knows it is not exactly a dynamic aircraft. To a lesser degree, same story with others like the Sea Hurricane MkIC, N1K2-Js, and Spitfire MkVcs which are overtiered thanks to their firepower.
Here’s the tracers when it was closer to the plane. you can see both vapor trails
The round enters
One of the rounds ricochets out, the other round passes through.
The particle effect to denote a hit finally spawns. In the vapor trail you can see the round that ricocheted out, and the round that passed through cleanly
At this point you’re arguing semantics and it adds nothing to the conversation besides you just wanting to try and disagree with me vehemently in every regard.
Okay, I watched it back several times in a row on 0.25 speed. Its definitely four hits I count.
First hit is on the elevator, breaks it off.
Second and third are both from the same gun cycle, hitting the left wingtip together.
Third and fourth are also from the same gun cycle, hitting the right wing, just before it detatched
I could not clearly 100% see any non tracer hits on the A-36. I think it might be possible a non tracer round hit the left wing just before your tracer rounds did, and its also possible a non tracer round might have hit after your tracer rounds hit the right wing, which could explain the slight delay before the wing broke off, it was the non tracer that broke it, not the tracer hits we can see. So Im calling a positive hit count of four, with a possible two more.
The reason Im bringing up the tracers, is because the only tracers in that belt are the AP-T rounds. The HEF are not tracers. So if that video is to be believed, you actually did most of the damage with the AP rounds in the belt lol. The two possible non tracer hits I saw would be the HEF - one hitting the left wing (and not breaking it) and one hitting the right wing after two APT rounds hit it, which would have weakened it for the HEF round to finish the snap.
The P-51C was a bit harder to see because your wing covered the hit, but it looks like it was between tracer rounds the hit happened, so Im calling that at least two HEF rounds tagged that to blow it off.
Im not sure why you think Im flipping out at you. Im telling you what I am seeing and what is happening.
I brought up the hit analysis because when I look at it, especially after some of the .50 cal games, it showed me some interesting things, such as multiple rounds hitting almost the exact same spot on planes at the same timestamp. Im at work so will have to screenshot it later, but the hit analysis would show me one round hitting a surface and yellow/oranging it, and then a 2nd round coming right after and destroying it.
The protection analysis doesn’t show that. It shows the results of one singular hit to an undamaged module, not a spray of rounds. Ive always disliked that about it when checking aircraft because it never actually tells you anything about whats actually happening in game.
All this almost literally doesn’t matter because I counted the impacts. You’re hyper focusing on the tracers when they’re just supplementary evidence for the actual impacts.
Two hits on the wing from AP. The hit effect showed.
here I did your job for you.
I clicked on a wing in a general area of where the purported ‘third and fourth’ HE bullet would be for over a minute.
Most of these would blacken the wing entirely and the rest would be sever damage making it dark red or dark orange, of which a follow up hit would be lethal. And IF there was two extra hits hypothetically, and it DIDN’T rip off the wing. It’s quite literally a ‘getting gaijined’ moment. and banking your entire argument that “You might get Gaijined sometimes” is stupid.
I would say it’s not US 50cals that need a buff, rather should be 12.7mm HE, and 20mm HE needs a nerf. The HE filling might be good at destroying the FM, but they shouldn’t rip your wing & tail apart that easily. To me the gun damage in November 2023 just made perfect sense, I enjoyed flying N1K2 during that time, seeing 20mm to have a correct hit and get people down, rather than seeing one-shot tail off just like now. Plus in 2023 the M1 incendiary could penetrate the cover and reach the wing fuel tank, more realistic than nowadays.
As for M23, the gun damage in 2017 was a good example. The M23 at the time was modeled as more like an HE round but with extremely large RNG damage. If lucky, 2 hits from M23 could rip I-185’s wing tip apart, or you may just see sparks all the way if you were unlucky. That was quite accurate since US Inc rounds were designed to be fuzeless, different velocities, angles and materials during the impact would change the blasting behavior a lot.
Your claim is that “the HEF round from the Ho-103 consistently breaks wings with one hit” and that the M2 browning is underpowered compared to other nations 12.7mms
My argument is that it does not do significantly more damage than an M2 browning, at least not enough to suggest buffing the browning or nerfing the Ho-103.
You showed two clips. One clip potentially did break his wing off in one hit, the other clip had at least four hits, with at least two hitting the wing that snapped (one of which was an APT round)
I showed two video clips of the Ki-44 as well, one kill where a wing was snapped in one burst, (i need to rewatch to see how many rounds it was) and one where I filled him full of rounds for nothing but an assist.
As Ive said before, Ive spaded the entire japanese tech tree and played most of the other tech trees up until jets, besides Italy and Sweden.
I have not once in the last ~5 years ever thought that M2 brownings were weak, and honestly my opinion of the Ho-103 while spading all those japanese aircraft with it has genuinely been “its meh”.
You need to play more games in other nations aircraft.
No I didn’t. stop putting words in my mouth. I have continuously stated and even SHOWED that it’s a two hit kill on average. You made that argument. Not me.
If the basis of your argument is you getting my claim wrong I’m not bothering.
When it comes to japanese 12.7mm HEF this is it. This is my claim. Three days ago.
The videos I made of japanese 12.7mm completely support my claim. Despite you and Percussion cap trying to split hairs.
First of all: Yes they do.
And second: What do you expect them to do? They are tiny bullets with merely 1g flash powder.
Of course the damage they do in WT is completely unrelated to being API, they simply deal kinetic damage. And in case you didn’t know, a single .50cal deals enough damage to turn any tail control black in a single hit.
.50cals are simply less effective when it comes to dealing damage to wings and tails, than 20mm explosive rounds.
As you need a large amount of filler to cause any significant damage to skin, which makes up a huge percentage of a planes area.
Even 20mm rounds aren’t that amazing in causing damage to structure, yet they obviously will deal a lot more than .50cals.
In essence 20mm will just do everything .50cals can but better and when you really want to cause structural damage, you’re going to need Mineshells for that or simply a larger caliber.
Of course currently the damage to structure by explosive shells is a complete joke, while damage to other systems is lacking because of the lack of realistic shell fragmentation and lack of a proper incendiary system.
So 20mm or even 12.7mm HE blowing off wings and tails constantly is rather stupid.
The reality is that you basically pray, every time when you attack an enemy, to hit a vital system, and you either have the RoF to make it likely to hit or the damage to make those hits count.
30mm and larger have the damage but not the RoF or ballistics.
20mm have decent damage but not the RoF.
.50cals might have the RoF but not the damage.
So ideally you want a larger caliber or more or faster firing 20mm cannons.
So either 30mm cannons or a 20mm Vulcan.
The MK 108 hits like a truck but you’re not likely to hit anything when the enemy is evasive.
.50cals are very likely to hit but can have no real effect on the target.
The result is that 4 or more .50cals are generally more effective against fighters while against bombers it should be the complete opposite.
With 20mm being neither good nor bad against either.
One more advantage goes for the 20mm HE is that it doesn’t need to specifically hit the cockpit to deal injury to the pilot. When 20mm hit the wing root, splinters will often go into the cockpit and cause the pilot a leg injury, though often not fatal, that still forces them out of the fight.
Sometime before 2020, an injured pilot in game will cause the plane to pull less. At that time, HEF rounds just didn’t do much structural damage like nowadays, I was enjoying shooting ShVAK and MG131 around the wing root and making the splinter to kill the pilot or set a fire. That was much more enjoyable than shooting the bandit into pieces, like nowadays.
Cuz when I used a replay I got this response constantly. So the replay is not worth it.
^
We know this. Optimum caliber program and Greg’s video already broke it down.
What kills is usually a round hitting something really important. Sadly, gaijin isn’t going to balance based on IRL performance but for gameplay as they’ve stated before.
I acknowledge that you said that, I went back and couldn’t find anywhere you said 1 hit, so my apologies on that. I must of parroted someone else (Or maybe SpeclistMain1 said it)
but there is also reason for my confusion, being that M2 brownings 2 shot modules as well. In fact an M2 browning will reliably 2 shot the engine of a plane, whereas the Ho-103 HEF-I round won’t, infact it struggles to even penetrate the cowling sometimes:
This is what comes of having 3mm of penetration, it can hit a surface and explode before it gets to anything actually critical. (Its also something that happens with 20mm HEF rounds occasionally)
I can’t even get the HEF-I round to reliably make the Pilot on this Spitfire die, partly due to that fragmentation. the API-T on the M2 browning does though. I never said that the Japanese 12.7 HEF rounds don’t snap wings. I said they aren’t as reliable as you claim at it, and aren’t any stronger than the M2 browning.
this yet again comes down to different guns doing damage in different ways. Yes the HEF-I will be a bit better at snapping wings, but its worse in causing structural or module damage, where the M2 excels.
Also, this is before we get to the fact that the most you ever get on a Japanese plane is four of them, that being the Ki-44 Hei.
You posted two clips. Only one of them completely supported your claim.
While I was showing the damage of M2 Brownings, I’ve posted about 20 different kills now, all of which showed consistent performance.
Im not going to deny the Ho-103 can and does snap wings, again. Spaded the whole tech tree. I also played a few more games in the Ki-44 Hei this evening. But It doesn’t take any less shooting than it does to cripple an enemy with quad M2 Brownings. (Also in one of the games I got completely and utterly styled on by someone in a P-51C, despite having an altitude advantage against him at the beginning)
I tried to do the same range of types of vehicles while not including the jet BRs, but what’s the list when you only look at BRs where having 6x .50 cals or more is a thing? There’s a lot of single 20mms below ~3.0 where the first 6x .50 cals are. I went through Germany, the USSR, and Great Britain since I kept getting captchas lol.
That translates to ~1/3g of TNT, though, or about 1/3 the damage of a Japanese 12.7mm HE round. The M23 incendiary should have ~3x the TNT equivalent of a Japanese 12.7mm, or about a 1/3 of the TNT equivalent of a 20mm HE shell (going off of the Hispano Mk.II).
Why is this video considered proof of good guns while Zekken’s clips were dissected with 10 different excuses on why his kills weren’t really good enough… cuz it was either fire/engine fire/pilot snipes/fuel tank explosions…etc when in reality the TTK is literally similar or even faster in some of his clips?
It feels like you would be more satisfied if .50cals ripped more wings n tails regardless if it takes the same amount of time to kill as the ‘‘lucky’’ fires, pilot snipes and engine fires.
Doesn’t really change much. There’s not many planes with a single 20mm, it is mostly P-38s, Yaks, and 109s. The P-40s being at 2.7 already enables all except the very first Yak-1 at 2.3.
For who? Unless we’re talking about france (and they don’t have that many aircraft to begin with) they’re almost all at 2.7 or above.
Tbh I forgot that the P-40s in the US tree had 6x .50 cal and not 4x .50 cal and 2x 7.7mm. They’ve got the garbo early (early) belts, though, so I’m not exactly sure if that counts in our discussions of .50 cals (since they don’t have API, and at best get one incendiary per belt). The F4U-1A would count, though, as they get some belts with only one non-incendiary-something round.
Some deal of 109s, some He 112s, some Yak-1s, some MiG-3s, some LaGG-3s, the float plane Zero, the float plane N1K1, and a handful of French planes. If you include the heavy fighters (or strike aircraft that are really heavy fighters), it’s probably ~25 planes.
Separately, why do some post-Tier-I British props only get 2x 7.7mms. Bruh.
Except the whole point of breaking down the videos is to point out what would’ve happened with a cannon or HE 12.7mm too, as opposed to anything a .50 cal only could do.
The breakdowns showed that at least half of the kills would’ve happened regardless of the gun (bomb explosions, engine hits, pilot snipes), and most of the remaining kills happened due to waiting until fire decided to do something. Meanwhile cannons and HE 12.7mms can also set things on fire, but they are the only ones who can do structural damage outside of the most optimal scenarios.
The P-40s have very good firepower. The downside with them are the engines and high weight.
All the single 20mm 109s are 2.7 or higher. There are only two Yak-1s, one 2.3 and one 3.0. MiG-3-34 has two ShVAKs. LaGGs have at least one 2.7 model. All Zeros and N1K1 have two 20mm cannons.There is just one He 112 with a single 20mm, with all others either not counting (7.92s only) or having two 20mm.
Such as?
You don’t know that. A 20mm MIGHT have hit the pilot or engine, but volume of fire is so much lower that the shell in question might have never been fired in the first place.
A plane with 6x M2 .50cals is putting out 4500rpm, 750rpm per gun. Almost all 20mm cannons fire slower than that per gun even before we get into how many each plane has.
