.50's deserve a buff

You are going by pure filler and not TnTa, which is with the Pent filler of the HEF rounds a good tat higher.

You are 100% and very, very, very correct that just because the wing blackens that doesn’t mean it’s removed or broken off. But protection analysis does give a good baseline on how damaging a shot would be.

In my P-47. A Blackened wing is a death sentence. If I pull up, my plane almost goes into a spin and it rolls like the wing was snapped off. But that’s my thing. It’s very easy to get your wings hit. In general, for everybody. Especially when it’s one of the biggest parts for the enemy to hit and many countries have belts that are more than happy to supply the proper ammunition to damage it no matter what gun it is at all.

I just don’t like the fact that everyone has belts mostly consistent of ammunition that do this to my wing in a stray shot.

While the ammo in my belt does this.

When I could be having rounds that hit like this.

I mean I’ve used tracer belts and yeah they can set things alight if you get things to align just right. But if you strike anywhere that’s not something important. I’ve had Spitfires, Fw-190s, I-185s, A6Ms where I’ll dump a good burst and they just eat it as if it was a three course meal and I have to go for another go around. I want my 3 or so rounds that hit bad too.

I want a belt that actually has substance.

Oh definitely. I never said you wouldn’t have any flight problems. but the fact your horizontal stabilizer was damaged actually affects your turning performance greatly. You produce insanely more drag.

I would argue that that being to force an overshoot even after losing the stab and elevator is highly dependent on the aircraft. Some planes, when you lose an elevator just become a bus.

Depends.
The TNT equivalent in WT is based on the destructive power of the explosive.

Like you need 1g TNT to penetrate 2mm of armor but only 0.6g of PETN.

It would also influence fragmentation of shells, since the explosive blows up the shell.
More explosive means more fragments and higher velocity, with a more powerful explosive taking up the same volume but being better at it.

As I’ve explained in this bug report:
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/AyCoq2Bai3nc

Incendiary blast performance isn’t any worse than that of explosives. Infact it’s even better.

Just ignore that big brain mod that shut my report down with his copy & paste response, despite my report not even mentioning any TNT equivalent.

The burning flash powder doesn’t create a powerful shockwave like any explosives, that can destroy sturdy material like steel easily but it will result higher pressure generated that last for a longer time.

This pressure is what can rip weak structure, like airplane skin, apart from the inside.
And it’s whats used on Torpedos to create a large gas bubble under a ship. The ship breaks apart, from the rapid formation and collapse of the bubble below it, which puts immense stress on the hull.

You also know about the Mine effect of explosives.
Where shells fired with a delay, into the ground or buildings, destroy them from the inside, caused by the pressure built up.
Which is several times more destructive than the shell exploding on contact, where the blast has little effect and the shell mainly causes damage from fragments.

So flash powder would have an equal blast effect of probably 0.8 times the TNT, potentially more.

M23 uses even stronger flash powder, so the blast effect is probably 1:1 to TNT.

So we are talking equal blast performance as 5.83g TNT.

Nearly as much as a ShVAKs HEFI with 5.6g RDX/Alunimum and certainly as powerful as the HEFI-T with only 4.13g.

So M23 would be an incredible powerful round, both in incendiary performances and structural damage, for a 12.7mm bullet.

But it’s potential is greatly held back by its heat sensitive nature.
Preventing long bursts without having the bullet self ignite.

So in reality it’s basically a gimmick.

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What makes you think it’s 1:1?

Is Potassium Perchlorate that powerful? Because today they moved on to Ammonium Perchlorate?

I decided to just google the difference. Surprising to see how easily it is to find people talking about the differences due to it’s use in rocketry.

But everyone is saying that Potassium Perchlorate has too much of an aggressive burn rate that it produces a shockwave when under pressure. I guess it’s a case of ‘it’s too powerful’

I found that DTIC report interesting, it shows that an M23 can penetrate fuel tank on the P-38 quite easily, and at the same impact velocity it makes the tank less likely to seal when comparing with an 60cal API round. Which may tell that M23 will punch a larger hole on the fuel tank.
image

Overall chance of fire, in current game M23 has a fire multiplier of 12.0, which is larger than M20/M8’s 10.0. It should be noted that in game fire chance is calculated as intrinsic fire chance( defined by fuel tank/engine, a piece wise function correlates with remaining HP) multiplies with the fire chance of the munition. So in game, even a 20mm HEI with the same 10.0 fire chance will more likely to set afire due to larger damage value given to the fuel tank.

Another thing can be verified is that the fuseless nature of US 50cal Inc makes dud quite often, if the impact wasn’t strong enough, the flash powder may not react as expected. So that 2017 gun damage, with M23 to have HE damage but with large randomness was quite accurate.

I don’t know if Gaijin willing to give 50cal Inc blast effect, since they make M1 Inc an HE round in naval M2 but not for the aerial one. If they model M23 as HE just like today’s ho103, then with its 1000ms muzzle velocity it will mean the end of air battle. So I think at least gaijin should rework to make the Inc round be able to penetrate the cover and fuel tank, making them function as usual.

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I‘m talking about the British test that showed that flash powder had an equal or better blast effect than a RDX/TNT mix.

In that US report „ Airplane Vulnerability and Overall Armament Effectivness“ the M96 Incendiary with 10.8g of flash powder is shown having a greater chance to kill a P-47 due to structural damage than M97 HEI, which has 5.5g Tetryl + 2.2 flash powder.

That‘s because the M96 actually has bigger blast power.

Thin structure is going to be blown apart from the pressure of the blast, rather than the strengths of the shockwave, which at first has to break up a shell.

Flash powder is denser than explosives, by around 50%, so I’m not sure how exactly a blast equivalent would be to TNT.
If it was 25% more effective by volume (replacing TNT with flash powder), the mass equivalent should be 0.833.

M23 with Perchlorate should be more efficient on a weight basis since perchlorate is a stronger oxidizer.

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Could it be that the flash powder and shattering projectile had caused a lateral effect, similar but somewhat different to an HE round? I heard that the M61 Vulcan used specifically designed projectile with lateral effect, though with less explosive filling, it was claimed to be as effective as a 30mm round.

I remember when I was visiting an air museum in Canada, an veteran(presumably the ground crew) told me that F86 sabre actually used dum-dum bullets for its 50cals. I assume he was telling the M23 Inc.

what this is just plain wrong

People in the military usually have a poor idea of what they are working with.
Especially when it comes to weapons.

All types of .50cal bullets are known and in that report someone posted recently, the ammunition for .50cals in Korea was:

M8 API
M1 Incendiary
Regular Tracer
M20 API-T

I think it was something like 40:30:20:10.

M23 wasn’t used as they couldn’t solve the self-ignition from barrel heat problem.

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Yes in the DTIC report, but that composition was only related with a partial of all fighting units (Only two instances of fight record perhaps), and does not represent the overall use of 50cal ammunition in the entire Korean War.

In that Canadian museum though it did mention the belt sequencing was 5xAPI + 1xT (perhaps M21).

As for M23, it did saw action in 1945 over the ETO, and the problem can be compensated by firing short burst. Since those DTIC report in 1950s focused a lot on M23 instead of the classical M1, I think M23 should have saw action in the Korean War, but not for sure.

The Japanese fuzeless 50cal HEI round Ma-102 also got self-detonation problem, that was more dangerous than the M23 round. The round was prohibited to be fired when barrel temp rises beyond 200C. It was not known whether IJA had used Ma-102 in action, in game Ho-103 air target belt utilized mainly the Ma-102, seems to be unlikely IRL.

they literally do

Would a 7,5 cm He round filled with such then also be way more effective, or is there a drop off?
Is that also the reason why for pretty much all grenades from germany (Pzgr.39, Sprgr.34 and such) there is also an Al variant, which has additional aluminium powder, for hotter, incendary blast?

Theoretically. But you want HE in a shell to cause fragmentation. The blast isn’t all that important unlike against aircraft.

The Al increased the blast performance as well as causing a larger fireball, adding some incendiary effect.

Most Soviet APHE all have A-IX-2 filler which is basically HA 41.

Post war a lot of HEI shells use RDX and Aluminum instead of adding layers of flash powder.

This results in a good mix of blast and brisance, so you get good fragmentation, blast as well as some incendiary effect.

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Made a suggestion regarding TNT equivalencies and it sat in pending before just magically disappearing. Lol

a black wing is super hard to fly with on any plane. Avoiding them hitting your wings is a tactic as well. Normally when I see someone coming for a good deflection shot on me, I roll sideways so they dont have my wings to shoot at. makes me a much smaller target and harder to hit, plus preventing wing damage.

you’re still focusing one one bullet vs one bullet though, its more like 1 bullet vs 2 bullets from an M2 browning. Plus you have different advantages that they do not. An M2 browning with an HEF round would become ny far and away the single most broken OP gun in the game

I’ve had this happen to just as many planes while firing 20mms too, all the damn time. you put a burst into them and they shrug it off. This is just more of a gaijin moment than a problem with the belts IMO.

I spent 300 replies and quite frankly several hours of gameplay explaining WITH video evidence exactly why he was wrong, and he refused to give me any evidence based response other than “You are wrong because I believe you are wrong!”

I’m not going to do the same with you.

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As I demonstrated above, the VAST majority of 20mm-equipped planes at your BR will have one or two 20mm guns. Their total RPM is 500-800 and 1000-1600 respectively.

Your P-47 is putting out 6000rpm while having ~10x the ammo capacity they do.

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Their ammo is mainly ball or AP, they do not have good firepower.

The E-3 109 has 2x 20mms; I should’ve said “a Yak-1”; the A-0 and B-0 He 112s have 20mms; the LaGGs also have three non-2.7s; wait are you listing the planes that don’t have only one 20mm?

The Hurricane Mk IV, it’s 2.0 rip.

That’s not what’s being discussed there, though. What’s being discussed is that a 20mm can also take out engines but it (and HE 12.7mms and other cannons) can do consistent structural damage. Besides, one .50 cal bullet is not comparable to one 20mm in terms of engine damage.

Because having to spray to maybe do anything, taking more time and wasting more energy due to more passes, in airframes that are already worse than the competition in terms of short- and long-term dogfights isn’t good?

HE 12.7mms and cannons can waste ammo spraying people down, can get pilot snipes, and get engine kills, too. It’s just that they can do structural damage consistently.

The following estimates are based on an RE factor of 0.25-0.36 for the powder used in the US incendiary rounds. The values were based on formulations of barium nitrate, potassium chlorate, and aluminum powder in a document somewhere above this, although the two compounds used in US used a magnesium-aluminum alloy/powder. Values of 0.30 and 0.36 were found for the low-potassium-perchlorate solutions, so if the magnesium-aluminum powder enhances the RE factor then it might be greater.

M8 API (0.97g powder): 0.2425g-0.3492g TNTeq
M1 I (2.2g powder): 0.55g-0.792g TNTeq
M23 I (5.8g powder): 1.45g-2.088g TNTeq

Japanese 12.7mm HE (0.6g PETN): 0.996g TNTeq

15mm MG-151 HEF-T: 3.23g TNTeq

ShVak HEF-I: 4.35g TNTeq
ShVak HEF: 5.8g TNTeq

Hispano Mk.II HEI: 9.28g TNTeq

The M1 incendiary rounds should be just short of the Japanese 12.7mm HE rounds and the M23 incendiary rounds should have more than twice the destructive potential of the Japanese 12.7mm HE rounds.

Two rounds of M23 should do comparable damage to a single ShVak HEF-I round (actually better when you consider there is more surface area of two .50 cal explosions than one 20mm explosion due to the inverse square law), and three M23 rounds should be doing comparable damage to a ShVak HEF round.

Although, the incendiary rounds are obviously not doing that currently.

A M2 Browning API-T round is going to enter one side of the fuselage, fly through the entire thing, and do nothing important unless it directly impacts with a module that matters.*

That’s literally what incendiary does, and M23 literally has over TWICE the TNTeq of the 12.7mm HEF rounds.

If that’s the case, then in combination with the TNTeq values I found it seems like 2.7-3.888g TNTeq of flash powder is better than 6.875g TNTeq of Tetryl (RE factor of 1.25) plus 0.55g-0.792g of flash powder. That would give flash powder a damage ratio (in terms of effective damage per gram of TNTeq) of 1.972:1 to 2.75:1 when compared to traditional HE.

In that scenario, M23 would have a TNTeq (to structures specifically) of 4.12g to 5.742g - nearly to just better than some 20mms.

Thats a lot of damage from one bullet entering through the rear of the fuselage. (I did this about 20 different times in different areas, it almost always ended up in the engine after damaging multiple modules, or the pilot depending on exactly where you placed the round)

remember there are 74 more rounds coming every second where that one came from

working on playing this at 5.3 btw, I’ve never flown the plane so it started from completely stock, still GRB (so I can force it in with a 5.3 tank lineup) but people wont. stop. running. away from me. Like they aren’t even trying to extend to energy fight me, they just keep refusing to engage at all :(

currently 5 kiills 1 death (the death was to SPAA). But heres a nice pair I got today:

that was what, a 2 second burst on the Ki-44? two .50s and four .30s btw

(Oh, and I ripped the wing off the Ki-61, the opposite wing to the one that was on fire. though it took a bit more shooting to get him down)

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Such wow, 2x 20mm with the ballistics of throwing a rock and 60 rounds each at 520 rpm, they are empty in no time with easily pretty much nothing hit.
And both E-3 and B-0 only use the MG FF without Minen.Geschoss.
And the FI-T (should be HEFI-T) is quite bad.

Not to mention the A-0 uses the 20mm MG C/30 L at 325 rpm with 100 rounds and no other armarment, and you will most likely choose the API-T belt, thats also not an ideal choice in general against air.

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