Im not talking about the M.Geschoss. Tho I dont know the in game velocitys from memory right now.
Yeah it’s 585m/s and 675m/s for Mineshells, which are never the first shell in a belt.
Let me close the topic then with a summary:
US .50cals deal less damage than other .50cals at the moment because they don’t have explosive bullets.
Explosive bullets are overperforming massively.
If US .50cals were buffed to the same level, they would start to overperform massively as well.
Resulting in huge BR bumps and similar unrealistic killing power.
Outperforming most fighters armed with 20mm cannons.
That‘s because US planes start to use .50cals when other nation still have 7.7mm LMGs, and generally have 4-6 guns when other planes get 20mm cannons.
So at the moment their lack of damage is compensated by number of guns as well as excellent ballistics, with high muzzle velocity and low drag.
Pure incendiary rounds are almost useless, but that’s the case with every nation.
Even HEFI has no advantage over HEF shells, as the structural killing power is so high that AP and Incendiary effect are redundant.
Even though the damage is lacking compared to the overperforming nature of explosive rounds, US planes armed with .50cals have no problem downing other planes.
Therefore the entire discussion revolves around:
- (US) .50cals should be buffed because it’s unfair that other ammunition types are more effective
And
- (US) .50cals should not be buffed because there is no need to make them more effective than they currently are
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that is a pretty good summary in my opinion.
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That is something I had thought about before.
If you think their climb rates are bad now, just imagine when EVERY single plane with US .50cals goes up by a whole BR (or more! see F4U-1C) because of their new firepower upgrade. F4U-4 is going right to the same BR as the -4B is now.
Silver lining that the F8F-1 might finally reach a balanced BR.
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This is true partially.
Incendiary rounds are still affected by the old HitPower code so they are slightly high-explosive which affects the damage. the fact that some rounds still use HitPower is weird to begin with.
it’s why U.S. .50s incendiary can opaque yellow a wing, and it’s also why a lot of rounds back then were weaker (Partially why Hispanos were ‘hisparkos’)
You can see this effect with Italian Incendiaries as well.
But I don’t see how buffing incendiaries would make that much of a difference when they barely exist in any belt.
Or just give the U.S. a belt that’s majority incendiary and leave the damage alone.
I saw the issue about 50cal Inc TNT equivalency were denied twice.
It was interesting that Gaijin actually gave SAPI round for Hispano a small TNT equivalency, for its SR379 incendiary filling which has similar composition as the US Inc filling. Also the naval M2 gun got TNT equivalency for its M1 Inc.
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They also gave US 20x110mm Mark 1 HEI and M97 HEI, as well as the 20x102mm M56 HEI, explosiv filler based on the entire explosive and incendiary filler.
Even though the incendiary filler makes up a huge part of the filler.
Mk 1 HEI has 5.6g Tetry + 5.7g flash powder.
In WT it’s 11.2g Tetryl or something.
Should be identical to Hispano HEI but in WT Hispano only have the 5.6g figure.
M97 HEI has 7.7g Tetryl in WT but it should be 5.5g + 2.2g flash powder.
M56 HEI has like 2g RDX and 8g incendiary composition but in WT it’s 10g RDX.
So of course Gaijin has like always no consistency when it comes to their implementation.
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Well, maybe theyll add the 2 cm Br.Sprgr. series, lets see how theyll be implemented. 20g H.5 would be fun. Lol.
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Going off of a basic average (sum of all rpms/number of guns), I got 577.17 rpm (6926/12). Compared to the average rpm of 750 for the .50 cal, there’s a 26% difference in rpm between them.
.50 cals are not doing only 26% less damage than 20mms.
I wouldn’t go that far, I would say the lack of damage is attempted to be compensated by other factors.
We can already tell that the difference in velocity is minimal for most cannons (i.e. does not make up for the poor damage), the number of guns definitely isn’t making up for the lack of damage, and the difference in rate of fire does not make up for the damage. The only positive is that .50 cals have more ammo.
Btw do you have a link to the bug report on adding TNT equivalence values to .50 cal incendiary rounds?
It’s totally not suspicious that they were both denied on the same day with the same copy-paste message - especially the one that quite literally has TNTeq values (\s).
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Good thing that every single plane with .50cals has more guns than any other 20mm-armed plane at the same BR then.
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Still, even with the extra guns 20mms are doing massive damage in comparison to .50 cals. The fire rate of the .50 cal isn’t an order of magnitude or two the fire rate of the 20mms.
Total RoF is ~4x faster, with greater ammo capacity and ballistics. There is no excuse.
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.50 cals are putting out less mass and do less damage - the fire rate is not making up for that. Neither is the extra ammo. If anything, the ammo is just extra weight that can’t be removed. Unless you’re spraying with no care in the world you’ll never use more than two-thirds of your ammo.
I went through the RAF document and tried to take the row-reduced echelon forms of the various explosives and the figure of merit values, but whatever relationship exists between them isn’t linear.