20mm cannons are not made to blow bombers appart or Germany wouldn’t have made 30mm, 37mm and 50mm Mineshells, nor would the US put a 37mm into a planned interceptor, just like the Russians did with their MiGs, planned to intercept US bombers.
Just like how 20mm cannons turned out to be very inadequate as AA guns unless you could pump up the volume of shells by large amounts, since one hit was simply unlikely to take out even a regular fighter, while the chance was massively increased with calibers of 35-40mm that also increased the range to hit targets by quite a lot.
Some fuel and engine fires, ammunition explosions, and pilot kills doesn’t sound too bad. Add a lot more internal modules for the aircraft that can be damaged, like they did with tanks recently. Not only that, going from the combat reports of P-47 pilots, some made kills of up to 800 meters away with their .50s. Yeah, they may not rip wings, but being peppered and having everything turned inside your plane to swiss cheese still doesn’t sound good.
I wouldn’t have a problem if the game changed to have damage more consistent IRL
No, Shvak literally 1-shots planes.
I got 1km sniped while doing 550km/h by Shvak. I like to watch replays and 1 shell happily travelled this distance and ripped my wing in half. Fw 190D9 wing, mind you.
Hispanos are also overperforming.
The least overperforming of all is MG151/20 M-geschoss, which is still hitting a bit too hard (mostly because tail.parts of planes are way tok fragile). But 3 hits to the wingtop of P-51D and it’s still attached, although black - it makes sense.
Consistent gunnery is an important skill. Landing 1 shell is often a matter of spray and pray.
Single 20mm shell should have extremely low chance of causing serious damage.
Yet in game a single FI-T shvak hit from 1000m away can and will cripple your plane beyond any chance of fight or escape.
Now, a bit off topic - Shvak FI-T, with current game logic, has zero business even reaching 1000m target in a tailchase.
It weights 90g and is fired at roughly 800m/s.
M-geschoss with like 3 times the drag (because it’s based on real world performance and not made up numbers) weights 92g and is fired at roughly 800m/s.
M-geschoss will get literally OUTRUN (assuming the self destruct no one asked for wasn’t introduced) if you fire from over 700m at a target in a tailchase if you’re both going 550km/h. By the time it gets close to the enemy, enemy plane will a be going faster, especially if we consider added distance due to firing the shell in a very high arc, to even get anywhere close. In other words, at over 700m your shell, even if gravity wasn’t an issue, will basicslly fail yo catch up with the enemy. And since gravity is an issue, you have to lob the shell at an arc, which further increases the distance travelled, which further increases the time, which further increases the drop. Basically at around 700m you have no chance of hitting anything with M-geschoss at this speed, and your only chance are APHE, IT and API shells.
It may very well be 37mm flak. Or 30mm mine-shell. It’s not 20mm, which will blow a 50-60cm hole if the planets align just right, but that’s it.
50-60cm hole in a fighter is a lot. But still you need a few of those to bring it down. In a bomber - it’s mostly superficial, hence you needed over 20, and that’s usually because with 20+ hits either tail controls got shredded, a fire started, pilots got taken out or 2 engines were out.
Meanwhile Shvak out of kinetic energy and with like 6g of TNT rips entire wing apart on a very sturdy fighter.
IRL it would make some holes from fragments, but since 6g TNT won’t get them to any crazy speed, these fragments will not penetrate a lot.
96g 🧐
91g was the weight of the pre-war ammunition, that wouldn’t even be used past 1941, since production switched to the new 96g FI and API rounds.
But War Thunder doesn’t really care for historical background 🤔
A lot of ammo types should simply not be available to planes, due to later introduction dates.
Yeah but hitting an engine or fuel tank is a bit more difficult than hitting the airframe anywhere.
In-game you can spray down someone from 1km with .50cals and set them on fire because API keeps their incendiary properties all the time and it’s simply based on chance.
20mm Incendiary rounds would be way more effective, but they aren’t in-game.
In one of the training manuals, printed shortly after WW2, they even say the effective range of .50cal is a mere 366m, since the guns are simply not accurate enough to have any effect on a plane sized target at longer range.
They will but you would need to spend a lot of time and rounds to even land shots on target.
Accuracy is actually quite a limiting factor. My previous mindset was that not having the accuracy upgrade for .50cals wouldn’t be a big deal since it had this shotgun effect, meaning you are more likely to hit by chance, which was better than not hitting at all.
But in reality it’s actually a drawback, since in cases where your aim is perfect, your are still limited by the accuracy of the guns, thus scoring less hits then you could with more accurate guns.
In US testing reports from 1941 they say that.50 cal are ineffective past 400 m since pen value for normal round would be around 3 mm at 450 m.
Peak pen value is 18 mm at 150 m but after that for every 50 m it loses around 3 mm of pen
I have a question, is this based off nose mounted .50s? A .50 strapped to a test rig, fired full automatic and then extrapolation based off that performance? If it was wing based, what convergence? Because I have a kill report from a P-47 that stated it was able to strike an Fw-190 from 800 yards (730 meters to save time) away, in two 2 second bursts as he witnessed flashes on the port side wing. This was co-witnessed by another P-47. I attempted this in a custom battles with A.I. in Cockpit mode and I had trouble scoring any hits at that range. If it was a super short conversion range or there was no conversion set (If it was a test done on a flight that), that test would make plenty of sense as at that point you would just have a cloud of rounds bigger than the enemy flying towards the target and you can see that illustrated in War thunder.
Now that I really think about it, this would be completely inviable lol. The US would have immediately moved to a different gun, instead of using them throughout the war AND postwar.
