The alloy its made of would also help. Antimony has a Brinell hardness of 294-384 (over twice that of mild steel), and as such its commonly used as an alloying metal for lead when hardness is needed. Like here, with anti-material bullets.
You’re not that far off. While incendiary material doesn’t create a strong shockwave like explosives, that would create high velocity fragments or destroy structures, like spars, with the blast force, it does create a similiar or even higher overpressure.
It doesn’t take much to blow a planes structure appart and the pressure created from exploding incendiary is sufficent for that.
M23 is super light, just flash powder packed inside a thin copper jacket.
Someone once called it an Incendiary-Mineshell, and they weren’t wrong with that.
Of course it’s still just a 12.7mm but the structural damage to wings and everything that is hollow and susceptible to pressure, is still going to get damaged substantionally more than from M1 Incendiary.
1 Like
Neither lead, antimony or lead-antimony has any application for armor penetration.
Animony is too brittle, lead is too soft.
The only point of hard-lead is to balance out the projectile, or give it some structural strenght and weight, in case of M23 for example.
A lot of AP rounds have lead-tips, increasing their weight compared to API, which replaced the lead with incendiary compound.
Being heavier, the AP round will have superior ballistics over long range, hence why heavy Ball ammo was generally used for machine gun bullets on the ground.
Both Italy and Japan switched back from a relatively light and easy to handle infanty rifle cartridge to a bigger caliber, due to logistical reasons and the fact that the heavier bullets were prefered for use in machine guns.
hmm, ye no. If you can aim around a played for a month level they hit just like 20mm just instead of getting only 200-400 ammo you get 1200-3000, I’ve used a lot recently on things like the G.91, the P-47D30, the F4Us, the P51s etc. and they gotta be the best in game gun I’ve ever used, then when I use cannons on things like the Mig 15. G.55, G.56, RE 2001’s, Bf109s and more and they hit just like 50. cals but have WAY less ammo still plenty for an ace but you absolutely gotta spare ammo which gets me killed way to much
Read things carefully before you post.
It says that the. 50cal Incendiary DOES NOT penetrate the target even at 100yards.
The. 50cal bullet that DOES is the A.P. one, not the Incendiary.
I had my wing shot off by a bomber from 600-800m, who can only fire 2-4 .50cals at most.
They can rip of wings way to often. One match in the F-80A-5 I parked myself behind La-200, a big bus of an aircraft, as he was climbing away. I shot at him from 600m, missed most of my bursts but then at one point I got the aim right and hit him with a good burst and took his wing off, using default ammo.
Based on that damage, it takes 2-3 .50cal hits to destroy a wing spar.
Testimony why high caliber AP in the game is a waste:
Of course when you compare it to what 20mm cannons can do, it’s probably in the same ballpark.
But at the bottom it says the M1 Incendiary penetrates the dural armor sandwhich.
Only the British .50cal Incendiary fails to so.
1 Like
You have six guns firing at once with a high rate of fire. I don’t think it’s 2-3 rounds, but more like you had around 6-9 rounds hitting your target at the same time in the same localized area. The P-36G has a singular .50 and API and regular AP basically does the same damage (I might be wrong on this as I’m actually noticing more structural damage with AP in protection analysis), besides of course the RNG fire capability. Taking the Stealth belts—so things don’t get muddied up by tracer rounds and give the best results in terms of potential damage and then I tested with universal for more AP rounds.
I tested on the P-40s in the test map in attempts to snap the wing at the wing root. It’s not the most scientific test on the matter, but I’m finding that around 7-9 rounds is what does the killing and this is entirely rear aspect where I am striking the spars the entire time, no deflection shots where AP passes through near harmlessly
so having a good burst of nose mounted .50’s is obviously going to have a lot of damage. Also note. YOu have this much lead coming out of your plane
And you say a good burst, that’s easily around the 50 round mark if you do a 1 second burst with nose mounted .50s, especially that close. No duh that’s going to hurt a crap ton.
But jet damage models are weird to begin with as a singular hit from any gun can heavily affect aerodynamics instantaneously to the point your plane can enter a spin at over 800kmh.
F8U’s have this happen a lot. Clip their wing tip, they lose all lift in that wing tip and then they will pull so many G’s the wing snaps in a split second.
prop aircraft DMs are wet paper mixed with insanely overperforming 20mms that can split planes in a single shot is an issue.
I’d like to add after testing with the P-47D and using ground target ammunition, which was utter misery. Incendiary ammunition. Not particularly API-T, but pure incendiary is doing the heavy lifting for damage, which is why stealth belts crap damage.
1 Like
You’re striking your targets for the most part with AP in your 20mm belts which is the biggest culprit for why your 20mm doesn’t do damage, and mixed with your slow rate of fire you can also have enemies fly threw your rounds. This can happen with .50s, but 20mms can have this especially happen to them. Does your belt contain anything other than HE as well? because regular incendiary shells can also do minimum damage.
unironically, the ‘realistic’ ammo belts for planes aren’t meta. You’d want them with the most explosive ammunition as humanly possible. Strangely for .50s, incendiary damages wings more than AP while AP damages the fuselage more. I dun get it, but I hope the addition of custom ammo belts comes out because I do want to see what a full ‘Incendiary belt’ with no AP behaves like.
1 Like
the “ACcURaCY” argument is honestly one of the stupidest arguments Warthunder players have made for their favorite nation to stay OP. You can see from the footage that the B-17 took over a dozen HE hits and showed 0 signs of critical damage, unlike Warthunder where just one or two shells will rip off entire tails and wings.
It doesn’t matter that aiming in WT can be more accurate when the pilot in the footage hit more shots than most WT players and the B-17 was fine.
1 Like
I wouldn’t argue ‘fine’ as more than likely the crew was shredded, but the plane would’ve definitely been able to fly for more than at least 5 minutes from that amount of damage.
The engines were definetly gone, but it was still flying straight. In Warthunder, just one or two hits would’ve completely ripped the wing/tail off or at the bare minimum leave it black and ruin your flight performance.
Irl they would’ve eventually had to bail out, but in Warthunder they would be considered fine as you can glide back to airfield.
Oh definitely I agree. Gaijin puts all this care into how damage modeling works for tanks, but the second planes are involved “OOPS ITS ALL PAPER”
2 Likes
Fr, especially in ruzzian vehicles
You can detonate fab500 on a su25/39 wing by hitting it with guns but it wont kill the plane or even rip the wing lmao
Meanwhile f15 will rip at the slightest movement downwards literally made out of paper
G overload seems abit sus rn. I can pull 8-9G “EXTREME OVERLOAD” in my F4D all day and suffer 0 consequences
Because gaijin isn’t going to even try and touch the physics of progressive structural overload from pulling Gs over and over again especially with how the game considers our planes easily replaceable, nor are they gonna make it where recovering from G-Loc can take several minutes to regain full functionality without being somewhat clouded.
3 Likes
Its almost like when you alloy them those two aspects balance out… Anything that helps a round keep from deforming will increase its penetration. Its why AP shells are made of steel, not lead despite lead being significantly denser.
2 Likes
So:
And not:
Because unless your 20mm hits a critical components, it’s not going to accomplish much.
In reality a 20mm Incendiary shell would greatly enhance a fighters ability to take down a B-17 with a MG 151/20 instead of firing mostly Mineshells, since the Incendiary shell have a much better to cause a fuel fire.
But in WT they are practically usless.
Same is true for other ammo types. They are simply not doing what they should be doing, so now we have this high-explosive meta.
For example: Soviets made 37mm API shells for their large 37mm cannons. And they are infact called API (BZ) like previous calibers, despite lacking any incendiary element. So they are just solid shot.
Now why would you even carry 37mm AP shells instead of 37mm HEI?
On thing that is for certain, is that a 37mm AP packs quite the kinetic energy.
It might not take down a bomber in one shot, but it can go throught the entire fuselage and destroy an engine.
It’s also interesting to think what would happen, if a fuel tank was hit.
In WT it would just pass through, but in RL would create a massive fuel leak.
And with the kinetic energy that gets dumped into the fuel tank, a huge amount of fuel is probably going to spill out of the tank.
While that won’t do much on it’s own, other 23mm API/HEI and 37mm HEI shells are on their way, which would easily set the fuel on fire, creating a massive fuel fire in the wing, that would most certainly be the end of the bomber.
Something that just doesn’t happen in WT. So instead it’s just blowing off wings with 37mm HEI in a single hit.
You do realize that a mere 5% antimony is enough to significantly boost lead’s tensile strength, and the USA had it over double that at 12.5%?
Why are you so intent on saying that adding a well-known hardening alloying metal to lead couldn’t possibly increase its ability to penetrate armor?