I sound rediculous because I want good and hard fiights between 2 opponents? And not fights like: “Oh… enemy… ok… lets point my nose for 0.01 seconds barley towards him and boom… I won… God… I´m the greatest pilot ever lived!!!”?
Yes, how rediculous.
.50 are just OP atm.
That is not a very good argument since you forget that most German aces used gun pods on their 109s.
It may not split the plane in half but the damage it can couse from one hit can render the planes unusable some times multi hit can down a fighter, and actually according to US military tests it appears that 20 to 25 direct hit from 20mm mg151 where enough to down a heavy bomber, and it took 3 to 5 hits from 30mm to down a bomber.
Effects of 30mm rounds on planes:
No you don’t German 30mm and 20mm Mineshells where self distruct the fuse was a time fuse and not impact the shells pen almost to 2/3 in side and then explodes inside the plane.
I suggest you watch these two vids
Bc if anything the only thing that really underperform is the 20mm and 30mm cannons
Mustang mk1 has 20mm, not .50cals.
So no… it’s 20mm that deserve a hughe nerf, not .50s
Flaps destroyed and the bent structure would cause a lot of drag on one side.
Here’s what appears to be a 30mm hit against a P-47:
The Pilot died in a crash-landing from what I’ve read. The hydraulics were destroyed, yaming the landing gear.
Not necessarely lethal damage but enough to take out the plane for some time.
In WT, you can not take two 20mm Mineshell hits without a wing breaking.
no
The plane in the picture is a spitfire not a P47
P47 is under “spoiler”. It even says P47 in the picture.
Don’t even need to know how to read, the big cowling and slotted flaps are a dead giveaway. The P-47 itself was probably THE toughest single engine fighter of WW2, and even it didn’t fare too well.
My fault
yes it shows the effectiveness of sustained fire from multiple cannons on aircraft. There are videos of bombers collapsing and Fw-190s having ammo explosions from sustained fire from .50 rounds. They’re not underperforming.
Honestly, if 20mms get insta-collapsing action with their 20mms, then american .50’s need to get back their 2016 flamethrower status.
Bombers collapse as a result of the wing spars being hit, not holes in the skin of the aircraft being hit by a .50 cal. .50 cals don’t leave very big holes, their damage comes from hitting critical components, like engines, fuel, and wing spars, and this is already modelled. They are, in fact, significantly better at that in this game, not just because of mouse aim like most cases in this game, but because the .50 cals are significantly more accurate than in real life (even when just measuring a single .50 cal shooting in a straight line, this is without even considering the box setup on .50 cals that would have them spraying all over the place if they were modelled accurately).
Cannons, in particular when firing HE shells, do their damage very differently. They use the explosive power and the subsequent force of air resistance to blow huge holes in the skin of the aircraft. .50 cals can already accurately hit targets as far as 1.8km away without too much trouble, whereas cannons are restricted more to 1.2km, or even as close as 600m at most if you’re talking about the German ones.
If you get hit by a burst of .50 cals from an early P-51, that’s four .50 cals firing around 10 rounds per second, so at most it’s likely 30-50 rounds hitting. 30-50 hits is an optimistic estimation, assuming a full second of accurate fire (which is longer than you might think). 50-80 assumes more than a full second. While .50 cals leave a larger hole than a rifle calibre bullet, it’s not by much, so even with 30-50 holes in your wing you’re not going to have a very significant aerodynamic effect. .50 cals require hits on important components to do significant, let alone crippling damage.
On the other hand, a set of German 20mms from an FW 190 is four cannons firing 11.5 rounds per second. With the comparative inaccuracy, fire rate, velocity, and range, we can assume that there’s maybe half a second of accurate fire, meaning 5.75 rounds per second between four guns, which is 21 hits. That’s 21 hits with 2/3 being an HEI round with around 30g of TNT equivalent, which, if I recall correctly, is around 3/5 of a hand grenade. For context, this means 14 HEI rounds (on which the incendiary effect isn’t even modelled, to be clear), equaling the effect of 8.4 hand grenades exploding directly on the surface of your wooden/aluminum ww2 aircraft. This is before factoring the subsequent air resistance of high speed flight flowing against the new holes in your wing, and also before factoring the turbulence effect of a ton of air suddenly rushing into the vacuum of space caused by the explosion pushing the air away from your wing. Realistically, if those shots didn’t tear your wing off instantly, they were extremely likely to do so around five seconds after, which is not currently modelled in the game. Compared to the .50 cals, this does not need to hit critical components to do crippling damage, which means if you nick a wing instead of the engine it’s still likely to tear the wing off, or at least the control surfaces.
If anything, cannons are underperforming and .50 cals are overperforming.
EDIT: Formatting and adding context.
We’ve already shown the guncam footage of Bf-110s sitting on the direct rear of B-24s and B-17s not instantly sawing their tails off with 2 shots and the damage tests Britain did with their spitfires showing that 3 shells shouldn’t be splitting planes in half with the high explosive shells
Even when taking a belt that carried the least amount of mineshells in game, we still get wing snapping action. within the single digits while IRL, it took substantial firepower to take down a bomber in the way we see in War thunder.
Like what @KillaKiwi said. Everything is overperforming, but 20mms are overperforming moreso than .50’s.
I can score a snapshot on a P-47 and split the plane in half, just ignore that most of it’s fuselage is consistent of a massive turbocharger and large exhausts, while with .50’s I need a sustained burst even though historically, .50’s were able to very easily set fires with an M23 incendiary round having a 60% chance of lighting a fire with a single round, yet we don’t see that in game.
.50’s are ‘overperforming’ in structural damage, yes. But so are 20mms to a cartoonish degree.
the best option is to bring back the 2016 .50 flamethrowers where .50 incendiary rounds practically guaranteed a fire.
20mms are overperforming in damage not because of actual stats, but because mouse aim lets us be more accurate than you could be in real life. .50s get this advantage as well, arguably to an even greater degree when you factor in the range you can fire them at. If you want to see realistic damage with .50s and 20mms, look at gameplay from IL-2 Sturmovik, which is widely considered to have more realistic damage with those rounds (though I know at least the mk108 rounds underperform a lot in that game).
Most people in ww2 considered the .50s, while good, to be solidly inferior to cannons. The Allies tried repeatedly to replace them with cannons but could not due to reliability and jamming issues. The primary reason American aircraft have .50 cals is that they were unable to replace them, not because they were considered desirable by comparison. As for the chance to set fires, I haven’t checked the 60% chance figure that you state, but I guarantee that’s only going to be for fuel tanks and engines, not for simply hitting the fuselage (where there would be some chance if it’s paper or wood, but far lesser).
KillaKiwi’s post is almost entirely correct except for the statement of the two 20mms. You are almost never just getting hit by 2 rounds. As I stated in my last post, with 4 German 20mms, at the ranges you can actually fire those, you’re hitting 20 rounds or so if you’re accurate, though 10 is more likely. 10 20mm rounds with 28g of TNT equivalent will cripple a wing.
If that P47 in KillaKiwi’s post was actually hit by a German 30mm rather than the service crews merely thinking so, then it is exceedingly lucky to have taken so little damage, because usually those shells will just tear off entire wings or tails with a single round.
.50 cals are far easier to hit with than most 20mms, especially German and Japanese cannons. If you make them flamethrowers again, there will literally be no advantage to using cannons despite cannons historically being the much preferred option.
EDIT: If you want to talk about rounds that should be flamethrowers, the incendiary round on the German 30mms is supposed to have 140g of outright thermite, but in practice I do not believe an incendiary effect is even modelled.
laughs in swedish akan m/39A
Which involved 20mm fire with unknown ammo loadout being spread across the entire aircraft, with most of it missing. I wager I could replicate that exact situation in-game.
Which were stationary and not subject to any aerodynamic forces of flying at a few hundred kph.
Of which nothing is modeled
The few planes that did get them (F6F-5’s inner pair could be swapped out, P-38) always had a catch. F6F crews even when issued one with the cannons, would often replace them with .50s since they just weren’t at all reliable. The P-38 I believe had a recocker for its 20mm, afforded by the extra space available with the nose installation.
Late war cannons were reliable enough to be issued, though still not perfect.
I don’t think I’ve read any complaints from crews about the MG151s jamming, which is quite interesting given that it was a ‘clean slate’ design instead of iterating on the Hispano.
Logistics too.
U.S aircraft had to perform very, very far from the home front and being able to reliably use the same ammunition for multiple platforms, multiple weapons cannot be understated in a prolonged, protacted war where you’re also providing lend-lease to your allies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F88uZ922gU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRtKK1TavSE
Also mention of aerodynamic forces seems fairly important.
I find I only tend to shred wings with my 50 cal aircraft if the target is trying to turn heavily. Otherwise they can eat a hefty burst and be seemingly fine.
They would jam if you tried to fire them while pulling more than 8-10 Gs, I think, though I’ve always assumed other cannons shared a similar flaw with G forces. That’s the only case I’ve heard of them having a “reliability issue” so to speak.
