I know. .50cals still have enough power to rip wings/control surfaces off when fired at the right angle and against especially soft targets (Japanese planes).
1 Like
The question is what you are trying to say.
The ability to down a plane with a .50cal is insignificant compared to the power of the force (of a 20mm).
It’s pretty much known what a .50cal can accomplish, particularly in comparison to 20mm and larger cannons.
Especially since Soviets had a similar .50cal with API and HEI bullets, which was still less effective than one of the weakest 20mm cannons.
Theoretically, multiple .50cals tumbling after impact might be able to rip enough holes into a wing spar to weaken it enough for it to break in flight , but it’s still an unlikely scenario, as these hits needs to be very close together. Basically sawing through the spar.
20mm cannons as AA were probably very effective during the interwar years where planes were still mostly constructed from wood but against metal planes the effectiveness was greatly reduced.
It’s not very likely to hit a fighter-bomber more than once with a single 20mm, which isn’t all that likely to bring it down.
Hence why Germany mounted them in a quad mounts but favored 37mm cannon development in later years.
1 Like
Not really? It might happen once in a blue moon on an already weakened target, maybe.
It’s certainly possible, just not very likely.
I’ve seen some picture of .50cals leaving some pretty long scratches in the wing of an aircraft.
So in theory they should be able to cause enough damage to the skin to have it bend and rip off.
But we’re talking about 2-3mm thick plates.
Not very likely for a round to impact that and leave more than a hole or a 10cm long scratch.
But in general the killing power effects pretty much everything but the structure of the aircraft.
Engine, pilot and fuel are going to be 99% of the causes for a .50cal kill.
Unless we‘re taking Biplanes vs. explosive bullets.
The big puff was just created from the airframe breaks, not directly from the M8 API hit. Simple.
Almost all cases of wing ripping off clips in gun cam I saw, were came from 50cal shots. Haven’t seen any footage of German or British 20mm tear off a wing from a S/E fighter. The number of samples and lower hitting rate of the 20 do matter in the case. One theory would be that 20mm HE round do most damage to the skin rather than the spar.
Yes you certainly saw cases where 109/190 been absolutely punched in 50cal long burst while leaving no structure damage. That do happen more often when the aircraft was steady and with little load. When the aircraft taken such punishment been thrown into a dive latter, the structure would likely to break apart, that would be outside the gun-cam range. When the aircraft was having air-load/ maneuverer, an AP round hitting the spar that accumulated a lot of stress, would be catastrophic. Specifically in Y29 air battle, P-51 pilots saw that FW-190 could took a lot of punishment when they flew steady, but its both wing could be shredded and flip like an carrier aircraft when exposed to 50cal fire in a sharp turn.
This 109 was trying a little neg-G roll, when 50cal hit the spar, the wing ripped off.
The 50cal HMG is definitely weaker when comparing with 20mm, but US planes often carry 6-8 of them, so that would still be very lethal. Again in lot of clips, it was not known whether the pilot shot all of them, sometimes the pilot would just shoot a pair of them. The amount vibration in the clip may tell.
In WT the structural breaks seems to be irrelevant to the airspeed and acceleration. This reminds of IL2-1946, where the JAVA code allows the spar been shot off more frequent when the speed and acceleration was high.
More nice footage coming.
He-111 torn apart by 50cal:
109 been torn apart:
Large airframe damage:
If they pack M-shell in the wing, this would be easier.
1 Like
No it was pretty common. Ofc, as I’ve said multiple times, it was different for Japanese aircraft due to their extreme lightweight construction.
Well, thats certainly the case.
HE explodes on impact and the pressure rips the skin apart while fragments are tiny compared to .50cal bullets.
.50cal bullets fly through the entire airframe, tumbling after impact, which creates large bullet shaped cuts in the spar.
If one area receives enough hits the spar will break under the stress of flying.
Spars are also much stronger then the rest of the wing.
When 60g of various explosive filling was detonated in front of a Spitfires main spar the spar was intact, with only a hole blown through in the middle.
While the skin was blown apart from the pressure.
Still the chance of .50cals causing enough localized damage to a spar is relative low.
Especially considering the accuracy of .50cal rounds.
You have to be very close to even have a chance for them to hit a spar in a localized area.
There’s a lot of footage of .50cals or 20mm armed fighters where simply nothing happens.
That and the fact that spars accumulate damage over their entire length.
Which makes spars in WT way too weak against kinetic damage, in addition of taking too much damage in general.
I’ve shot wings off from B-17s with a couple of .50cal rounds from a P-39s two .50cals.
Just targeting the center of wing.
Against AI planes from close range.
While the other day I had my Ta 152 H lose its wing while attacking a B-29 in GRB from a distance of 400-500m.
With bullets flying all over the place.
I would say the US 50cal in the current game may be some 25-50% more destructive (depending on the case) when compared with real history.(You have to consider most time in history they shot something equivalent early/middle 50cal belt in the game, and with larger dispersion on gun convergence setting).
But considering that 20mms are doing at least 200% more, and Japanese/Swedish HE 50cal doing possibly 400% more. I think that’s acceptable for US 50cal to be at the current level.
A lot of time I see ki-61/84, yak3, and bf109k4 absorb at least 50-100 shots from my 50cal but still be able to fly normally. In the historical record, I can barely see some guy (S/E plane) fly back after being hit by more than 50 shots of .50bmg, excluding those who count fragmentation scar into account.(Iwamoto claimed received 200 shots on his A6M, simply impossible).
1 Like
On flipside though, I don’t think I’ve ever ripped a wing while maneuvering a damaged aircraft without follow-up hits, while in real life you’d expect a weakened spar to give out more readily - especially in dives/pullouts and high G turns.
Which I do think would be cool if wing structural damage translated more to reduction in maximum g-loading before more damage, and if high G loading could cause structural damage by itself (I wish I could find it, but I recall reading RAF reports of horizontal stabilizers getting damaged when pulling out in a dive in either the earlier models of the hurricane or the typhoon). It’d create an interesting dynamic in defensive flying where hits were less immediate death (unless the damage was sufficient to reduce g limit to below 1 or so).
Having reduced max G on a given part of an aircraft when damaged could maybe satisfy issues with “X does too much/too little damage!”
2 Likes