Yeah, 2x the Explosive filler tends to do that, however the 30mm grenade launchers were mostly used for anti-bomber duty. Obviously in game isn’t isn’t the case, but yknow.
Some piss off .50 cal isn’t going to rip the B-29/TU-4’s wing off, it might do minimal damage, and at a most, if you go head on you might get a few good rounds into the cockpit and kill the nose crew.
Not when most of the shots are missing and going away from the target. All those tracers were diverging from, not converging on the target.
Which is why the M1, M2, M3, M24, Mk12, and finally M39 20mm cannons were all made, with only the M39 sticking around for a significant time?
The M1 20mm wasn’t even used at all despite an entire production line being made just for it. These guns were entirely UNUSABLE due to how unreliable they were.
They’re supposed to be worse than cannons and this is accurate. Before deciding to start production of the M1 20mm cannon (HS.404 copy), the US found that a single one of these would have equivalent firepower to 3x M2 .50cals while being under half the weight.
There’s a reason that literally everyone switched to 20mm guns the moment they had a dependable design and it isn’t because .50cals were “just as good”.
Yes as we can see this is apparently “literally no damage”.
Just ignore B-239s which combine those exact same .50cals you’re using (and just 4 of them!) with a maneuverable airframe and are absolutely decimating low tier since their introduction. Point and click adventure.
The IL-2M:
The Tu-2S:
The damage you took was from a bomb, going off of the full circle damage indicator and the simultaneous nature of the damage to your nose, cockpit, and right wing. I’m not talking about how you already took damage on the nose by the gunner (I can see that you did, and the bullet impacting your plane can also be seen), but the damage you took that had the full circle was not from a gunner.
It depends on what you mean by “a heck of a lot” and “very quickly”.
Most of the kills that weren’t just bomb explosions (or the pilot snipe or pilot error) relied on fire to break control surfaces/snap the airframe after a while.
Except a lot of the time (most of the time, really), a plane can be on fire and still be fully capable of controlling their aircraft. Them falling out of the sky without any control is the visual indicator in the scenario that you’re describing, and determining if they actually aren’t in control takes more time than seeing a shorn off wing.
I think you’re talking about how the US found that 20mms put out more damage than 0.50 cals when both guns put out the same mass of bullets, which I know, but that isn’t what’s happening currently (and I was implicitly saying how 0.50 cals would be just equal in terms of competitiveness).
A fire to a single engine? Is that supposed to counter my argument? If you showed me the wing getting shorn off, the tail getting obliterated, or something akin to that, then I’d say it wasn’t “literally no damage.”
I didn’t need to shoot again, but it was at that moment that I remembered I absolutely DESPISE Hornets and shot him again.
In a single pass with DEFAULT belts: one engine completely destroyed, a fire that is not extinguishable, a radiator completely destroyed and another one leaking badly, extensive airframe damage. He wasn’t returning to base nor staying in the fight.
The second burst from closer up just detached the wing that was already on fire. Entirely unnecessary.
One engine destroyed, one radiator destroyed (not that it really matters since the engine is destroyed), and nothing else broken? He could’ve 100% made it back to base. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything in the fight other than try for one or two headons, but that’s still more than what would happen if a wing or tail was ripped off.
Engine fires are not extinguishable, and the Hornet is still a wood plane. He’s not making it back.
Half the belt is straight AP. No incendiary whatsoever.
Not sure what you’re trying to say. The B-239 is a Buffalo but with 4 Belgium Browning guns which have a RoF of 1100 compared to the US AN/M2s 750.
Which is almost like 6 AN/M2s.
And yet despite using the same ammo they’ll delete anything in the blink of an eye.
Well, they can easily knock out engines.
Damage against engines is somewhat exaggerated in WT.
A Stuka can melt your engine in a seconds with its MG 81Z, even though British tests showed that .303 MGs have no immediate effect on a Bf 109 engine firing from 200yd.
It takes 3-4 .50cal to kill an engine in WT and at low tier planes are slow meaning more time on target.
4-6 .50cals is practically peak armament at that BR other than a ShVAK with 120 rounds.
French Hispanos are of course also very effective but have merely 60 rounds while MG FF/M and Type 99-1s suffer from poor range.
you clearly dont understand how convergence works, because if the target is past the convergence distance then the shots are diverging
yes many of these were made because the navy and USMC wanted 20mms for effect on ground targets like I said earlier
This entire list is literally “.50 cals doing damage”
It is again splitting hairs as to what causes the damage.
You are literally saying “it wasn’t the bullet doing the damage, it was all these other things caused by the bullet hitting the plane that did the damage”
I could make the exact same argument you are about 20mms by saying “it wasnt the round that did the damage, it was the explosion the round caused that did the damage”.
Your argument would make more sense if it wasnt entirely based on pretending that all of the ways that .50 cals do their damage didnt exist.
A list of lucky hits and fire doing damage.*
You mean the explosion that was straight up from the round, and not fire randomly deciding to actually do something?
Except it isn’t the .50 cad doing damage, it is fire doing damage. Other guns don’t have to rely on passive effects.
Its not luck if its consistent, which it is. You are clutching at straws now
yeah, just like all those control surface and engine damage from the .50 cals that was straight from all those rounds.
2 planes. 2 planes at most died due to fire damage. And if you MUST insist that these planes ARE dying to fires and not the rounds themselves, then fires disintegrating aircraft in ~2 seconds max must mean those fires are doing a substantial amount of damage very quickly which makes your complaints about them seem strangely incoherent.
The point is not to show that you should ONLY use the cannon, but that you can succeed greatly even if you DECIDED to go only the cannon. A small burst on a B-17 watching him completely go completely undone just throws out my suspension of disbelief.
Because when the rounds get smaller and smaller. It becomes a matter of verbiage of ‘what’s considered high explosive’ Like I stated before. The Dutch with U.S. M1 incendiary considered it high explosive. and I don’t blame them if API does this . Now imagine M23 with over with 5.8 grams of IM-28 filler. The round equally should explode and throw hot fragments all over the aircraft and those fragments hit fuel tanks and especially those with thin and weak spars. The question is, and lets use Japanese ammunition as an example. How does 1 gram of PETN compare to almost 6 grams of incendiary filler? Because Incendiary ‘explodes’ just as well. I mean…
The ammunition should throw chunks. But according to gaijin. Just because Japan called their rounds ‘high explosive’ even though they technically have less explosive mass, two shots from a jap .50 is enough to completely blacken your wing.
Similarly. it should be honestly expected that airframe durability differed A LOT during the war. This isn’t today where you really do need to make a tough airframe to withstand supersonic speeds. You’re having planes with different design philosophies even from the same country. Compare the Fw-190 to the Bf-109. Or the P-47 to the P-51. The very way parts are built are completely different. The P-47 was built more like a purpose built tool, and it showed during the war. Same dealio with the A6M. Build to have as long range, and be as light as possible. So you wind up with A6Ms during the war going utterly obliterated later on as faster aircraft emerged and .50s tore into them.
Some countries stuffed as much as they can in as small and light of an airframe as possible
That’s if we go by M23 being entirely consistent in the belt. And you’re mixing IRL with war thunder physics. Currently in game. even 20mm can segment P-47s into 4 pieces.
If you look at swedish and japanese ammo belts, it’s roughly you’re throwing out all ‘HE’ rounds with one AP being there just to be tracer while in U.S. (late) belts and early belts, unless you straight play stealth, you’re having a lot of filler AP and API-T rounds using universal. with only two incendiary in the lineup. and with early belts, it’s even less with only ONE incendiary round.
Gameplay wise, I don’t see the problem with having two rounds maximum in a repeating belt of 5 being able to actually affect enemy aircraft structure while the rest act as filler or for fuel tanks.
Fires do extinguish. This isn’t 2014 anymore where .50 flamethrowers were guaranteed death and instantly melted your plane. I can’t even count how many times now I lit an enemy on fire only for them to still try and kill me and nearly succeed or the enemy was able to recover from the fire and fly back to base as I now have an entire enemy team flying back to me, and in general, twin engine vehicles are easier to catch alight. Big target with more things to hit. It’s not hard to catch any enemy on fire when they’re literally covered in fuel tanks and two massive engines.
I pointed before that .50s have redeeming qualities. But being reliant on “I hope I catch this guy on fire” while when everyone looks at me and they just go ‘I just have to hit this dude.’ is a different feeling. When I play any other country. That’s my general mindset.
Similarly, why is the argument “.50s can do fires!” even an argument? Every plane can start fires, and do so reliably. They’re not some hidden mechanic only done by .50s. Almost every single time I’ve gotten ganked by a 20mm I was lit on fire.
M23 is just a thin brass jacked filled entirely with incendiary filler.
There’s no real fragmentations and the velocity of the fragments wound be super low due to the lower brisance over real explosive.
Dude, that is certainly not the result of simply 2.2g of incendiary filler.
M1 incendiary is enclosed in a steel tube, that will focus the flash to the front of the bullet.
There are also images of Incendiary rounds being tested by US researchers and they don’t go off in a 1m wide fireball.
German 20mm FI-T carried 2.1g Thermite, Hispano HEFI 5.7g flash powder, 20mm Mineshells 3.7g aluminum.
All would create a much larger fireball.
Yet you don’t see huge fireballs appearing constantly in either US, British or German gun camera footage,
unless fuel was ignited.
US planes with 60-100% API or API-T and 6-8 guns just throw out the most rounds that could start a fire.
And since 20mm don’t have any advantage in setting fires and .50cal API is just as likely to start a fire as 20mm API, they simply have the best chance to start a fire.
The combination of ballistics and number of rounds always has made US .50cals the number one fire causing weapon in WT.
20mm will always always rip your wings or planes and only in a few instances is fire the actual cause for being destroyed.
90% of times your plane suffers so much damage that fires merely finish the job.
.50cals dealing inherently less structural damage benefit much more from setting fires and in a lot of instances fires are the main killing power of .50cals.
6 .50cals API-T over a single 20mm HEFI are not likely to cause a kill unless hitting the engine or the pilot.
And fuel tanks are an additional factor that can lead to the plane getting killed.
Factor in the better ballistic of .50cals over most 20mm cannons and were probably talking about 10-12 .50cals for a single 20mm hit, for a single 20mm cannon.
So the chance of causing a fuel fire is pretty high and let’s not pretend that fuel fires aren’t lethal least 50% of times, unless it’s Ju 288.
Countless times I suffered minimal damage from .50cals and my plane was destroyed from 2-4 .50cals lightly damaging my fuel tank from 800-1000m.
With four .50s in the nose, you could also succeed greatly without using the cannon at all as well, so the point is kinda moot here I feel
Okay so heres the thing here, I think this whole topic is in the wrong direction. The thing you are debating isn’t whether .50s should be equal to 20mms, because the answer is obviously no. But I think the real debate here is whether the US M2 Browning .50 cal is under performing compared to OTHER nations .50 cal MGs.
I will say, your part of the debate is much better and makes more sense than SpecialistMain’s mental merry-go-round.
I did give the Ki-44 a fly, checking its HEF round, we do actually have 3.06g of TNT equivalent - about half what the HEF-T shell on the 20mm Type 99 Mod 1 cannon the A6M2 at the same BR gets. And I admit, if you look at the two clips in the video below, it does snap wings like it did to the P-51D, but also it does do things like it did against that P-63, that was a lot of hits for a whole lot of not much. He did lose control, get stuck in a flat spin, and would have given me the kill had my teammate not gotten some hits in right after, but in this scenario, I’m willing to bet that the same number of M2 brownings would have ripped him to bits and set him on fire as well. I think the Brownings are slightly more consistent in that regard. (and have better ballistics than the Ho-103 to be honest)
I think a lot of this has to do with the Ki-44 being an extremely strong aircraft in terms of flight performance at its BR, more than the guns themselves
I already talked about this in my realShatter topic but HMG explosive bullets can literally deal no damage on impact, just based on RNG →
The rounds are simply bipolar. They can either deal insane damage or just hardly any to no damage, simply based on RNG fragmentation dispersion.
Are you consistent with bomb hits and pilot snipes?
There was a lot of single elevator damage, not much in terms of engine, though.
The number of total kills: 10
The number of kills that weren’t bomb destructions, a pilot snipe, or the enemy dying for no reason (the Su-9): 6
The remaining four kills:
That is 1/3 fire damage, 1/2 likely assisted by fire damage, and 1/6 direct hits to the wing spar.
Except fire damage is inconsistent nor is it as powerful as HE filler.
Do you have more information on the explosive used in the .50 cals? I’d like to look it up some so I can see if we can get an HE modifier/code added to the .50 cal rounds (at least internally).
From a microfilm from the USAAF, it seems like the gap between 15mm, 20mm, and 30mm destruction was pretty considerable (for German shells): 50 cal (high rate of fire) vs 20mm cannon (hitting power) | Page 3 | Aircraft of World War II - WW2Aircraft.net Forums
