It’s closer to rifle caliber than say a 20mm, but there is a boundary that .50 bmg crosses, as well as other HMG calibers that set them apart from rifle calibers. Look at a picture of .50 BMG next to a .30-06 or 7.62x51 round and a NATO or WW2 german 20mm round. The .50 is much closer in size to the 20mm than the 7.62. but you will also notice the higher volume 20mm round. This is because there is a distinction between rifle caliber, heavy machine gun, and autocannon ammunition, and .59 cal is HMG
Not asking for non explosive rounds to detonate, nor am I asking for insta snaps. Like I said above in th original post, I want the damage to be slightly lesser than the swedish 13.2mm as even the 13.2mm machine guns almost behave like full on cannons (I’m using the definition that 15mm and above is a cannon, as that’s been generally accepted) I’m well aware that glancing blows with .50s that have no filler will usually consist with several rounds hitting the enemy aircraft with minimal damage. My gripe is that the .50 damage potential is much lesser to a great extent whilst 20mm cannons have cartoonishly strong damage potential, blowing off entire fuselage’s of aircraft in either a single round or in a few rounds. The disparity makes no sense as the only ‘strength’ the .50’s have is the ability to set fires, something 20mm’s do as well. Surely you remember when Gaijin had it several years back where .50’s basically lost all ability to set fires right? Their damage was utterly pitiful.
Again, look at how each .50 round behaves in the protection analysis. Literally all of them besides API-T basically do no damage. I don’t even understand why rounds like the non AP incendiary rounds are even in the game if they do absolutely no damage in comparison to API/API-T
In fact, I wonder what would happen if gaijin allowed us to make custom ammunition belts for firing sequence. What would happen if I had 1 API-T for every 3 incendiary round? How would this affect damage?
The 13.2mm guns have High Explosive Fragmention - Tracer rounds. Again, the US .50 calibers do not have any high explosive rounds. The reason the damage is lesser is because of the lack of filler. This goes back to the explosive thing. If you look at the damaged caused by the German MG131 (13mm) API-T it is just as little as the .50. The .50 caliber is not the only machine gun that has low damage due to the lack of High Explosive ammunition. Even the German 20mm AP-I doesn’t deal a huge amount of damage.
You aren’t firing a single .50 at a time exept from defensive guns. Firing 4-14 .50 cals at a target makes a huge difference. They are in the game because that was the makeup of the belts available to these weapons. Having 1 ammo belt option in game isn’t very interesting, nor historically accurate.
Thee strengths of the .50 caliber guns are better penetration, less drop, faster velocity, and having more guns per airframe. They deal less damage, yes, but that is the only serious downside.
The damage would be similar, just without any damage to internal modules. The incendiary rounds shatter on impact and will destroy the airframe’s modules but not deal internal damage. I would assume that it will weaken the airframe enough to cause a wing to rip off under the stresses of flight.
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Protection analysis shows no fragmentation being produced by the 13.2mm HEF-T rounds. I trust what the game model says, not what the stat card says about filler
Not asking for one ammo belt, this was a rhetorical question.
The range, and velocity mean nothing if the ammunition doesn’t do anything to hurt the enemy unless you can score solid bursts on him. You’re not making 2km shots on average. You’re making the same deflection shot he can make on you, except for you, you have to stay longer with your fifties while a tap or two with his cannon will either kill you or put so much damage on your airframe you can’t even turn properly as your plane biases towards that wing.
Everything needs a buff with all the uptiers
Explosive blast isn’t properly shown in those models. That blast radius is the primary damaging force. Think about overpressure in tanks.
Didn’t say you were. The big thing there was about volume of fire.
If you can’t land solid burth with .50s, then every other gun is going to be more of a challenge because the .50s have the best ballistics.
You can fire a longer more accurate burst from a further distance and and pull off before cannon fire can reach you. That is the bonus of the ballistics.
Do 50’s get burst mass like early spits 7.62’s?
Imho every communication after this request (“cannons to be just slightly better than 0.50 cals”) was just a waste of time and energy for the other contributors.
It makes no sense to use rational arguments vs irrational viewpoints.
This guy is just trolling. Don’t feed trolls.
You misunderstood my point.
Unless you can get a full on solid burst from such extremely far ranges, the velocity and range of the .50’s won’t serve you well. I’m not talking typical engagement distances of 0.9 km and below. You would need to have specific convergence to take effective use at the distances I’m talking about, and whilst german cannons would struggle due to the shells bursting mid-air, the British and especially russian cannons would have significantly less issue. In fact, I’ve been struck by russian cannons 1.2km away whilst running from them. My issue is not “getting a burst off on an enemy” it’s “You can’t get a burst off on an enemy from over 1km away and the damage you do is miniscule”
Again see my point above. Cannons need one lucky shot to severely damage your aircraft. .50’s need multiple.
Again, like above. the volume of fire with the scrapes you provide on the enemy do very little unless you luckily hit a radiator, at which point your rounds have already lost enough energy (If he’s running from you) that they merely tickle the enemy aircraft
I’d like to repeat. My issue is that 2-3 cannon shells can literally split my plane in half. If I have to unload a 3-4 second burst, and 3-4 seconds is very long in this game especially when closing in, while having perfect accuracy with perfect convergence. That’s utterly stupid
So lemme get to the crux of this:
a short burst of 20mm cannon fire can literally split my plane like this.
So gaijin is saying that 3-4 of these
is on par damage wise to this:
This is why I say I don’t care about the “realistic” aspect of damage, because the damage modeling has gotten so cartoonish, that asking for .50’s to hit a bit harder shouldn’t be too much to ask for, when I can simply snap people in half with minimal effort with 20mm cannons.
Again, I wouldn’t ask this, if the damage modeling of the game wasn’t so goofy that 3-4 20mm cannon shells had the explosive output of a 500lb bomb.
Now I want to say, you argued with me in good faith, and I’m thankful for that. But at least you should understand why I’m asking for it, even if to you it seems unwarranted.
I need to achieve very long, and accurate bursts to even milk out the possibility of the the same insane amount of damage as 20mms can pull in this game.
Maybe it could be as simple as buffing the basic incendiary round a slight bit to allow more super structure damage, or who knows, replacing one of the API rounds with an extra incendiary to maximize super structure damage potential. All I want is to know my glancing shots for the most part, leave a lasting mark on the aircraft that affects their performance in some way. I’m not asking for the insta snap success.
I’m sorry I spent this much time trying to argue this. The only thing I understand from this is that Uncle_J_Wick was right. I have learned a very valuable lesson from all this.
You haven’t even used any other nations planes, so you can’t draw any experience from actually using 20mms other than the few the US has that only use AP-T and HEF-I. Your experience is only dying to them, which explains why you think they are sooo deadly. You mostly play arcade, where everything is more “cartoonish” to begin with. It makes perfect sense now. Enjoy, good luck to you.
It seems you’re upset simply because I disagree with you.
Mg151 cannons, ShVAKs and Hispanos are all OP. You simply don’t like the fact that I am stating what is true.
Think whatever you need to to help you sleep at night. Good luck to you.
Pilot snipe? No. Troll yes!
Individuals have been good to you and all you do is throw it back in there face with scutter
While it is quite annoying only getting “Critical Hit”, there’s is probably no way to actually buff them (without being non historical).
I mean, literally everything is capable of pilot sniping, while tail ripping is not really a thing if you’re using .50 cals (at least I don’t remember doing it).
And I personally never understood people who say “aim for the pilot!”, I may get like, half a second of firing time when the enemy intersects with my aim, I can’t really precisely aim at that short time (especially on something like a P-51D where you can’t really control due to rudder).
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/6V6sEORuH4nU
You can help out buff all kinetic rounds, by having Gaijin fix this bug.
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No, off topic
It affects guns that rely on AP and API rounds, so .50cal are inherently weaker at the moment.
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I would love for 50cals to have a buff for my p51d20na. Tbh it does ok, like you said if i can get on target due to rudder
You will get a reply that says “not a bug”