a black wing is super hard to fly with on any plane. Avoiding them hitting your wings is a tactic as well. Normally when I see someone coming for a good deflection shot on me, I roll sideways so they dont have my wings to shoot at. makes me a much smaller target and harder to hit, plus preventing wing damage.
you’re still focusing one one bullet vs one bullet though, its more like 1 bullet vs 2 bullets from an M2 browning. Plus you have different advantages that they do not. An M2 browning with an HEF round would become ny far and away the single most broken OP gun in the game
I’ve had this happen to just as many planes while firing 20mms too, all the damn time. you put a burst into them and they shrug it off. This is just more of a gaijin moment than a problem with the belts IMO.
I spent 300 replies and quite frankly several hours of gameplay explaining WITH video evidence exactly why he was wrong, and he refused to give me any evidence based response other than “You are wrong because I believe you are wrong!”
As I demonstrated above, the VAST majority of 20mm-equipped planes at your BR will have one or two 20mm guns. Their total RPM is 500-800 and 1000-1600 respectively.
Your P-47 is putting out 6000rpm while having ~10x the ammo capacity they do.
Their ammo is mainly ball or AP, they do not have good firepower.
The E-3 109 has 2x 20mms; I should’ve said “a Yak-1”; the A-0 and B-0 He 112s have 20mms; the LaGGs also have three non-2.7s; wait are you listing the planes that don’t have only one 20mm?
The Hurricane Mk IV, it’s 2.0 rip.
That’s not what’s being discussed there, though. What’s being discussed is that a 20mm can also take out engines but it (and HE 12.7mms and other cannons) can do consistent structural damage. Besides, one .50 cal bullet is not comparable to one 20mm in terms of engine damage.
Because having to spray to maybe do anything, taking more time and wasting more energy due to more passes, in airframes that are already worse than the competition in terms of short- and long-term dogfights isn’t good?
HE 12.7mms and cannons can waste ammo spraying people down, can get pilot snipes, and get engine kills, too. It’s just that they can do structural damage consistently.
The following estimates are based on an RE factor of 0.25-0.36 for the powder used in the US incendiary rounds. The values were based on formulations of barium nitrate, potassium chlorate, and aluminum powder in a document somewhere above this, although the two compounds used in US used a magnesium-aluminum alloy/powder. Values of 0.30 and 0.36 were found for the low-potassium-perchlorate solutions, so if the magnesium-aluminum powder enhances the RE factor then it might be greater.
M8 API (0.97g powder): 0.2425g-0.3492g TNTeq
M1 I (2.2g powder): 0.55g-0.792g TNTeq
M23 I (5.8g powder): 1.45g-2.088g TNTeq
Japanese 12.7mm HE (0.6g PETN): 0.996g TNTeq
15mm MG-151 HEF-T: 3.23g TNTeq
ShVak HEF-I: 4.35g TNTeq
ShVak HEF: 5.8g TNTeq
Hispano Mk.II HEI: 9.28g TNTeq
The M1 incendiary rounds should be just short of the Japanese 12.7mm HE rounds and the M23 incendiary rounds should have more than twice the destructive potential of the Japanese 12.7mm HE rounds.
Two rounds of M23 should do comparable damage to a single ShVak HEF-I round (actually better when you consider there is more surface area of two .50 cal explosions than one 20mm explosion due to the inverse square law), and three M23 rounds should be doing comparable damage to a ShVak HEF round.
Although, the incendiary rounds are obviously not doing that currently.
A M2 Browning API-T round is going to enter one side of the fuselage, fly through the entire thing, and do nothing important unless it directly impacts with a module that matters.*
That’s literally what incendiary does, and M23 literally has over TWICE the TNTeq of the 12.7mm HEF rounds.
If that’s the case, then in combination with the TNTeq values I found it seems like 2.7-3.888g TNTeq of flash powder is better than 6.875g TNTeq of Tetryl (RE factor of 1.25) plus 0.55g-0.792g of flash powder. That would give flash powder a damage ratio (in terms of effective damage per gram of TNTeq) of 1.972:1 to 2.75:1 when compared to traditional HE.
In that scenario, M23 would have a TNTeq (to structures specifically) of 4.12g to 5.742g - nearly to just better than some 20mms.
Thats a lot of damage from one bullet entering through the rear of the fuselage. (I did this about 20 different times in different areas, it almost always ended up in the engine after damaging multiple modules, or the pilot depending on exactly where you placed the round)
remember there are 74 more rounds coming every second where that one came from
working on playing this at 5.3 btw, I’ve never flown the plane so it started from completely stock, still GRB (so I can force it in with a 5.3 tank lineup) but people wont. stop. running. away from me. Like they aren’t even trying to extend to energy fight me, they just keep refusing to engage at all :(
currently 5 kiills 1 death (the death was to SPAA). But heres a nice pair I got today:
that was what, a 2 second burst on the Ki-44? two .50s and four .30s btw
(Oh, and I ripped the wing off the Ki-61, the opposite wing to the one that was on fire. though it took a bit more shooting to get him down)
Such wow, 2x 20mm with the ballistics of throwing a rock and 60 rounds each at 520 rpm, they are empty in no time with easily pretty much nothing hit.
And both E-3 and B-0 only use the MG FF without Minen.Geschoss.
And the FI-T (should be HEFI-T) is quite bad.
Not to mention the A-0 uses the 20mm MG C/30 L at 325 rpm with 100 rounds and no other armarment, and you will most likely choose the API-T belt, thats also not an ideal choice in general against air.
I find as a general rule of thumb, find the belt with the highest AP value with some incendiary. You need that AP value to break engine blocks or even armor. If the ammo in the belt contains: Incendiary alone or Ball or Tracer alone those are usually useless rounds within the belt.
The way .50 cals are modeled has always been a hot topic, especially when compared to the sheer destructive power of 20mm cannons.
Real gun camera footage shows that bringing down an aircraft usually took sustained fire whether through structural damage, setting it ablaze, hitting the pilot, or even triggering an ammunition explosion.
But in-game, 20mm rounds often feel absurdly overpowered, while .50 cals struggle to match their effectiveness from my testing.
Buffing the post-penetration damage of .50s to something closer to the Swedish 13.2mm rounds when they were first introduced seems like a fair adjustment, even if it’s not completely realistic.
If 20mm cannons are essentially functioning like tiny HE shells with exaggerated damage, then smaller calibers should at least be able to hold their own.
The nerf to incendiary tracer belts is another frustrating issue. Late-war U.S. belts were notorious for igniting enemy aircraft in real footage, yet their in-game performance has been weakened over time.
Germany and Russia get access to strong 20mm options early, making U.S. weapons feel comparatively underwhelming for a large part of the tech tree.
If War Thunder really wants to balance realism and gameplay, tweaking .50 cals to make high-altitude Boom & Zoom strategies more viable would be a welcome change.
A yellow elevator, yellow fuel tank, and yellow engine is a lot of damage? That’s also going under the assumption that it’s a near-direct shot from the rear - which I get is the premise of what you were talking about - but that isn’t what’s going to happen most of the time.
They’ll be doing more damage than 2x or 4x .50 cals, though. Especially at the low BRs where the .50 cals get the early belts (at most one incendiary shell per belt, and with the rest being either just AP, just T, or just Ball).
More than 2, ok, but not more than 4, not to mention that you simply dont have the advantages (that were so often mentioned above) that 2 Cal. .50 have. Ballistics, Velocity, Penetration, Ammo storage, fire rate. The Mg FF only has 1 thing for it, some damage, but getting the damage on target, in a comparisson to Cal. .50 is a whole different story, if you dont see that, thats either skill issue or you are just completly biased.
I’d rather have x6 .50cals over the current MG151/20 and even easily x4 over the MG/FF’s.
These are performing so poorly due to their outdated nerfed code and bad ballistics. Makes no sense.
So .50 cals get slightly better velocities (outside of M23 which is not the majority of belts) and more time to spray (on platforms that generally do not do well in long dogfights) as a trade for massively worse damage? Meanwhile cannons get to do massive amounts of damage with a limited amount of time to spray, even though their aircraft excel at quick and long dogfights?
YES, and you also have LOTS of Cal. .50, you can easily outrange shoot them, you can shoot whenever you want, with ease of aim, and the damage isnt bad as you want to say.
Pilot skill, there are different planes with different strength.
You now wrote the numbers yourself and yet are still blind, you are just so biased. Its not worth to concidder the topic. (Well it wasnt from the beginning, but thats a different story.)
They have fantastic firepower. Everytime I get a good angle on someone they’re either dead or terminally crippled.
You were talking about single 20mm-armed fighters. The 109 E-3 has two, and they’re quite bad in every regard. Very far apart, only 60rpg, bad ammo, low velocity, and even firerate is poor at ~500rpm. There’s a very good reason why it’s the same BR as the 109 E-1 with 4x 7.92mm.
That has two 40mm cannons.
Which is entirely irrevelant because at any given BR, .50cal-armed planes will have more guns (2-3x as many), each with higher RoF on average, and far greater ammo reserves. Sure, a .50cal may not destroy an engine like a 20mm hit would, but it never has to because it’s putting out several times more bullets in the air.
You can fire accurately from much further away.
With their much smaller ammo reserves and half as many guns most of the time?
By the way this is the early 12.7mm HEF, which had also 1g incendiary filler alongside the RDX explosive. Actually, most of those other shells should also have quite a bit of incendiary filler, so this is not a 1:1 comparison.
I’ve seen this happen a lot to me, my only recommendation is to just turn away and go for a reversal or maybe bait them into friendly SPAA. Of course the fight much more boring then.
Can also bring someone else along (in a squad) to chase them down.
Neither MG FF is what I’d call “strong”. Their poor performance leads to some very good flying fighters though, like the 109 E-4 - a far more important set of capabilities than “it shoots good”.
And even in that plane I’ll get as close as I can to guarantee good hits and not waste the very few 20mm shells it carries.
To complete this chart:
MG FF/M has 675m/s velocity on its Air Targets belt; Type 99-1s at 588m/s on all shells, and Type 99-2s (only found at 5.0 and up to 6.7) at an unimpressive 750m/s. Ho-5 20mm are even worse at 740m/s. Ho-103 12.7mm are also very low on this table at 780m/s and high drag.
You’re right, we don’t, but the fact remains that this debate has been dragging on since the old forum thread. Countless other issues still linger unresolved, yet nothing really changes.
I would like to add that bullet velocity only matters for the first round in the belt. The M23 could have 10000m/s velocity but if the first round in the belt is AP it’s going to follow the velocity of AP. Gaijin did this so you wouldn’t have random rounds that fired at way higher velocities than other rounds which I think is dumb.
You would think it’s the P-47. But unless you have a sustained burst on something important. you’re mostly going to be striking the wings with API-T which basically do nothing. Even in slow stall fights where you have enemies cross the nose. There are multiple times my guns rake across an opponent but do minimal damage. But I’ll fight any cannon armed or even machine gun armed aircraft and I get tapped and my entire plane turns to mush.
Using kills as a metric when you’re hitting essentially a bunch of blind people is not good form.
But lets use this video actually. Because this shows my point to a T.
For the first plane. dumped 50 rounds on the first plane. Now I’m 99% sure not all the rounds hit but lets say 10 smacked him, again. we’re not counting missed shots here. That’s not productive.
on the second pass, You took roughly ALL CENTERED 20 rounds to just set him alight. Not even a pilot snipe So over 30 rounds on target for a kill with a vast majority of them being ALL CENTERED and aimed DIRECTLY at the important bits with no worries for convergence or anything of that matter… For the second plane, it took 20 rounds all centered on directly his fuselage to actually set him alight. For both aircraft. These are sweetheart targets too. You aren’t booming and zooming people. You’re dumping EVERYTHING into this guy.
Here’s a funny too. Just as an aside.
On the outboard wings (Not the wing section of the wing root but the two others) 7.62 does the same damage as API-T on the skin. On the spars it’s iffy but it can opaque yellow it on a single hit.
It kinda shows that if you’re stuck striking the wings you’re doing piecemeal damage, even with a bunch of .50s. You’re doing dookie damage unless you hit something important (Like the point I’ve been making before.
Now what about the Ki-44?
Using ONLY the two wing mounted guns. I tore apart a P-47 in a few rounds.
My F6F kill. You’ll notice something… I am missing a lot of ammo. And it says gun jammed. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking. Yes. At the beginning of the match I purposely jammed one of my guns to ensure I was firing at the enemy with only ONE GUN
One japanese fifty cal beats eight American fifty cals.
