It’s most likely just a bug.
While all shells start with the same velocity, each shell has their own ballistics and slow down at different rates.
So there’s no real reason for that to be intentional.
It also effects gun penetration because the velocity is higher or lower than it should.
This might be a bug that‘s as old as the game itself.
I was surprised, only one of the shells is that slow. The FF/M HEI is even faster at 750m/s, I think gaijin fucked up somewhere.
My dude, you just need the same advice as this guy:
Nah its just because Im playing a P-36 at 5.3 lol, its just too slow to keep up. It out turns them all though so if they do try to fight me they’re dead.
Ah, I see that now. Sorry about that, I looked back to see what I was responding to but not the full context.
The wiki has 2x 7.7mms for some reason lol (for the record I don’t use the wiki for everything, but running war thunder just to check out a vehicle usually is too annoying for me due to my overheat-prone laptop).
Except the rate of fire difference for the M2s (pretty much all WWII planes iirc) to any 20mm isn’t that large, and the number of guns nor the extra ammo outways their poor damage.
Accurately is relative, and the damage you’ll do isn’t much.
Corrected with the flash powder (assuming a similar RE factor): 1.361-1.522g TNTeq (still lower than what the M23 should have)
Tbh I forgot about that. The updated table would be:
| MG/Cannon | Penetration (mm) | Velocity (m/s) | Ammo Storage | Rate of Fire (round/s) | Time to Spray (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M2 .50 cal (Late belts) | 28-30 | 874-899 | 425 | 12.5 | 34 |
| ShVak 20mm (Standard belts) | 28 | 800-815 | 120 | 12 | 10 |
| Mg 151 20mm | 26 | 720-785 | 200 | 11.67 | 17.14 |
| Hispano Mk.II | 26-37 | 853-880 | 125 | 10 | 12.5 |
The .50 cal now barely has a velocity advantage (if it has one), with the only thing left being the number of bullets.
Except that goes under the assumption you are in the scenario of being near-directly behind the enemy with them not realizing you are there long enough so you can spray enough bullets.
Two other people are already shooting at him so we have no clue how damaged he actually was. Mixed with what percussion cap stated before.
According to server replay only hits TBF sustained is from my MG. First hit was in engine area. Wings were untouched till rip.
Hit registration and tracer sync doesn’t matter for server replay because server counts damage only for hit it registers and on replay it looks like it registered only my hits.
Does anybody want to TLDR the last 100-150 comments for me so I don’t have to read pointless bickering
Dovah and SpeclistMain: “M2 Browning .50 Cals don’t do enouugh damage. (Dovah): Japanese 12.7mm HEF Rounds do more damage and rip wings off more” (Speclist): “M2 Brownings should do the same damage as a 20mm”"
Me and PercussionCap: “Browing .50 Cals do less damage individually but you have far more guns with far more ammo, with much better ballistics, so they have broadly equivalent firepower to planes with 2x 20mms and 2x MGs, but do their damage a different way”
Repeat lots of bickering about whether a wing snap is a “better” kill than an engine/fuel fire and loss of control surfaces, and nitpicking about exactly where the rounds hit, and differences between certain guns and shell velocities and aircraft
This is what I agree with
My Zeros are also quite slow, the P-36G is probably slower still.
Ho-3 - 400rpm (feel free to write this one off as it’s only found in a few Ki-45s, probably the slowest aircraft 20mm in the game)
Type 99-2 - 490rpm
Type 99-1 - 516rpm
MG FF and FF/M - 520rpm
Hispano Mk1/Mk2 - 600rpm
AN/M2 - 600rpm
NS-23 - 600rpm
MG151/15 and /20 - 700rpm
Hispano Mk5 - 750rpm
AN/M3 - 750rpm
M2 .50cal - 750rpm
ShVAK (synchronized) - 750rpm; (unsynchronized) - 800rpm
Ho-5 - 950rpm
The only 20mm cannons that fire faster are the Ho-5 and ShVAK, both affected by poor ammo capacity and the former affected by subpar ballistics, belts, and damage.
The Hispano Mk5 and friends are generally only found at 5.7 and above, bar exceptions like the fucking Wyvern and some crappy attackers like the Firefly Mk5 and Brigand.
MG151/20s have awful ballistics, and the 15mm model is only found on ONE fighter in a configuration you’d actually want to use, the ones in gunpods suck.
There’s only two cannons that fire faster and the majority are at 600rpm and below.
Sadly I can’t take replays admissable because like I said before. Percussion cap states they aren’t reliable. If this was the case. Then this Yak-9 screencap from a Replay I had after coating his wing in shots (He survived this btw)
there are no belts that start with M23 so its velocity never matters now when they add custom belts (passed to devs iirc) it could get interesting
If there was custom belts it would fix a decent chunk of the problems I would probably have with .50s.
Again I pointed that out several times. just let .50s have a belt consistent of mostly incendiary like what most other aircraft armaments have. But again. They like to stay quiet on it. Strangely enough.
U.S. .50s have only belts filled with primarily AP while for most other aircraft have they get a belt full of their most damage dealing round for the largest surfaces for them to hit.
On planes like the P-47 with wing mounted weaponry. Unless you hit directly where convergence is at. You’re going to have to aim your aircraft where only one side of your wing is striking the fuselage to cause a fire.
Japanese, Italian, Swedish machine guns. You just have to hit somewhere to hurt bad. Thanks to favorful belt compositions.
"Well, if America is going to have a belt that barely has any incendiary, buff the incendiary so at least periodically, when you do have the round hit it’ll actually do damage "
They go “No no! That’ll be too OP!”
“Oh, Okay. then let the U.S. have a belt that’s almost entirely incendiary with some API-T”
Crickets…
Im not talking about the M.Geschoss. Tho I dont know the in game velocitys from memory right now.
Yeah it’s 585m/s and 675m/s for Mineshells, which are never the first shell in a belt.
Let me close the topic then with a summary:
US .50cals deal less damage than other .50cals at the moment because they don’t have explosive bullets.
Explosive bullets are overperforming massively.
If US .50cals were buffed to the same level, they would start to overperform massively as well.
Resulting in huge BR bumps and similar unrealistic killing power.
Outperforming most fighters armed with 20mm cannons.
That‘s because US planes start to use .50cals when other nation still have 7.7mm LMGs, and generally have 4-6 guns when other planes get 20mm cannons.
So at the moment their lack of damage is compensated by number of guns as well as excellent ballistics, with high muzzle velocity and low drag.
Pure incendiary rounds are almost useless, but that’s the case with every nation.
Even HEFI has no advantage over HEF shells, as the structural killing power is so high that AP and Incendiary effect are redundant.
Even though the damage is lacking compared to the overperforming nature of explosive rounds, US planes armed with .50cals have no problem downing other planes.
Therefore the entire discussion revolves around:
And
that is a pretty good summary in my opinion.
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That is something I had thought about before.
If you think their climb rates are bad now, just imagine when EVERY single plane with US .50cals goes up by a whole BR (or more! see F4U-1C) because of their new firepower upgrade. F4U-4 is going right to the same BR as the -4B is now.
Silver lining that the F8F-1 might finally reach a balanced BR.
