In all seriousness though, the issue isnt just that .50cal damage is too low, but that other nations with near identical guns somehow deal more damage.
In theory, WarThunder did set up the hit point according to this, you can dig into the blkx file to see the specific health value been assigned to each parts of each plane. However, in real game it’s not necessarily correlate with those values. Planes like Bf109 and Yaks are given relatively low hp value on its structural parts, but they can absorb a lot damages. In contrast, plane like F6F, F4U are given high hp values, but still very fragile against HE round.
Excluding the fact that some planes (Yak series, Ki-84) are given low value of been sit afire on their fuel tanks helped their survivability, the size, thickness, spatial topology and material matters more in real game environment for a plane to absorb hits, especially against fragmentation rounds under the real-shitter mechanism. The FlightModel also contributes to the survivability, planes with high cirtical aoa and good stall characteristic (Bf109s, Yaks) tend to absorb punishments and keep flying and manoeuvring. Those with low critical aoa, bad stall and not much tapered wing area ( FW190, F6F, F8F) will get into a unrecoverable spin by itself whenever a relatively hard wing damage happens, despite with high HP points.
I had my F8F get a light orange wing and my plane instantly fell into a flat-spin.
Very sad.
When everyone else has machine guns that can kill in those “one second bursts” while you showed you shot short, smacked the tail, didn’t do anything and it took a second burst to get the money shot. While with japanese .50s and Russian .50s you wouldn’t have to worry, as those ‘’‘’‘‘HE’’‘’’ rounds would’ve easily heavily damaged or snapped the tail.
Only then when you finally had your guns hit the target where he needed to be hit did he finally burst into flames. You can see this because some rounds ricocheted off the engine.
Again. If it was japanese or Russian guns, you could smack anywhere you pleased and do insane amounts of damage.
The fact that one japanese and russian 12.7mm can split wings off planes easily and surpass the damage output of multiple U.S. brownings is INSANE.
Sounds like an instructor issue, which is plausible given how bad the instructor is with using the rudder. I’ve had a game where I thought to use the F6F Hellcat in GRB to practice CASing for a sim event and I noticed that the plane was practically unflyable with wing damage but I could casually nurse the angry kitty back home to the airfield once I swapped to full-real controls in a desperate last ditch effort. Once I stomped on opposite rudder and applied trim, it was like no big deal while the instructor kept dropping the wing and wobbling like insane.
I presume the same experience is applicable to the F8F as well.
Partially this, but I think it’s mostly Gaijin’s scuffed damage models. I have keybinds to go to full real controls and slammed opposite rudder to try and recover. Some aircraft just lose almost ALL lift or become extremely draggy if they’re struck.
P-40 is a good example. P-40F. Got an orange fuselage. My entire aircraft basically bleeds all it’s speed in one turn. Entered a fight against a M.B.157 and I was basically kissing stall speed the entire time and my plane labored to reach 320kmh when going flat
Yeah man, those Japanese .50s totally doing those wing snaps, every single time, without fail. Yep. (video is PercussionCaps from another thread)
Edit: Look man, where are all those easy 1 shot wing destructions? I was promised easy 1 shots!
Fun fact, both those planes made it back to base to repair after those hits. I eventually killed the Ar-2 but it still took 3 passes on him before anything that would have prevented him from staying airborne
Watch how accurate and careful with my aim I was having to be due to the low ammo count! Man, I wish I had a set of M2 brownings so then I coulda just gone ratatatatatata and left the guy a burning wreck in a one second burst instead of having to chase him and line up a perfect shot to conserve ammo.
I don’t trust these calculators much. But you’re right the M.B. does gain energy much faster and he also came out of a dive. So he kept carrying too much energy, basically how I beat him.
But after the fight I had to go rearm, my aircraft struggling and took an astronomically large amount of time to reach 320kmh. It’s just weird how some aircraft just become a drag chute with some damage to the frame.
Keep putting words in my mouth. Stated multiple times Japanese 12.7mms when their rounds hit will usually be a two hit kill on a wing. Not one shot. You’re acting like percussion cap. This would also be around the third or fourth time I had to correct you to stop misrepresenting my argument. I also stated this was for HE rounds and when they have a nearly full belt for their ‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘‘HE’’‘’‘’‘’’ you’re going to have a high likelihood of just nuking some random aircraft with barely any rounds.
AP Hits, does nothing because it hit nothing important. ‘HE’ hits and snaps a wing. I mean. It proves my point. I literally showed this by snapping an F6F’s wing off with 1 gun.
So you smack an Ar-2 in the engine pods where they are not programmed as a breakable joint from the aircraft. You smack an elevator control surface, you smack a rudder. removing both. He could still use the other elevator to move. So you ripped the dude apart with just two guns, and you let him live to try and make a point instead of just finishing him off?
The Bf-109 you snapped his wing with around 2 rounds and the other Bf-109 you struck once. Which would’ve, on average, dark oranged his wing.
You didn’t need to aim accurately at the wings.
Here’s the thing: I used wings as a reference point because it’s a massive area and if stray shots hit there. you’re going to do some kind of meaningful damage. While with U.S. browning AP. You’re only going to do something, if you smack the fuselage. Where all the important bits are at. With Russian and Japanese aircraft they can literally hit you almost anywhere and do good damage.
and turned him into a burning wreck, because hitting him just about ANYWHERE would be a severe hit. I’ve stated this before. But I’m putting it more explicitly now.
Well that’s the thing. Russian and Japanese .50s are basically half a step away from becoming like 20mm cannons.
This is ignoring all the realism mumbo jumbo, and how 20mm should behave way differently. We all know that at that point.
You can pull out the Ki-44 use only two guns at the time and literally smack people out of the sky with little issue because just about everywhere you hit will do serious damage. In terms of functional damage. They’re extremely close to 20mm cannons.
It’s the issue of “Everyone can smack me anywhere and I die, I have to smack someone in a specific spot for them to die.” It’s even worse when many of these aircraft have airframes that are better suited to the meta gaijin wants.
Why not have the incendiaries in the late-war universal belts do orange damage instead of yellow? There’s still plenty of AP to balance out the damage you can get on glancing blows, but it’ll make it a tradeoff from higher velocity API-T rounds with the potential of more generalized damage.
At that bracket, just about everyone has 20mm cannons and machine guns that can instantly obliterate anybody else.
The Berezin BS 12.7 HMGs are literally the outright best 12.7mm caliber HMG in the game, it’s pretty standard for them to hit well above their weight class. The Japanese and Italian 12.7mm HMGs (and German 13mm HMGs) are significantly weaker when compared to the Berezin BS machinegun.
I decided to go through and look at the average of my kills with .50 and what I usually find is that I will usually completely yellow an aircraft until I either pilot snipe them, or I get results like these where I’ll Hit the pilot but because the fuel tank is close enough to the pilot, or the fuel tank is just big enough for my rounds to actually hit somewhere.
For the Japanese .50s I was using only the outboard guns to hit the enemy with and then switching to inboard when those ran dry.
This was just from a GLANCING blow of japanese .50s from a very close and awkward deflection shot 0.2km away from a P-51C who happened to just pass in front of me in a furball where I could only hit off a few rounds.
This was after a sustained dogfight against an F6F and pelting him round after round with U.S. brownings
Got a full burst on a Bf-109 with a P-47D-28. I used ground target belts because of the increased velocity and it still carries an incendiary round. I’d imagine it would even be less with just tracers without that Incendiary.
Because I didn’t magically touch the parts that mattered. He was still a threat to me.
what you say your experience with US .50 cals is, and what my experience is, and what I have shown my experience is, are completely contradictory to each other.
I genuinely don’t know how Im supposed to debate the topic when we have entirely different views on what the guns are even doing. Unfortunately most of what you have shown is screenshots, rather than videos. You’ve shown a few videos but not many. Mostly of single kills or instances, where as the videos I have tried to show I was intentionally just following a trend of showing everything that happened within the session I was playing, to avoid any sort of cherry picking of results.
So where am I supposed to go from here? I have not denied that on a round by round basis, the HEF shells from guns like the Ho-103 do more damage. However my stance was always that those guns have plenty of their own drawbacks to counter act the higher damage, and that M2 Browning’s have many advantages to offset the lower damage on a per round basis, such as the ballistics, ammo count, and pure volume of fire you get with them.
Since we are talking about server replays, here is the Bf109 K-4 kill from my latest P-51H compilation, in video rather than screenshot because it gives far more context:
at replay time 7:26.044, I started firing my guns
at 7:26.269 the first rounds contact with him, These first couple of rounds immediately set him on fire.
at 7:26.477, his rear fuselage has been blackened, and he loses all of his tail control surfaces. His aircraft is effectively dead at this point, which means the burst that killed him was 0.2 seconds long
at 7:27.134, his Pilot is killed, meaning the game has credited me the kill at this point, with my time on trigger being ~1.1 seconds
at 7:27.283, he loses his left wing. I stop firing around this time, total time on trigger ~1.5 seconds.
I did hit the fuselage mostly with the beginning of the Burst, as the Bf109 was doing what he is supposed to do and was trying to minimise the cross section of his aircraft for me to shoot at by angling his wings to be in line with me.
Well, your problem here is still that you are using the wrong belts. Like, seriously? I’m not sure what your aversion to using the M20 API-T belt is?
This is probably one of the only planes where you might actually have a fair point, since the P-63s get the early M2 browning belts, without the M20 (or M23), and are the highest BR aircraft to do so. Otherwise the early belts stop being used around 3.3 max, where those belts are fine because the US is still getting 4-6 of them at BRs where other planes are either stuck with .30 cals or are only just getting the early 20mms which have low ammo counts and pretty pathetic rounds and/or ballistics.
Any belt I use that consists of purely API-T or API I will usually end up with the same result as shown with the F6F. The entire aircraft is yellowed and the only time I will do damage is if I hit the fueltanks of an aircraft or the pilot. But those aren’t consistent spots.
Because at least there’s some incendiary in ground targets or universal. I will at least make some of the super structure of the plane orange whilst also having almost the exact same ability of lighting people on fire.
So again. You got to have your rounds hit the spot that actually does damage and light the enemy on fire and cause a fuel tank rupture.
Volume of fire is less effective if none of your rounds hit anything important. Especially when having to make tight deflection shots. Fighting a Yak only having a few rounds hit and do meaningless damage while he can easily tear me to shreds with just a few rounds is whack. While for me, I have to be lucky and hope a round hits something important, or he’s low energy enough I can ensure I dumped a full burst into him. The range (not literal range) at which I can do effective damage is heavily reduced unless I either get a lucky hit to catch him alight in deflection shots, or like before, he’s low energy and I can put all my rounds in target. If any of his rounds touch me. I’m dead. All he has to worry about is to not get smacked dead center.
Ho-103 will do damage, still reach pretty far, and the issue of velocity is not as painful when you can keep in mind the fact that glancing blows can severely cripple somebody. I’m fine with missing a huge chunk of my shots, only to get a few glancing hits on the guy and his wing gets blackened and he can barely fly now making the fight even easier for me.
Frankly, if you look at the velocity of ho-103. It’s literally almost at 20mm cannon velocity (compare with mg151, Shvak, and Ho-5 and Type-99 model II) with I think it being better down range in terms of ballistics, and with it being basically almost 20mm status in damage, you can still cave people in with only two guns. Which makes it even worse when you see a plane like the ki-44
Having 1000 rounds. And even if you used all 4 guns at once. compare it to most other 20mm cannon armed fighters. It’s not far off in terms of ammo count and many cases supercedes a lot of aircraft like Spitfires, Germans, and even U.S. cannon armed aircraft. Even the F4U-1C, F4U-4B, and F8F-1B don’t carry that much. The Ho-103 also usually has around 250 rounds per gun on on most jap aircraft equipped with it. It’s a cannon at that point.
Berezin’s are almost in the same suit, but they’re slightly balanced out more by having usually around 150 rounds per gun, and the fact that their best belt is a 50/50 split of IAI and API unlike Japan and Sweden having belts just comprised almost entirely of ‘’‘‘HE’’‘’
But Russia still has a better belt composition than the U.S. in terms of a round that actually outputs damage.
Again, don’t look at it as if these things are just ‘machine guns’ With how they behave, they very well act like cannons at this point with on-par or better ballistics with slightly worse damage output, but still impressive damage output nonetheless.
With the current belts. I don’t see why the U.S. can’t bridge that gap by keeping the belts the same and letting incendiary do more damage. Or let the U.S. have a belt that’s consistent of basically almost all incendiary. I mean, the B-239 gets something similar. Why not the U.S.?
The reason I brought up Sweden too is that I also believe Sweden could be balanced better and not have their aircraft get shoved so high up if they reshuffled their belts. Got rid of air-targets, and had a similar belt setup like U.S. belts so you don’t get nuke rounds all the time. But that’s just an aside.
API and API-T have very similar fire chances. The only difference being 10 meters or so velocity difference.
P-63 also doesn’t get early-war belts. It gets mid-war belts. It’s full of API with only one tracer round and one incendiary.
P-40E and F get the early war belts which are basically all AP and with one incendiary and tracer.
