That’s something I could look at too. I wish I had a way to test precision/saturation at, say, 1000 meters with different gun settings. That would be cool for those of us that like to geek out over little optimization changes. The nearest I can think of is pulling up in AI planes and estimating the size of the shot group relative the aircraft.
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F8F1 bearcat dropping br was wild to me bc it has a really good fm as long as you don’t get hit even a little bit
“One shot of explosive 20mm ammunition is sufficient to tear a wing off.”
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Reading this thread over the last couple months or so especially with the state of cannons since Leviathans update is genuinely mindboggling. Cannons are still left in a broken state where HE rounds have a good chance of doing nothing on impact and I have plenty of recorded video of this occurring. The frequency is high enough that it happens at minimum twice per game. M2 Brownings on the other hand have always been reliable for me and many of its positives have already been outlined in this discussion. Even before Leviathans broke cannons, I would still prefer M2 Brownings over some of them anyways.
Now here is one of my most egregious examples of cannon HE not doing anything:
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The funny thing about the F8F is that compared to other U.S. props the climb rate really sets it apart and creates a lot of opportunity, especially early game… but it’s not that special when looking across the BR spread it faces.
I struggled a LOT yesterday because I continually met planes at my altitude (4500-5500 meters) early game. Sadly, the MM saw fit to provide me nothing but competent opponents (how dare it!). Even in the matches where I was fortunate to have another F8F with me, we were still at a disadvantage.
My most embarrassing failure yesterday was dying to a B7A2. I couldn’t get above him, couldn’t out run him… and he played me like a fiddle when I tried to reverse him. I think that was a 3 kill match for me… but a loss because a BR 3.7 opponent was more than I could handle.
ETA: my K/S went from 1.14 to 1.39 over 7 matches… I think I am still improving, but there are a lot of situation that are beyond my skill/ability.
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Yeah, cannons are in a terrible state right now, you basically roll a dice to see if u will do damage or not.
Brownings are reliable, just won’t excel at snapshots which makes sense given how they are modeled.
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???
20mm HE are doing that.
Yellow wing damage is hardly the result of an explosive round.
Then again it might be the result of bugged damage.
Some weeks ago I was shot up by a Yak-2 and my J1N1 turned all yellow/orange.
Which puzzled me as even the default belt has 50% HE shells.
The only other explanation I had was that he misses me with the HE rounds and only hit me with 7.62mm bullets and maybe 20mm API.
That video was just like my experience a few days ago in A6M3. I was shooting Spitfires in Ground RB and in most of the passes, the 20mm cannons did nothing except blow off a flap or something. They kept flying just fine even though these were point-blank. I was lucky they were quite bad otherwise I would have lost the 4v1.
I think he hit with the 20mm, going off of the sound, and my own experiences in the Tada’s Ki-61 earlier taking a decent amount of shots to down a AM-1 (intentional self-uptiering). Killing it required getting it to catch on fire, as wing shots kept it more than flyable and also just how much damage I have taken from 109s and lived in various mustang matches.
Example of mustang surviving what had to be a pretty solid shot from HEI:
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There’s something really wrong with damage.
CW-21 fuses shells just fine. I struck him in the rudder with 37mm M-geschoss from around 700m (I struck him in the fuselage 12s before, it did not affect the plane in a noticeable way). Basically no damage anyway. Game is bugged more than ever.
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Well, planes should survive getting shot by 20mm explosive shells, Mineshell or not, just not always.
If you want to take down a fighter reliably in one shot you need a 37mm or 30mm Mineshell.
Otherwise it can take 1 20mm or 10, if the shells don’t hit anything vital.
But surviving 10 shots from a 20mm is pretty unlikely, even more so from a 20mm Mineshell.
Now take a bomber, or heavy fighter, and you are now at the point where you can take 1 - 2 engines out and the plane is still able to fly.
On a single engine fighter a single 20mm might kill the pilot, cause a fuel fire, cause a fuel leakage, cause damage to the radiator system or outright kill the engine.
For bombers you have two pilots, redundant engines and engine related system, fuel tanks deeper inside the structure and a much larger structure to begin with.
The chance to land a killing shot increases with caliber. Lower calibers need to fire more rounds to have an equal chance.
Hence the whole idea of 30mm Mineshells and 37mm explosive shells to target bombers.
There’s also a reason to load not just one type of shell, as depending on the angle of attack, different types of ammo are more effective.
An IL-2 has huge wings for a single prop aircraft. 19.25m² per wing compared to the already large P-47 with just 14m².
If you attack such a target directly from behind the fuselage is a much larger target than the wings. But the fuselage is armored, so you want to have some AP rounds, prefereable API or SAPI.
Otherwise you need to land quite a number of explosive rounds to the wing to take it down, which isn’t going to be easy to hit unless you come in at an angle, which limits your time on target, or if he’s turning, giving you a deflection shot onto the wings.
For Schräge Musik, only Mineshells were loaded, since they would strike a bomber directly into the wings and wing fuel tanks from below, no point of loading AP.
Hispano’s were loaded either 50:50 with HEI:Ball or later HEI:SAPI, since one solid round out of that cannon can easily pierce through a pilots armor plating.
Even the MG FF was originally loaded 4:1 with HEF-T and P-T, as the solid round could defeat armor plates or strike a fuel tank inside a wing directly.
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I did that. Using the ground targets in testflight mode. The studebakers are great because the crew members are the same size as the pilots. If you get directly within convergence, you can quite literally snipe one crew member at a time. When you start heading out of convergence the only difference is the. It’s less ‘spread’ and more ‘the guns are aiming at different spots’.
There is slightly more spread with the upgrade off, but again. It only really makes a difference once the guns are past convergence.
Now do this with a fighter. If you read up to here, you would’ve known that bombers and twin-engined aircraft are usually immune in some areas of their wings to wing snaps as this was talked about. You could fire a 120mm HE round straight into the wing root of a B-17 and it wont snap there. No matter how much punishment you give it there, it’s not programmed break there, therefore it’s functionally useless to hit there for structural damage. If you struck the rear empennage of the tail or hit further up the wing. Bombers are scuffed in this game completely and using them as a case example doesn’t work.
That’s basically what happens. Most of the time. They either smack an enemy with AP and go “See, HE is not doing anything” or they shoot an aircraft where it’s not programmed to break apart and go 'See it does no damage" You can smack the in-board wing of a P-38 all you want, but that spot will not break, no matter what because it’s not programmed to.
Blackens an entire wing segment and even damages the OTHER side of the aircraft. Thats a lot of damage.
120mm HE will eviscerate the rest of the aircraft; if you want to really prove an area of a plane cannot be removed no matter what damage, it’s better to use the area between the engine and fuselage on the Me262 or Su-9/11 against 30mm M-shells.
120mm HE will make the entire plane break everywhere it can be broken. Especially tank HE, since it hits muuuuch harder than aircraft HE.
That’s the point. It’ll snap everywhere BUT in that area. Some spots simply won’t break off and using bombers as a metric for damage is not the greatest
I am aware of certain areas on planes being unable to be broken regardless of what hits it. However in the video I posted you can see that I landed a chain of hits along the rear side of his left wing only taking off the aileron or flap and then I drop my line of fire towards the tail also doing minimal damage. While a wing break likely would have happened normally, the fact is the fuel tanks in his left wing did not get ignited, none of the left engines took significant damage (ironically the M2 Brownings with the subpar British belts likely did inflict the minor damage in the video), the gunners in the left waist turret and tail were still actively shooting at me while tanking HE to the face, and the tail didn’t fall off. I am 100% genuine in saying that if i had 4 or 6 M2 Brownings with Tracer belts in this exact same scenario that I would have shredded/ignited at least one of his left engines/fuel, pilot sniped him, or killed his gunners rendering him helpless on that approach angle.
I can also dig up some footage from my recycle bin of me shooting at single engine fighters with similar results. I usually still kill the majority of people I shoot at because attacking from an advantageous position helps a lot but having to use large amounts of so-called one shotting ammo on a single target is a recipe for being unable to carry matches consistently.
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