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.
1 Like
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.”
2 Likes
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:
3 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
???
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:
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
3 Likes
It’s recommended you show server replays and show the damage of the aircraft you’re hitting Here. Reliance on the server replay to show tracers is not accurate so it’s good to have the normal footage like you showed if you want to be granular and pick apart what rounds hit what.
At the same time. You speak of fires. This is why I don’t trust fires
I catch a Fw-190 on fire, and he instantly sets it out. His engine is completely undamaged but he’s dropping smoke. He proceeds to gain a good amount of energy back. I didn’t pay him much attention as I thought ‘Oh, he’s probably heavily damaged.’ I doubled back when he gets closer than 2km “Oh, he’s coming in really fast.” I proceed to catch him on fire again. The damage he receives from the fire is actually still survivable but he didn’t have the fuel to fly back to base, the best part of all. His engine is undamaged STILL.
Watch the P-51C video I posted higher up where I damage a Ki-44 and I leave him to what I think is his death, only for him to be one of the last enemies in the match harassing a Bf-109.
Fires aren’t what they used to be where it was essentially a guaranteed kill anymore. People can survive that crap now. Not always, but I’m running into these types of incidences more and more where they set out the fire and are damaged but are still functional enough to be a danger. It’s not bad like back in 2017 when the B-17 was essentially immune to fire damage to, what people assumed, emulate extinguishers. But it’s not uncommon to find instances where people just eat that stuff up for a long time before finally croaking.
I also looked at your footage and you need to remember. The fueltank placement on the PB4Y is really close. Like REALLY close.
The PB4Y also will not lose it’s wings on the first spar. It physically can’t. Make the thing dive from space, everything else will rip but not the parts programmed not to rip. That’s where you’re hitting a lot, with a few stray hits elsewhere
Do note that for hispano belts you also have SAPI and AP-T which won’t do much to fuel tanks but will light engines on fire.
SAPI
AP-T
HEI
For a bomber btw, that’s a lot of damage to a single spot. That’s more damage than the 20mm Mineshell on average.
But again. You’re not firing pure HE. You need to check the server replay.
My most hated mechanic of WT. You catch a single .50cal API from 800m and your fuel tank / engine is set on fire.
It’s just so annoying, as it’s literally a dice roll. 9 times nothing happends but the 10th time you die because of it.
It’s just as stupid as the RNG ricochet mechanic that was never removed from the game.
4 Likes
I went into the server replay and it confirmed further that my cannons failed me (I use stealth on Hispano mk2 and ground targets on the M2 Browning).
Those black spots are what the server replay rendered for some of the confirmed HE shell hits.
Now here is the actual damage done to the PB4Y.
So you are telling me that I directly hit each left engine nacelle for one turning orange, his left inward fuel tanks directly turning it black and splashing the other tanks (no fires), and all those hits along the fuselage being almost in line with his tail control cables leaving them yellow. Best of all I have a good cluster of at least 5 Hispano rounds exploding between cockpit and nose which turned the pilot orange and nose gunner yellow (which might have been the Brownings anyways). Just a reminder that the damage that I did deal to him here was not lethal as he was flying back to his runway until a friendly finished him off.
1 Like
Basically how I feel. The dice roll can get absolutely insane where you might smack a dude but because the coin flip wasn’t in your favor. You did absolutely nothing and I’m left trying to hit the dude again. Or you might get that lucky shot that gets the fire, but again. It’s a coin toss.
Engine nacelles don’t break. So yeah.
It would be preferential instead of just showing the end result, you actually record it. That way you can see the damage build up. But considering you basically blackened the majority of his entire aircraft. You crapped damage on the dude…
You’re using jank bomber DMs as your baseline. Same deal with planes like the B7A2 and SB2C they’re ridiculously sturdy compared to other aircraft. Also, Showing tracerfire from replay isn’t conducive to anything. Because tracer fire can be completely inaccurate in it. In my replays using stealth. The game says I’m shooting short (shows in sensor mode) but I’m smacking the target.
I also decided to pull out the PB4Y as a test. and I took this mid-match (Game was almost over, one dude left) so I’ll edit the replays onto this soon.
Again, my plane is completely STOCK. But the PB4Y is honestly just an uncharacteristically durable aircraft. Mixed with the fact that you have a crap load of guns being aimed at you.
Again, the point is that he did not die from this damage that I inflicted on him. One of cannon’s primary advantage over machine guns is not needing the same time on target to inflict lethal damage (which you agree with as well), yet in this moment I actually failed to deal lethal damage while 4x or 6x M2 Brownings would have finished the job.
Why would someone use cannons if they require the same time on target as .50cals while not having the (significant) number of advantages that they bring?
1 Like