I thought of you and this thread yesterday as I was watching a Chuck Yeager interview… specifically when he was talking about his first air to air kill. He tucked in behind and low and, in his own words, found himself in a hazard zone because of how much „stuff“ was falling off of the 109.
Chuck certainly didn’t have any complaints about the .50s and considered them superior to the 20mm for use against fighters for some of the reasons brought up in this thread - namely, they could penetrate to stuff that mattered. The 20mm Minengeschoss would not… though it did OK in that „full commit“ head on he took ;-).
If changes were to be made, it might be that cannons are over tuned and the .50s are just fine. That said, I’m still on team flight performance. I‘d much, much rather see control surface performance parity (i.e. changes to the compression of elevator and rudder that seems to disproportionately affect U.S. props) - I‘m just gonna keep on hoping for a Corsair/Lightning with working control surfaces ;-).
For many props it seems like the instructor just… doesn’t use the controls properly. I was playing with someone new the other day and somehow got my Ki-10 into a flatspin. The instructor is UNABLE to recover it unless you throttle down and have a lot of altitude to work with.
Others like Ki-43-II don’t use ailerons or rudder properly or as much as it should, for P-38 I know that mouse aim/instructor mode won’t use the elevator fully and i believe this is shared with a few others like Ki-96.
In the Ki-45 it’ll also almost never use the rudder and barely use the ailerons so you have to baby the instructor constantly to do the simplest of maneuvers. Incredibly annoying.
As you can see in my video, I took off an Fw-190’s wing with my .50s. I had already run out of 20mm ammo by this point in the XP-50. I am using the armoured targets belt here.
That’s generally true of real life air to air combat, and even Il2:Great battles and air sim battles. You fly in close until within some 100-200 meters - ideally slightly below the enemy or slightly above rather than dead six - and open fire “Once they fill your reticle” or even windscreen. Shooting from dead six is surprisingly hard.
Also echoing Perc’s words. When I tried to fly with instructor again I keep noticing it makes planes “flop around” like dead fish and waste all its energy when trying to do a simple turn. It makes planes like P51C/MkIa mustang feel completely different in RB over SB. I feel most “FM” complaints could likely be directed to “Instructor” complaints for certain planes because those issues evaporate promptly. Think the G.55s are also hit pretty badly with this floppy behaviour leading to way more energy loss than normal judging from conflicting advice for RB and SB in how to fly them.
Sigh… I just need to get a flight stick setup and be done with it. I’m still so shit with mouse aim that it might not even be much of a drop off there. I’d rather have a hard time hitting more shots because the plane is flying right than an easier time hitting fewer shots because the plane just doesn’t pull (even with the keyboard).
I grew up with a flight stick… it’s way more natural for me to manage roll/pitch that way, even if it means i cannot just point and click.
Chuck was wrong and Korean pilots will testify the .50cal was insufficient which is why by late 45 and through the Korean war Navy aircraft switched to the 20mm cannon. The USAAF followed after them with great effort taken to rush the F-86 with 20mm cannons.
50 cals are great but aerodynamically they lack stability and would even during WW2 they tumble. When we start flying the speeds of the Korean war and are pulling more G their effectiveness drops off further.
This was in Korea, where the much faster transonic jets also required much tougher construction.
However even the F-86Fs equipped with the experimental 20mm cannons still had to expend a large portion of their ammo for a single kill.
You mean a guy who only shot at German planes considered .50cals superior than 20mm cannons, despite never using 20mm cannons or Mineshells?
I don’t know in which world a 20mm Hispano would be inferior to a .50cal.
And cannons still fired rounds that penetrated through the airframe like the MG 151/20 Inc-T round that carried 8-10g of incendiary filler compare to a .50cal with 2.2g, with a much larger projectile body.
Their only advantage is that they are quite ok to take out fighters and thus aren’t that bad as long as you don’t need to take down a bomber fleet.
The US was fine with just having .50cals on their planes and the USSR with just having 1-2 relatively weak 20mm cannons.
Both Germany and Japan had to develop guns to effectively destroy bombers, so 20mm cannons were basically the minimum but both nations also used 30mm and 37mm cannons for that purpose.
The US doctrine during the war was basically ‘If the code works, don’t fix it’. During the Joint Fighter Conference the AAF and USN had a debate on switching to 20mm.
The AAF representative believed that the 50cal is well enough to deal with single engine fighters of Japan and German, so the important thing is to increase the number of guns and amount of ammo so that even the average pilot can spray down targets easily. Plus the ANM 20mm was having disadvantages on ballistic when compared with 50cals at certain range ( close & medium range 20mm is slower than 50cal).
The Navy representative said he just want to see A6Ms been shot into millions of pieces and asked F4U-1C to be shipped ASAP.
The AAF used to have a great calls on increasing fire power, but after they’ve received M8 API in 1943 the call ceased and they were pleased with the effectiveness of the API round, and the planned increase RoF M2 and M3 MG never saw service.
The USN found that even the early 50cal belt AP-AP-I-I-T worked well in 1945, the ammo easily burns even the heaviest Japanese 4 engine flying boat. However it was hard for strafing missions as most of planes on the ground were de-gased and couldn’t be ignited by 50cal incendiaries.
I’m seeing more and more argument for gaijin to allow us to do very funny stuff with multi-gunned aircraft. The idea of just having API-T and incendiary in certain guns. I want gaijin to go ahead and just add custom belts already.
We also made multiple high explosive rounds for the .50. These actually had a unique detonator on the inside. Big problem. It would explode inside the hot chambers of brownings.
This is why I think having a mostly incendiary belt would be pretty good. If I had incendiary. I would’ve done a load of damage to the superstructure wings of his aircraft.
Catch him on fire, he not only survives, but with an undamaged engine. Even when I cut at him several times.
Here’s a replay and a recording of the same Bf-109 I fought.
In the replay, I cut through him, and even when I hit his wing, I would’ve done more damage if I actually had some incendiary to use.
I’m cutting through people, but because I didn’t touch anything fleshy, the game just gives the middle finger
If you read the next page. It states tracers in general weren’t used as much and lots pilots chose to fly with no tracer in the belt.
In fact going by this.
This sounds more like Pilots roughly had choice in belt compositions and could pick and choose as they pleased.
At the same time, if your issue got accepted and implemented. gaijin is just going to remove the incendiary from Stealth and make it literally worthless to use and not make a belt that would actually use incendiary in any reasonable margin.
The AAF pilots had more freedom on selecting their belts, despite the standard was 100% API. The ground service was willing to fill whatever they wanted in the linkage.
In the late Pacific, the ammo belts were mostly shipped to the carrier in specific pattern and in large quantities, and most of the time guns were loaded with pre-filled belts and thus not much choice on it. Yet it was still plausible to use different ammo linkages on different guns(for example, outboard guns can have different ammo linkage than inboard guns).
Personally I would like to see separated belt option for every single gun on the aircraft, rather than custom ammo belt.
At the same time, if your issue got accepted and implemented. gaijin is just going to remove the incendiary from Stealth and make it literally worthless to use and not make a belt that would actually use incendiary in any reasonable margin.
I don’t think they will fix the Incendiary problem in the near future, so make the stealth belt fully consists of API will increase the utility of the 50cal.
Except I’ve shown a P-47 chainsawing through me and I ate it like candy. I’ve shown pictures of the aftermath of raking through a Bf-109 with tracer rounds. If you DO NOT hit anything important. Nothing happens. Incendiary is the only round that does adequate structure damage to the wings that the U.S. has for .50s
I’m tired of turning people to swiss cheese but nothing happens because he basically matrix dodged luck-maxxed through my rounds where nothing important was hit, or I’ll get into fights and I’m just sitting there, pelting round after round into a dude trying to use what little time I have in a fight to get guns on target, doing nothing to affect his performance while I get shot once and my plane goes “Sorry boss. I can’t go no more.”
I got shot by a Yak-3 ONCE in my P-47 where I lost my right aileron and my right wing tip was light orange. Literally the only damage. I lost almost ALL roll authority It was literally like trying to fly with one wing.
It’s the most miserable weapon to use because you have people who have the SAME CALIBER guns as you. Doing MORE DAMAGE.
