It seems that Incendiary deals slightly more damage to wings and tail than API, while dealing less damage against any other component.
But I hardly consider that more effective. All you do is trade maybe double the damage against wings and tails against 0 piercing ability and less damage to other components.
So no damage to fuel tanks, pilot, engine or cooling systems, unless it’s basically touching the skin of the aircraft.
Yes. I prefer having my belt consist with a higher amount of rounds that does double damage on the wing structures. because even if I don’t kill the opponent on the first hit, it should be enough to cripple them.
Hitting a plane and hitting where you need to hit a two completely different topics.
The reason the US switched from AP-AP-Inc-Inc-T to just API was because you get always the ideal damage type, regardless where you strike.
Incendiary is much worse than API against armor or engines, and AP isn’t all that great against fuel tanks.
With the current damage of .50cal Inc there’s simply no point of using them ever, over API.
Except from everything I have seen and experienced. You’re not always going to get a perfect burst on a dude, and I’d rather have a belt that will do more structural damage to the wings as that’s a bigger target and I want to actually have glancing blows do something other than tickle the enemy. I don’t want to shoot an A6M multiple times, catch him on fire he surives, and grind him down all because I’m praying for my APIT to light the guy on fire and actually kill him this time.
But if it’s literally Inc-Inc-Inc-API-T-API-T I’d legit be happier
Yeah, pilots liked API… But the thing is. This isn’t real life. This is War Thunder. Where everyone else’s guns are exponentially more dangerous while the U.S. .50s are hilariously one of the most accurately realistically portrayed rounds in the game besides it’s pure incendiary rounds, but we barely get those anyway, the only difference being the .50s good ballistic accuracy and lack of realistic complex bullet tumbling after impact. But every gun in the game is also ballistically accurate but they do almost double to triple the damage they should be doing compared to IRL, which you went into excruciating detail over in another thread. Especially even guns in the same caliber.
That’s the issue. It’s dumb for other countries In the game to have machine guns that can hit like 20mms while the U.S. is basically stuck with 7.7mm+ rounds. I’m not asking for .50 incendiary to behave like a 20mm cannon. But just to have more so that glancing blows are actually dangerous. Because as it stands, it makes no sense for America to literally have some of the weakest 12.7mm guns in the game.
You arent accurate enough, at most you hit him with 20 rounds.
.50 cals are not 20/30mm
It is also a problem with war thunders damage model these small incremental damage does not add up in IL2 that 109 is now out of the fight his engine will overheat and seize and control surfaces will make the aircraft very difficult to fly with even the wing failing (we dont have that modeled in war thunder)
Not asking for .50s to hit like 20-30mm cannons. But it’s definitely a fact all 20mm cannons are massively overperforming in game. Even the MG-151.
Other .50’s from other nations are in fact hitting like 20mm guns, in fact doing more damage than IRL 20mm cannons. The Japanese Ho-103 and Russian Berezein 12.7mm all hit like 20mm cannons. So I’m playing the U.S. having some of the least effective .50s of any nation. Again, it’s over glorified 7.7s
I’ll give you an analogy. You have 20mm Hispanos, but you get only access to belts that have majority AP rounds, and 1 or 2 HE rounds. Such as 4 AP and 1 HE or 3 AP and 2 HE
Every other country gets a belt that’s filled with HE rounds with one AP round purely to behave like a tracer.
Mix that with the fact their 20mm HEs hit WAYYYY harder than yours. So even if you get rounds on target with your HE, you’re not doing enough damage for the rounds to actually do anything. Wouldn’t that suck?
Japanese Ho-103 and Russian Berezein’s hit like Trucks and U.S. brownings you gotta play pin the tail on the donkey with your rounds and not only hit your target, but ensure they actually hit something important…
My convergence is usually 400-500m but I’ve been using 400m.
I’m hitting my targets, but my hits are never enough to actually do anything.
You can look up at the Bf-109 video and see how I hit his fuselage, but because the rounds passed through doing nothing. It’s basically a completely worthless shot.
I’m tired of U.S. .50s being more like 7.7s while other countries have .50s that behave like 20mm guns.
I’m not even asking to buff the round M23, but just let me have more so that when I get glancing blows, most of those hits are gonna be on a guy’s wing more than likely, and I’ll still be able to do adequate levels of damage. Why do you think there’s more of it in the stealth belt? It does more damage on average than API or APIT.
Also hilariously. Instead of trying to add more internal modules to damage in aircraft. Gaijin continues to focus on tanks.
Basically.
But for some reason, gaijin decides to let other .50 caliber armed aircraft to hit like trucks, while the U.S. needs to poke holes until they finally strike something worth while
Switch to all Armoured targets belts and you will saw wings off.
As for 20mm Hispanos are generally called Hisparkos for a reason.
Maybe 20mm are overperofming i suppose from a point of balance a 109 has 60 Mg 151 rounds vs a P-47 2000 rounds of 50 cal.
I do think more practise is needed 50s still hit hard.
It’s basically the same thing. API, AP, and APIT all behave the same besides fire damage chances. The only reason you would realistically use ground targets over universal is that the first round in the belt is API-T so it’ll have the extra velocity of tracer rounds. But you only get one incendiary round.
You’re not doing extra damage. Incendiary is what causes structural damage to the wings, and that’s better when you’re firing wing mounted guns and some of that spray hits the wings as usually is a larger target,
AP - More damage fuselage
Incendiary - More damage to the wing.
When you have it where you basically have no incendiary, your only mode of reliable damage is hoping you hit the enemy in the fuselage where the important bits are at. The issue is that even if you damage the fuselage and nothing else, it really only adds drag to the aircraft, it does affect turn performance, but not to the same extent as turning someones wing red or black… This matters when you’re flying a U.S. plane. Not so much when you’re fighting spitfires, Yaks, Bf-109s, A6Ms as they still turn handily better than you and most of the time, running from you is not an option to begin with.
Oh and fires are completely ganked now. I’m having almost every single match, a guy will survive a fuel fire, and then fly on and continue fighting or fly it back to base.
@dovah4 - I realized that part of your problem is you’re using stealth belts. You can actually see the rounds hit because you’re not puking tracers everywhere… and that’s distressing you unnecessarily ;-). Switch to the API-T belts and you won’t even be able to see your hits through the tracers much of the time… WAY less frustrating.
I ran stealth belts for the first time today, just hoping to get a competitive advantage in the F8F-1… I think I got at least a few kills because the bad guy didn’t realize I was shooting until the rounds started hitting their plane… of course, I also got a few assists because many of the rounds hitting their plane didn’t do much.
It was a weirdly inconsistent experience… chopped the wing right off a Yak-3 in one match, hammered a Spitfire over three passes to no ill effect in another. It felt like I was heavily reliant on fires for kills or damage… but I guess that’s not different than normal.
It’s a fuel tank explosion, everyone can do that. I’ve shown that before. Cannons do the same.
This has been talked about before further up.
For the 30mms.You’re hitting the fuselage where nothing is programmed to break, while fighting jets where fuel fires are highly unlikely to occur. You literally snapped his wing with ease when one round struck it. Same thing here
Anything a cannon touches structurally, Poof it breaks it.
You saw that when it took 2 hits on the rear empennage to break it and one hit on each wing to break it.
It was not a fuel tank explosion. Hit analysis showed that the 12.7mm rounds pierced through the front fuselage, killed the pilots and set engine on fire, penetrating the aircraft in a straight line.
Current 12.7mm is ridiculously powerful against the internal modules like engine and spars. While 30mm minengeschoss virtually does nothing to the critical internal modules like engine despite its massive explosive filler.
12.7mm kills pilots well, cripples engines well, sets enemy on fire well. It’s also easy to aim and normally comes with tons of ammo. I see no reason to buff it in any conceivable way.
Don’t use hit analysis. it’s not a good metric and it’s very misleading.
Go Here. War thunder’s website to see the server replay. That way you can actually see the damage you put on a dude the same way you can press the ‘O’ key and see your own aircraft’s damage…
What you more than likely did is that you pilot sniped the guy AND caused a fuel tank explosion. That bf-109 kill was the same, in fact, I think the game even stated I killed the pilot.
(it did)
The game is only going to show in Hit Analysis what it determines to be lethal or dangerous hits: which is for the most part engine hits and pilot snipes, are almost always going to be given priority for Hit analysis.
The only issue with Replays is that you can’t trust the tracer fire. it doesn’t sync up with what actually happened in game, but the end results, the damage, is accurate. Match I recorded, I used sensor view to see the ‘tracers’ of my stealth belt, and I was getting hits on a guy, but the replay believed my rounds were running short but the guy was getting damage.
Comparing my experience flying Bf109F4 vs F6F-5 Hellcat, I want to draw emphasis to this.
I engaged a Yak-9 in my Bf109F4 and my shells did NOT kill the pilot despite shooting from dead six as the fuselage and tail “soaked up” the damage. Getting the kill required multiple bursts into wingroot (WHICH DID NOT FALL OFF and the yak-9 continued to pursue my wingman) before finally getting a lucky scissor-like position where I managed to fire at the yak from about ~7 o clock and cut the tail off through a fairly lengthy burst.
Likewise, I engaged a P-51C in my Bf109G14 and again the tail section and rear fuselage soaked up my shots quite reliably. This P-51C only died after I snapped off his left flap which caused him to spin out and crash. I shot off his rudder and half his elevator and kept flying away without issue.
Whereas in my F6F-5 Hellcat,
I engaged a Ju-87 and one-tapped it from dead six as my shots went right through and killed the pilot.
I likewise engaged a Bf109F4 and again got the pilot kill in one very short burst from dead-six.
Having ~23 mm of RHA equivalent penetration without fuzing on skin is super valuable.
The precision of replay analysis is not important here. It is more than enough to show that a single 12.7mm bullet is so powerful that it is capable of piercing through the plane and crippling 2 most important internal modules altogether.
12.7mm is very powerful compared to its relatively easy handling. As you said yourself, high explosive rounds of the cannons are now very ineffective against the plane’s fuselage in this game, thus they need to aim the wings to effectively kill a plane.
While 12.7mm doesn’t even have to aim since it easily pierces through the fuselage, damages the modules greatly and sets them on fire. Not to mention that some of the high explosive shells are now not inflicting any damage to the engine even in direct hit.
30mms can cripple engines. The replay is there so you can actually see what damage was done to the aircraft. if you’re just going throw “See, here’s this buggy hit analysis where it doesn’t show anything” Then I’m not going to take anything you say seriously when all you have to do is record a clip showing how damaged the aircraft got.
You had a lucky strike on the spar, mixed with having almost double the fire rate of normal .50s. If only the entire U.S. tree got M3 Brownings and not just a few jet aircraft within a very narrow battle rating range.
Mmmmm. No.
The point I was getting at is that you’re striking a billboard aircraft with a borked DM where there’s a lot of empty space inside of it and the only object that will really only burn is the engine, as fuel fires are basically impossible with jets, and you’re using this one instance to be representative of the whole. it’s not programmed to break there. I can fire a 40mm bofors all day at this sunderland, but since it’s not supposed to break there it’ll just eat it, and there’s no good modules to hit.
You are using a HEF-I round. It’s not a mine shell, and works just like normal HE shells with realshatter mechanism, thus it can damage the engine. I’ve been talking about minengeschoss from the start, haven’t I? Moreover, there is only one out of four of that round in a single kind of belt. Less than the chance to ‘luckily’ hit a spar with a 12.7mm bullet while hundreds of them are sprayed in mere seconds :)
