That was the earliest model, that probably didn’t see much use.
Ghostmaxi (or I) can provide you with some info on that, lf you want.
I think there’s an error in the naming of the shell for the table, because there was no „Incendiary“ shell with self-destruct fuze.
So this table would correspond to the 370g Mine-Incendiary shell, which has roughly 40g HA 41 filler and what’s basically a 20mm Incendiary shell in the back, making it heavier.
@Ghostmaxi But we have 330g indicated in 2 separate spots (here entire round weight is essentialy identical, so the shell weight is likely also the same) so it’s more like 90g of incendiary
Edit: aoparently it’s 140g, I guess the fuse part of the shell is a LOT lighter to compensate, still it sounds a bit weird. Either way - that’s a lot. The whole point is - in game it deals no damage.
The Handbuch der Flugzeugbordwaffen isnt the most accurat. And 370g was first 485m/s then uprated to also 500m/s. The 295g shell is yet another (early) generation.
I would be very happy to know more about M-Panzergranate in 3cm caliber.
Anyway, wonder where does Gaijins absolute contempt towards incendiary shells come from. Is it because mighty soviet union did not utilise these?
On the other hand, I don’t think we’re ready for .50 cal incendiary nukes, because Gaijin has a great track record of being unable to make the damage realistic and properly reflect smaller size and weight of ammunition.
Probably.
But Incendiary for air devs is basically whats APCR or HESH for ground devs.
Especially with the current system of blowing off wings and tails with a few low caliber shells or bullets, incendiary rounds don’t serve much purpose.
lf they don’t have to, then they won’t change anything.
The HEI-T rounds for 20mm ShVAK, 23mm Vya-23, 23mm NS/NR-23 all are labelled as “FI-T,” so that does not entirely compute. Against ground targets with detailed damage models (the AI BTR-152s), those guns do not fragment like other 20-30mm HE rounds seem to do.
And yet .50cal APIT rounds are literal flamethrowers, with a higher fire-starting chance per bullet than pure incendiary rounds that are much bigger.
I find this very weird given that once these are both actually fixed and effective, it would help alleviate so. much. shit! Even moreso if the postpen damage effect of HEAT rounds were also rebuffed to 1.67 levels (where it had similar effect to what solid AP has now).
Like, I have observed that all the late-game armor monsters like the Maus, T95, Tortoise, etc. all sit at questionably high BRs due to their “survivability,” which they only have because all the rounds that can pen them deal fuck all for postpen damage, and several rounds which should easily pen them currently do not. This places their battle statistics on stilts and leaves them incapable of dropping to where their armor is actually effective at preventing damage. The heavies are stuck playing barrel/breech/gunner repair simulator awaiting inevitable death while the guys shooting at them are stuck playing whack-a-mole - nobody seems to enjoy it.
Only exception is big enough HE rounds overpressuring the superheavies, which is frankly something I am more okay with than all the HEAT-dispensing light tanks running around like they own the place. At least the artillery pieces are huge and thinly-armored.
I’m talking about pure incendiary. The Soviet shells work because of HE component, as every HE shell in game sans German FI-T is extremely overperforming.
All real sh*tter guns fragment in a very limited fashion. The only reason 20mm M-geschoss kills crew effectively is because it overpressures crewmen if it hits close enough. Same goes for 30mm, fragments are extremely limited.
APIT works, because it’s AP + incendiary, which means it can get to the fuel and the AP part means a ton of damage giaranteed. Incendiary bullets have super limited base damage and penetration. They are inferior to even normal AP for most intents and purposes. And that’s partially because MG AP is vastly overperforming when it comes to aerodynamic damage and to some.extent structural too
Okay, thank you for the clarification. I too have always wondered about the strange total lack of damage on that bullet type. But would giving pure incendiaries more “armor penetration” so they reach fuel tanks make them more effective? Or would coding them as just “funny explosives with enhanced fire-starting chance” work instead?
We all agree there’s a problem - so what is the most common-sense solution that will permanently fix it?
This.
But it would require Gaijin actually modelling aerodynamic damage vs structural damage properly.
Incendiary should be bad at fragmentation, but decently good at making bigger holes in stuff, but they should also have the “rear part of the shell” continue after exploding for some time. Which would solve the “it can’t even get to the fuel tank” part. German 13-20mm I/ IT was designed so rear part continued in 1 piece to punch holes further down the line.
Thr standard .50 cal incendiary should work this way too.
M23 - this one should have a lot worse ballistics, less penetration (because all there is to continue is lead antimony slug at the bottom) but much bigger boom.
Of course modelling them as such would be a nice idea in a game without completely broken HE damage where devs actually know what assymetric weapon balance and general game weapon design is and care about realism to at least some extebt. WT devs don’t and they are absolutely clueless.
I can only imagine the people complaining if those bullets were simply modeled as “low explosives,” which according to some Google Searches, would give M23 Super-Incendiary bullets similar hitting power to the explosive bullets that make all other HMGs so potent, because American .50cals beyond the lowest BRs have so much greater ammo supplies than any of those other HMGs.
Has anyone made a Suggestion to the effect of “model incendiary composition as explosive with a 0.3-0.5x TNT equivalent depending on composition”? It wouldn’t be perfect, but would be better than nothing.
It’s because US .50cals fire nothing but API or API-T while having the same incendiary modifier as .50cal Incendiary and 20mm cannons.
There’s no point to 20mm or even 30mm Incendiary ammunition when they are modeled incorrectly and perform worse than .50cal API.
US 20mm Incendiary does literally nothing to a plane, German 20mm IT deals damage like 20mm Ball and 30mm Incendiary deals less damage than 34g bullets with 1g explosive filler.
I mean, look at British 20mm SAPI to see what gaijoob thinks.
You’ll be surprised, but not in the positive meaning of this word.
I thought they fixed Hispano SAP-I rounds ages ago, was I mistaken or did they actually do so only to later fuck them up again?
I remember seeing something about this, thank you for clarification. I believe the firstarting multiplier per bullet of API-T is higher than that of 20-30mm incendiary bullets, while with both higher RoF and larger volume of fire the result is fires everywhere.
They “fixed” them as in “they actually fragment after impact”.
Problem is, they deal super low damage, it’s kinda bad compared even to the HMG explosive bullets. And the fragmentation pattern is underwhelming. No AP nose continuing on its merry way, even if tumbling, once it explodes, it’s over.
It’s not completely useless, as it deals some damage at some larger area, so it’s already better than incendiary 20mm shells, but this is where the positives end.
The Mk 108 incendiary, to my knowledge, is purely thermite. I don’t know exactly how well thermite would stick to a plane, but I would guess that it doesn’t need to get inside the skin to do more damage than it does now.
No. No they don’t. Go look at the pictures of 20mm damage. .50’s also have much more ammo for spray and pray and after the period where they were the best guns and nothing else was viable just no.
It is purely thermite filling, yes, but its still encased in a metal shell moving at considerable speed. That metal shell punches through the extremely thin unarmored aircraft skin and then burns so rapidly it may as well be a lower-grade explosion with greatly enhanced fire-starting chances. The more rapidly an incendiary burns, the hotter it gets, and the hotter it gets, the more likely it is to ignite even rather stubborn jet/diesel fuels.
Currently the incendiary portion of American 20mm M2 and 20mm M3 cannons, as well as their higher tier derivations, is modelled as some type of explosive. Would it really be game-breaking to extend that same feature to every other pure incendiary, adjustment-incendiary, immediate-action-incendiary, or incendiary-tracer bullet, regardless of its caliber? Obviously yes a 20mm cannon incendiary would do much more damage than a rifle-caliber incendiary.
And similarly, given the already hilariously-high fire-starting chance of M20 API-T on US .50cals, why aren’t pure incendiary bullets that have more filler starting fires even more often than that?
I don’t mind M20 doing what it does, nor do I mind 20mm M2/3 incendiary composition having explosive effects - I just want to see some damn consistency with other nations.
Aircraft guns need an entire overhaul for their rounds damage mechanics.
But thats never gonna happen, since gameplay changes don’t make any money and either you are fine with arcade damage mechanics or deal with it.
Well, consistency and War Thunder don‘t fit into the same sentence.
Agreed. I sometimes play low tier france (with the 7.5s laugh all you want) and even when taking full IT belts (literally all shells are incendiary) I can pump half my ammo into a plane and just achieve nothing at all
