I find rapid ignition to be the norm provided one executes proper aim. I’ve linked a fair few videos of it happening to me or to my targets - even in the P-51C with its measly 4 guns. Granted, for those I don’t have exact slow mo video and x-ray views as those are instant replays from my normal gameplay. This one happened fairly early into the match (in terms of me joining) so doing the replay mode itself was reasonable.
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Hits to multiple Me-264 fuel tanks
Gaijin? Fire? Please?
Please?
I get one and he instantly puts it out.
He repairs and comes back for revenge. Hit his fueltank again and no fire. THROW ME A BONE.
Having to sit on a dude. Just grinding him down hoping I hit spar or just grinding his tail down takes so much ammunition.
Sure I’ll sometimes get fires. But don’t even think this is a fuel fire but an engine fire.
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Yeah we get it.
Not every shot is causing a fire.
But then again you can have a single hit set fuel or engines on fire and cause a kill.
It’s complete RNG.
But nothing beats .50cals in fire chance and volume of fire.
So there’s absolutely no point in buffing them and then having you die the instant someone sprays .50cals at you from 1km.
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1.4 shots with incendiary on He-111 fuel tanks.
2.4 shots with API on He-111 fuel tanks.
if you go by the weapon vulnerability report on fighters like the P-38 if you go by the hits on the fuel tank and the hits that light up the aircraft. You find that the P-38 takes aroind 1.4 rounds to light up.
The B-25 actually follows in line with the He-111 where the follow up shot is highly likely to light a fire, it calculates to around 2.4 shots
The performance on the B-25 bomber actually lines up well.
API-T should be matching those values but they’re not. Even with further testing with the M2A2 equipped with API-T firing at static targets there are more times where It’s requiring 6 rounds to light the aircraft on fire. They’re underperforming.
And again. That’s not statistically the norm in this game. I can just launch any HE at a target and instantly obliterate them easily. You yourself should even know that because even you remarked, and showed footage, of you completely splitting a P-63 in half by just tapping him a few times.
Then explain this. That was done under 500m. Literally parked on the dude for that too.
Same with the IL-2. I’m getting more kills shooting pilots, tail empennages and wings than I am actually starting fires.
If I can have a dude dive on me, and I try to reverse him, and he’s able to insta-gib me in a single hit with cannons. Meanwhile I’m having hits and I’m not getting any kind of reward for doing so because all my hits don’t matter because the modules won’t light up unless I get the uncommon fire
the only times I have gotten fires to be reliable is if I had my convergence land exactly on the fuel tank. When the whole point of .50’s was inundating a target with a crap load of rounds that one or two of them with set alight the target.
Or we just have a realistic system were fire severity is linked to fire chance and damage caused/sustained.
So you can have all your .50cal fired that aren’t actually going to be all that lethal and easily extinguish themself compared to 20mm HEFI and Incendiary shells, unless you also pump three or four times as many bullets into the tank.
I would also be happy, if bombers stopped having their tails get shot off and instead get killed by fires from 20mm shells more often.
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Except they won’t If they’re having consistently good performance even up to 600 yards away. If this is what the fire looks like
As long as the round penetrates the tank, it’s either going to cause a spill into the fuselage where the next shot with this big fireball is going to set whatever the fuel leaked in to on fire, or instantly set draining fuel on fire in the first hit.
Are you really sure?
Are you really really sure?
When you’re having just one or two guns at a time hitting a target, so most of these rounds aren’t even hitting the enemy. just shots that go off into the ether and yet the few rounds that hit still realistically light targets on fire.
These were done with a singular gun firing a 1 second burst.
If you compare 20mm M3 and .50 M3. (They didn’t test 20mm M2 for whatever reason on this one) They’re close.
On bombers. They’re exceptionally close together. This is ONE GUN.
20mm HE didn’t work well until you got to large calibers, as shown in the graphs.
You talk about fast moving air setting out the fire. These tests were done with an engine providing buffeting and wind to simulate the plane in flight to see how fast moving air would affect fires.
In fact
.50 M2 API-T is on par with 20mm incendiary for efficiency.
No they weren’t.
It’s a 1500lb turret and the number of guns in that turret is determined by the weight of the gun and weight of the ammunition.
So a .50cal turret with light guns and ammo is going to have more guns than heavier guns and ammunition.
And since the turret contains ammo for 30s of fire, the higher RoF of the M3 doesn’t improve the effectiveness all that much because every M3 now carries more ammo in weight and more weight in ammo means less guns per turret.
Again, incorrect.
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Look at the armament efficiency value.
No matter where you cut it. .50s are insanely effective and their incendiary performance in game needs to be fixed.
You can say what you want, but the document literally states and shows that 30mm and M3 .50 are the most efficient.
You were constantly going “W-Well! The fire will spark and sputter out because of the air going over the aircraft!”
And that got shot down because they took that into account.
You literally have the researchers plainly state that M3 .50 and 30mm are the most efficient in terms of rounds with M2 .50s having similar efficiency 20mms.
From your post about the turret weight takes is what’s taken into consideration for efficiency. AKA. “How much crap do you need to make this gun function compared to other guns and how heavy is it.”
Again as shown in the chart this is single shot ignition chances on undamaged fuel tanks.
If the first shot doesn’t light the target.
The next compound shot is highly likely to start the fire.
In fact, the math for the B-25 actually lines up with the He-111 test from the handbook.
It would be around 2.39 rounds.
For the P-38 it’s in the 1.4 round range.
I’m not saying .50s are blowing planes up and doing massive structural damage like 20mm. But the metric in terms of killing something, by any measure the .50s are doing a great job at it.
Look what that actually means:
And then there’s:
1/4 the kill propability for one pound of ammo, 0.292 to be exact.
A single belted MK 108 round weights 1.33lb so that’s 0.75 30mm round while a pound of belted .50cal API-T is 3.6 rounds.
Which means 16.45 .50cal API-T are as deadly as a single 30mm.
If we do the same for 20mm it’s 4.6 API-T to be as lethal as a single 20mm M97 HEFI.
But we could have gotten that information just from looking at the firing data against P-47s.
And since the firing against the P-47 is conducted from the front, where engine and pilot are much more likely to be hit, this scenario favours the .50cal already.
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Yes. I’m well aware. you’re going to have to put more rounds into a target to match the destructive potential of a specific cannon caliber. I’m not saying that 1 .50 round is as good as a single 20mm in terms of destructive capability.
You need more .50s to match the same destructive potential as 20mms. But if I can just dump 4 rounds into a dude and it equal a 20mm in performance, that’s great efficiency.
You keep ignoring the fuel ignition tables.
Fighters like the P-38 already have a high chance of lighting up within the first hit while bombers like the B-25 match the He-111 in terms of catching alight as illustrated in the Small Arms and Ammunition book and by the engineers, theater commanders and generals who looked over the gun cam footage of the testing of M8 API, M23, M1 and M20 in action.
If the first hit to the fuel tank doesn’t light it up, then the subsequent shot will. But in game, we’re seeing this is not the case.
Took my La-5Fn to 4.7-5.7 because there were no 3.3-4.3 lobbies available and I decided I need practice flying the La-5Fn.
I ended up with a P-51D30 on my tail and he fired at me for less than 1 second of burst.
You won’t be able to guess what happened next!
Spoiler
I catch fire with just 1 tracer cycle from his guns.
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clap clap clap
Now explain the rest of my images, and my testing I’ve shown above.
Why are enemies being ripped to shreds and yet not catching ablaze? How come when I shoot at static targets the rounds don’t do the thing they’re meant to do?
If I stick my hand in a beartrap and eight times out of ten it snaps on my hand. I don’t turn around and say “Oh! I guess it’s safe because it didn’t snap on my hand those two times”
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My assumptions are:
- Penetration depth/range. In GRB, when you shoot a tank with APHE sometimes you yellow the crew without doing damage beyond that seems governed by penetration quality/depth.
- Fire consistency
- Target fuel. I almost always fly with 30 or 35 minutes’ worth of fuel, sometimes even 45 if playing a particularly careful play-style plane where I know I’ll loiter a lot. Many people I know of go for a 25-35 fuel amount in sim for fighters. You’re probably shooting minfuel people. It’s very rare I enter a dogfight with less than 10 mins fuel (someone called for back-up, I got jumped. Otherwise I’m RTBing and refuelling because having less than 10 min of fuel makes me feel nervous). Coincidentally, that time I survived being ignited in an A6M5 was… being shot with like 12 minutes of fuel left and looking at the damage doll - the fire prolly ate my entire fuel tank and ran out of fuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh5pAuUqB14.)
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Technically, full tanks should be the hardest to set on fire, as there are no fuel vapors inside the tank or air.
So they can only catch fire from gasoline pouring out, which might self seal after a few seconds, cutting the fuel supply off.
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While true, 30 mins of fuel is usually50% of a many aircraft’s full capacity, sometimes like 60-68%. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether Warthunder fills tanks according to a specific scheme (whatever keeps CoG constant) or equally balances them (with how Fw190 and P-51D is affected by low/high fuel, prolly it does it hisotrical-styleish?).
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So gaijin horrifically modeling post penetration where rounds can sometimes just not do things? It would make sense especially considering I satisfied the test conditions that were done with the He-111
The spars in game heavily negates any post pen flame chances when IRL the main barrier was the spars and it explains why even with the most minimal of barriers can make the round do absolutely jack all. Even the aircraft skin will make the round incapable of lighting at times. I’m going to fire more shots at different angles and see how they hold up.
Testing was done with the exact purpose of firing above and below fuel level.
There’s a measurable difference for API (And API-T as they’re effectively the same) but for Incendiary it was effectively the same.
Here’s also a diagram of the japanese testing targets.
And other target orientations.
I pointed this out before as an issue with fire and fuel mechanics being ganked.
Fuel doesn’t pour and flood the aircraft, it disappears into the ether and fuel tank damage directly correlates to how quickly it drains. The issue is that as we both know. that shouldn’t be the case. The wing should at that point become a giant bottle of fuel and then catch alight within the next hit and anything else flammable catches alight with it. Hydraulic lines, fluids, and so forth.
Kinda like when you shoot a water jug and it bursts. Bunch of fluid rushes out and sprays all over and I’d imagine if it’s above the gas line, well vapor is still a type of fluid. So you just have a huge ball of fire rush out of the tank.
Shoving some more resources I discovered talking about self-sealing fuel tanks. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1946/february/story-self-sealing-tank
I played the F8F the last couple of days and it really felt like the chance of setting fires was lowered because most of my kills were either from ripping wings or tails off or by pilot sniping.
Very few of my kills were actually from lethal fires and if I set them on fire, it was from a burst that dismantled their plane anyway.
Still I don’t see why .50cals should be buffed, as they have good ballistics and lots of ammo.
Other the fact that non US .50cals are overperforming with their explosive bullets, I never felt like US .50cald need to be more effective in killing planes.
It’s frankly annoying to see sparks all over a Bf-109, Yak, La, Ki, even twin engined aircraft only to do absolutely nothing to the guy.
Meanwhile he can just tap you and instantly obliterate you. The TTK required for .50s Especially as you’re stuck with point harmonization is insanely high relative to what your enemies can dish out in a few glancing blows. Even the Fighter Gun Harmonization book remarks this is inefficient.
I made some tests with the Bf-110 as it turns out the He-111 spar is impossible to penetrate and my previous video was the round going over the spar hitting the tank. So I had to use the Bf-110 as a surrogate as it provided direct access to the gas tank.
Needless to say. It wasn’t pretty.
The thing was I struck the gas tank even after it turned black. You can see by the red vignette at the top but because the tank was “destroyed” it didn’t make a sound.
What usually snaps a wing is the .50 hitting the spar in game, not directly destroying the super structure (It can happen, and you can see it especially work in stealth belts in late-war belts but for belts like Universal and tracer, it’s just not the case). So for some aircraft, you’re shooting at some spars that are almost as thin as the control cables in the aircraft.
At that point, why use tracer? Why not just use ground targets?
I took out the AD-2 and even with just 2 20mm guns I could get tippy-tap separations on the enemy. And that’s with Default belts where it’s just HEFI and API-T.
Honestly what’s your limit until you get to “Hey, these rounds do need to be fixed.” Because if you’re fine with basically the incendiary element being taken away and mostly ineffectual. How bad do you need the .50s to be where you go “Yeah man. This isn’t bueno.”
Because I don’t understand how you can look at clips of someone casually snapping wings with HE while you yourself are having to dump rounds into a dude to hit a spar somewhere or hit his pilot and your first thought is “Yeah, this is fine.”
If people were complaining about 20mms “Not working.” even though they were still massively overperforming compared to real life. Yet here we are where the main way that .50s were supposed to kill literally barely works anymore.
If it’s accuracy you’re talking about. We don’t have hard data on the automatic accuracy besides this reference to M1 (Alternative) which was just an M1 incendiary that used less important resources but it’s accuracy was terrible.
I tested firing a single aircraft mounted .50 on US6 Studebakers while closing in.
Not the best test. But it honestly matches the 6 foot target. Especially when you look at the replay
Studebaker dimensions.
All the complaints are issues that generally fit every other gun in the game as gaijin doesn’t account for atmospheric effects affecting projectiles. Such as wind to my knowledge. I believe wing flexing is taken into account though.
I’ve mostly been on the receiving end and I do not feel this to be the case.
See my earlier video flying the La-5Fn where I get put on fire within the first tracer cycle of the P-51D30. Or the earlier video of my P-38 immediately catching fire from the P-47 shooting me with only one wing’s worth of guns.
I really wish the P-51C was rank 3 (so that I could test it from my end in live games and progress the BP).
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Well, I do complain about HE damage.
I was perfectly happy when 20mm didnt hit like 30mm yet and I could use the default ShVAK belt and two Berezin on a Yak-3 with good effect without planes losing wings and tails in an instant.
Of course there were still several issues, like how powerful 12.7mm were compare to 20mm shells and how many shells, like Incendiary, were completely useless.
But the current performance of .50cal is perfectly acceptable. Otherwise there’s literally no point to have cannons.
If they were to be buffed, they also need to be nerfed to their historical accuracy.
Also because of the very big spread of .50cals I find it hard to believe how individual gun harmonization would even matter.
Especially as their effective range is given with 400 yards.
Hitting a wing tank from any reasonable range would require a very long burst as bullets are flying all over the place.
In that case I can be on board with it only requiring 1-2 hits to set a fire.
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