Because you still have to hit the fuel tank?
Meanwhile with High explosives you can hit and do great damage even with scraping hits on the super structure of the aircraft? That’s kinda the whole point? The .50 has to hit something important on the inside, and even still the a good chunk of the important bits are either as small as a rat’s pubic hair or it doesn’t do anything like it should.
What even is “Historical accuracy?”
I already showed that spread at around 250 yards is around the whole cab of that Studebaker which roughly matches the dimensions and firing range of the fully automatic test firing target with M1 Alternative.
Heck, even when looking at guncam footage, following the tracers of one of the guns, you can tell the guns are converged in a pattern and at times some are converged almost into point harmonization like this clip.
If the guns were so inaccurate, why did he have to walk it up to the train?
Meanwhile this guy had his pattern converged where it’s literally as large as the ship.
You can see how the guns are converged in a way where the tracers are following a specific path that they were converged at
At that point your belief of historical accuracy is “Because I feel it’s that way.”
Yeah but US planes have on average at least 4 guns, a lot have 6 and the P-47 has 8.
Thats a lot more than cannons on most planes.
There’s hardly any benefit for more cannons since they already one shot your wing or tail anyway.
And it’s not just fuel tanks for .50cals but also engines, pilot and spars.
Thats a horrible test environment.
I already reported how they are too accurate and showed it in-game by just comparing spread to a plain sized target at 1km.
You comparing a train sized target, several meters in height, to a plane that has a wing thats like 30-40cm thick.
No, I don’t.
I just said I don’t believe this practice of gun harmonization has any real benefit.
It’s you who takes everything from documents and then interprets it a way that fits your narrative.
Like when you showed that graph with the fighter armament and bomber turrets and then was like:
See? .50cals are actually as lethal as cannons.
.50cals should be inferior to cannons in damage while having a benefit of being able to score more hits, which makes up somewhat for their lower damage.
Not every cannon is a high velocity Hispano.
Four .50cals should have roughly the killing power of a 20mm with the same RoF.
Make it 1.3 because of the better ballistics.
1.3 cannon is already all you need to get kills.
Of course the damage varies depending how close you are to your gun convergence.
For completeness’ sake, same match. .50 cal at very high aspect & point-blank vs fuselage:
(I think issue with case 2 was that my .50s were “too accurate”/not enough spread. Idaho tested taking off the accuracy/jam mod for his F6F-5 and had much higher pilot snipe chance for weird shots like this).
He’s literally hitting localized spots on the train. He’s not hitting the WHOLE object like you see in the naval gun cam footage. He’s literally hitting specific spots on the locomotive.
At a minimum it’s a slightly larger than human sized impact point when you converge all the guns together. It’s probably close to two people in size
Because when you’re catching things on fire in two hits, you don’t need to match any structural damage potential like the 20mm. Especially when just one or two hits is what lights the plane on fire.
That small red dot is what you hit. You hit right behind the cockpit on the edge of the fuselage. If you can find the server replay he probably got an oranged fuselage from that.
kinda fair but i still dont see why my wing should fall off cuz three .50 cals hit one of my spars while sometimes i can put 10 he shells in one spit and it still flys away
True, they shouldn’t. .50cals ripping a wing would be a rare occurance that only happends when a bullet slices the skin appart, or somehow an awful lot of tumbling bullets compromise a spar.
They shouldn’t even penetrate the armor protecting pilots most of the time, since again the bullets tumble the moment they strike the aluminum skin.
They will sometimes blow up a fuel tank, when the right conditions are met but typical this shouldn’t happen all to often.
They can detonate ammunition inside a wing, blowing it off.
Other than that, there’s damage to the engine, cooling systems and pilot.
But it’s also true for 20mm explosive shells. They simply don’t carry enough explosive and rely primarly on the fragmentation effect and additionally incendiary effect.
So for the most part 20mm does what 12.7mm does but much better.
Penetrating pilot armor without much trouble (unless it’s ShVAK API with subcaliber penetrator).
Causing much more damage to fuel tanks and other systems and also increasing the likelness of inflicting damage.
If only damage models worked like that instead. Reducing max G-tolerance before catastrophic failure rather than the earlier linked video where I burst like 1 second in my F4U-4 and the Ki-84 loses its wing.
parked on this dude with .50s. He survived, was able to make it back to base, only getting intercepted by an ally as hail mary because he was the last enemy left
It depends on what gaijin Programs as a part to break. The empennage and wings will snap easily. It gets more complicated with twin engine fighters or jets. Especially ESPECIALLY some of the earlier jets. the Seahawk is a really wonky DM as the fuselage is blended in with the wings super far out so you have where nose mounted cannons will just smack the fuselage, turn it black. Which helps make it extremely draggy but you need to hit the wings or tail. Of course, that’s if you have a belt of pure HE of which no plane really has. You usually have a mixture that helps with a few AP rounds.
When a Yak-3 ran away from me in my AD-2. I put two hits on the empennage his whole tail just split off him.
Weapon Vulnerability Report confirms the number and these ignitions were done with a slave engine to provide wind gusts to simulate the aircraft flying.
The range of these test firings is 500 yards
The first image is single shot ignition chances. An airframe with a fresh undamaged fuel tank is used each time.
The first value is rounds fired at the airframe. The second value is the rounds that penetrated the fuel tank and the third is how many of those rounds lit the fuel tank.
The next is compound shots. AKA shots in already damaged fuel tanks.
As you can see, the number jumps significantly higher even for the B-25.
If you take the numbers and average them:
For the P-38 it averages to 1.4 rounds
For the B-25 it averages to 2.4 rounds.
If you average both together, it’s practically at 2 rounds.
These averages line up very well with the Small Arms book. Especially so for the B-25 as the main testing medium of these rounds in the Small Arms Book were models of a He-111 wing with a self-sealing fuel tank. They also tested on other models as well, such as Japanese aircraft. Of which they noted any differing behaviors in the those models.
I decided to take another look at U.S. .50 accuracy.
This was from the 1950’s right here.
100% 8 mil
75% 4 mil
Using the dispersion chart.
and what we have in game.
2000 feet is around 609 meters away
Testing with .50 accuracy mod turned off.
This shot 657 yards (I forgot to switch it back lol.) yards away. Which is almost to a T exactly 600 meters. What does this mean? You can simulate closely what the chart says via removing the accuracy modification.
all 100% of rounds would be in that 8mil circle. 75% of those rounds would be 4 mil.
So 75% of these rounds would be in that smaller circle.
all 100% would be in that larger circle.
So you would have areas of dense concentration but also areas where you would flyers where they could intersect with one another.
At 1200m 1.2km It would basically mean that the 8mil circle where the P-47 is shown is the hitting circle.
Edit: Ignore all that I said right here. the circles are actually the 4mil dispersion cones. So gaijin doesn’t really need to attenuate much.
If they make the main accuracy like what it’s like without the accuracy mod, then the guns are actually performing almost one-to-one to how they should IRL in terms of accuracy.
Omg. They AGAIN introduced the freaking “spars block kinetic rounds” bug.
I just went into a flight mission, firing against He 111 H-3s with a C.R. 42 with 12.7mm API-T and didn’t cause a single fire. Couldn’t even kill the engines.
Instead I had to pump 15-30 rounds into the spar for the wing to snap.
It’s no wonder setting fires with .50cals become rare compared to just snapping wings.
