At the moment it’s a non-factor though.
There is armor on the side of the fuel tank.
.50 cals standard was designed to hit from 600 yards away. Keeping as close to the same incendiary effectiveness and penetrate the armor on the back of a Bf-109
That’d be 548m away
You can say the same thing about Japanese .50 cals
We only have point convergence, which works fine for cannons. But for .50’s you’re just guiding two small laser beams instead of actually saturating the target. Even turning off the weapon mod still has almost all the rounds to converge at the point you set it at instead of variable convergences where you can have a large field of fire. The only exception is when your rounds are right before convergence and right after convergence.
Here’s a Fw-190 somehow tanking a full burst of .50s right into it’s spar too.
Unironically like playing fruit ninja but with planes instead of just a cone of fire with different convergences like it should be.
They have enough penetration for 20mm of armor at 600m and still killing a pilot easily?
It’s an entirely different damage type.
a large field of fire so 90% of your shots just miss even if you aim properly
Yes, did you expect to get a kill when you’re just swinging your mouse over him and causing 99% of your shots to miss?
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the full burst in question
you prob hit like 2 shots and thats it
like if you think you rlly should have gotten a kill here im just giving up arguing with you
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Which one is it? Is it an instant death laser beam when you brush a module or do you need to throw a huge amount of ammo into a module to destroy it? I hit exact convergence, so at a minimum 6 rounds hit the spar of the wing. That should be more than enough. Seve
All the vids you show of you getting instantly snapped by seemingly one fifty caliber is not coming true. So which one is it?.
I don’t care if I shot 1 million rounds at the dude. If I hit direct convergence and that still didn’t do anything.
https://www.youtube.com/live/5IB86KtxjLU?si=jlB_zL8jk7TdEPCB&t=1717
He misses so his opinion doesn’t matter either going by your logic.
It’s a machine gun that hits like a cannon and you get multiple hundreds of rounds per gun.
it is instant death if you actually hit the enemy, hope this helps
all you did was punch a few neat 12.7mm diameter holes in his plane
This might be difficult to understand but this:
…is not the same as this:
If you MISS 99% of your shots I would not expect any meaningful damage.
notice how the enemy dies very quickly when .50s are at their optimal aspect instead of a few glancing hits in deflection shooting
we’ve already gone over this both in this thread and the cannon cope thread, and the conclusion is that they do not
unless of course you believe that a single engine, low tier fighter can take 20 hits to the tail from a cannon and be shot down not due to loss of tail, but to pilot knockout from the 1/4 AP in the belt
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I hit the target in convergence. My rounds hit. The spars are large when facing the aircraft. Why was there no critical.
So it either laser beams people to death, or you need to put substantial rounds to damage the aircraft. Going “They’re laser beams, but not for you.” is hypocritical
You can have them work
But they’re complete diceroll weapons.
If you got a slight pass on a dude. You do literally nothing to the guy, meanwhile he can just one-click adventure you
All you did was basically go “nuh uh.” while you were showed the Ki-44 literally snapping wings with just 2 guns, technically 1 as the Ki-44 split the wings off the P-63 with 1 gun each.
Meanwhile .50 calibers are constant dice roll machine where you either insta kill the dude or you do absolutely nothing.
One hit, you tear the guy apart.
The next? Absolutely nothing. And for the tail empennage for being a “weakspot” I shredded the crap out of it and got nothing.
Wait a second.
Oh of course. No fire even though it’s a damaged fuel tank.
Forgot. The ammunition meant to start fires takes 30 rounds to actually do the incendiary part.
Historically IIRC the 109s had no such 21mm steel armor plating behind the fuel tank, instead it was a duraluminum plate. A duraluminum plate would only have less than half of the effect as the steel armor when against penetration, so the plate would be only equal to <10mm steel which was why U.S. tests showed suceessful penetration, even with M1 Inc round.
I think Gaijin made it to steel purely for the purpose of game balance, considering how German Tier4 plane fight the odd. They had also doubled HP for most components of late BF-109s, the inline engine had 60 HP points which is at the level of the radial engine.
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It’s crazy how you forget something that was said like 10 messages ago
-another deflection shot at a very high angle where you miss 99% of shots and your few hits go right around all the important stuff
contrast that with the video you posted above where the enemy was facing his side to you and so you actually hit center mass
Given the many videos of your gameplay that you have posted this is the only conclusion possible. You go “.50s aren’t doing damage” and then we see the actual event and it’s extremely obvious why they didn’t do damage - you missed.
even this shot would be 100% lethal with 50 cals if dovah would just hit
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So the fuel tank is not important stuff?
You also called the Empennage a weak spot and that was a lot of hits on the empennage to blacken it.
It’s either a laser beam of death or you have to be highly selective on where you hit it. So far, I hit areas that should’ve killed either way but didn’t. Even when I shot short, these were shots that should’ve snapped it’s tail (according to in-game logic) or caught it alight. But didn’t do so.
It boiled down to “Well you see, people said cannon no good, so cannon no good.”
Yet I actually hit things that matter in both videos.
It’s why I keep calling the guns “Dice rolls” because unlike cannons where a few off kilter shots can still damage the superstructure of the aircraft enough to heavily affect flight performance, making them super consistent, .50s don’t get that luxury. Compound with the issues of point convergence, and the fact that it can take 10+ .50 cals to light a fuel tank, the only thing U.S. .50 cals have going for it is smacking the spars, pilot or engine.
In a high deflection shot, against a D-9, this is basically what you have to hit to actually kill the enemy.
The API, the round designed to literally catch fuel on fire, sucks at catching fuel on fire. The incendiary rounds we have literally don’t do anything. Meanwhile they should penetrate and start fires as well, and to my knowledge, you don’t even believe that should be fixed either.
All the while attached to aircraft where RB is setup to perform completely antithetical to their function.
We can go back to your ME-262 video all over again where you literally struck everything that should’ve counted and it still would’ve done nothing if you didn’t hit the pilot, which you still needed an insanely long burst for.
I’m not saying .50s should blow off entire wings of fighters with no problem. But when you’re having it where you have to hit important modules, and also the caveat you need to strike these modules a multitude of times and there’s a random chance that one of the main modules you’re supposed to hit, is literally a RNG biased against you unless you hit it a gorillion times.
Meanwhile, a single MG-151 to my P-47s wing tip instantly gives me insane amounts of drag to the point I can barely run away from a zero of all things or it just snaps.
You’re moving from “It’s a laser beam that shreds everything it passes through” to “Oh, you need to hit DEAD CENTER on the target and hit the pilot.”
you hit the plane with like 2 stray 50cals
and then complain that they dont do any dmg
do you like look at the footage of you playing youre sending in here?
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uhhhhhhhhh
if you actually hit the fuel tanks it doesnt
but anyways
they would if you would hit
(btw a 50cal in the wingtip of a 109 can send it into a flatspin if its turning)
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I did hit the fuel tank
How was this damage survivable?
I hit the fuel tanks. I hit what should’ve mattered.
lower convergence would have most likely resulted in a kill, don’t even need to change the aim
You hit the fuel tank once. Even by your own source earlier that’s nowhere near 100% chance of ignition.
“a lot of hits” yet unlike every other time they’re not enough to remove it
It’s a laser beam of death if you actually hit things that matter and you do so more than just once with your 4/6/8x 750rpm guns with near infinite ammo
If you had, the tail would have fallen off. It was simply not damaged enough.
It’s a matter of statistical relevancy. Otherwise one could claim 7.7s just snap wings in an instant.
They can’t. This was very lucky.
And as a tradeoff .50s get ~3x the number of guns with higher RoF, better ballistics, and like twice the ammo per gun when compared to cannons
nonissue
It can also take just one. And considering they have 4-8 guns, it’s never gonna take you very long to achieve that.
“I can only hit anywhere within the frontal 2/3rds of his fuselage, how terrible!”
“fixed” does not mean “they almost hit like cannons”, which is what you want - last I checked. If that went through all the planes people already struggle with would quickly rise in BR.
Only because I missed 90% of my shots on the worst possible aspect, but unlike you i didn’t drag my cursor right over the other guy so I could claim I “hit him” while doing no meaningful damage
they already do that
good thing you have hundreds of rounds to do it with then! i’m sure you can manage.
a cannon which in its most common configuration is as a single unit, with less ammo, much worse ballistics, and worse belt composition than .50s
so difficult
I don’t know what the striking velocity was. Even if we take muzzle velocity as per your source on P-38 fuel tanks, that’s about a 50% chance per hit. An orange fuel tank is like 2 hits, so 25%.
Are you really gonna say a roughly 25% chance of not setting a fire is impossible to come across?
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And to my knowledge there’s no real source that indicates 20mm would regularly snap the wings off P-47s in 1-3 rounds. But as we both know. Gaijin buffed the damage of all HE rounds to an insane degree to make fast TTKs. Even if we got to the realistic number.
It would still be around 44-47% going off the range I hit at. I got the demarcation for the horizontal line to show about 50%
In-game on the other hand is a measly 10%
So by the end of it, it would still be a nearly 50/50 coin toss.
If they had an actual accurate incendiary belt for the U.S. API-T, I API-T, I, API-T One of those rounds would have an over 60% chance to light a single fire per shot.
But at this point. If we’re going to buff 20mms to have insane damage potential, far higher than they realistically had. Just do the same with .50, but instead of structural damage, just make it focus on lighting things up.
So the Empennage is not a weakspot as I can clearly count over 6-7 puffs on the tail. Meaning the only time It counts as a weakspot is if I’m directly facing his rear and shredding him that way or I literally just concentrate EVERYTHING into his tail in the deflection shot.
I talked about this. I originally used a Binomial distribution, but realistically I could’ve just used a geometric distribution. as the “First success” is all that matters
With current stats, it would take about 10 rounds to get a 65% chance.
You got it backwards. 2 hits would give a 75% chance to catch alight, but you would still have a 25% chance of it not catching alight.
if your literally going through the code to check this stuff then the problem isnt that the .50s are coded bad its that your rng sucks lmao
This is reasonable given that gaijin likely chose 10% as an ‘average’ value for a round that has travelled a fair distance, passed through the skin, internal structure, and possibly armor before finally hitting the fuel tank. APIT fire chance drops drastically as its speed decreases.
APIT only gets to 60% right at the muzzle and if it meets no obstructions
ok Wildcat goes to 3.7 right next to J22-B
I didn’t get it backwards. He is not on fire → 25% chance. 75% is if he was on fire.
Thereabouts. However the fire chance in actual gameplay is still very high and there’s other causes for kills.
The testing they took this data from include the actual target itself. Not just the fuel tank.
They used a P-38 Airframe, fired at it’s fuel tanks, and used a slave engine to create windgusts that would quench any small external fires (Like in actual flight) They didn’t just shoot at bare fuel tanks.
Any obstructions would make it easier to defeat the self-sealing action of a fuel tank as you’re making less clean “cuts” into the fuel tank and the heat from the incendiary would scorch and burn the rubber, breaking it off into pieces, making it where the self-sealing function was bypassed.
So this would also include actually striking the airframe.
I was referring to M23 for the 60% figure
It should technically be higher as this value is for completely full fuel tanks. Everyone flies with fuel tanks at 30%. Normal incendiary works even better than API and API-T for ullage detonation.
If You have 50% for each round to light a target, two hits would give a 75% chance. Not a 25% chance. I have no clue why you would think the first round being 50% would automatically have a lower chance for some reason.
J-22 also literally has an HE round which makes it insane when you can blow wings off with just a few rounds. It’s not a good comparison.
Wildcat has only 1 round of Incendiary in it’s belt. Everything else is tracer or regular AP. it wouldn’t be that effective (if it performed correctly) as you still have a huge chunk of your belt just not including the round. Even if it did, you still need to rely on hitting fuel tanks.
You can fix a lot of the perfomance metric issues U.S. planes have by just making every match have Airspawns as this gives less of a strict advantage of fast climbing props from having a massive first contact advantage. BAsically. It’s more realistic since everyone is in the air already. This also stops planes like the P-38 and other interceptors from just towering over everybody.
The fire chance is very low still. As I’ve shown with the Bf-110. API can’t even go through spars like they should when I tested the He-111. Bf-110 has an insanely high amount of rounds to actually light up. and this is considering the M2HB firs the API-T round almost 30m/s faster than what aircraft spew out.
This also got me. I pointed out the problems with point convergence with machine guns, with you calling it a “nonissue”
In the same post you said that the convergence would’ve needed to be different—not the aim. Which shows that machine guns having problems with point convergence.