OK, so essentialy I guess MG151/20 apparently was in use as ground fired weapon in 1942 and had its entire separate ammo logisticz, and I guess we have sources clearly stating they were not, never, nada used by fighters, even though on eastern fromt there was 0 reason to use self destruct fuse anyway.
I don’t think there’s any need to prove whether it was used for air to air combat, if it clearly existed in several variants and was perfectly capable to be fired out of aircraft mounted MG151/20.
Of course there was.
On the eastern front the fighting took place all the time on the front lines.
So you’re constantly near or above friendly units.
Unless there’s a belt for attacking ground targets, Mineshells should have a SD fuze.
Ok, but is that reflected in game?
No.
Do other nations care?
No.
Switxhing Germany to SD fuse simply ruins the ability to fire long range in a head on. It serves no other in-game purpose as NO SANE MAN would choose SD over normal shells for combat as shown in WT.
Also the chance of hitting troops is miniscule compared to a chance to hit a town or city you’re dogfighting above, hence the need for self destruct shell grows exponentialy when defending your own territory.
It wouldn’t, if it wasn’t bugged.
How is it bugged then? MK108 has the same issue, where we get self.destruct shells in the (by far) the best belt because every other one has a shell that’s lower in power than Shvak’s single FI-T for whatever reason and that includes the HEF shell.
Here L.Dv.4000/10 Abschnitt C Punkt 7.
“He Rounds of the heavy Guns are not allowed to cause damage on the ground, if they miss the target.
Solution: Self Destruct (…)
Excluded: For Ground attack from greater heights (…)”
The main issue is that the self-destruct is bugged:
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/dvxLt7m0iE7k
So essentialy it can be used just fine, since there are no friendly forces to be hurt ever present in WT and also MG151/20 shells magically disappear after 1600m (it’s 2500 in the file but I’ve never managed to score a single hit beyond 1600 even in a vertical dive upon the truck in test flight).
I love how we’re using “the right ammo for air combat”, only it’s not the right ammo for the conditions in game.
Remember, this is a game where you can literally take off for a combat mission in a propeller driven aircraft with fuel for 13m of flight (which any WW2 pilot would probably call “suicidial”) so the “realism” argument has no power here.
I refuse to believe any intelligent human being capable of predicting the basic consequences of his choices would code it like that, hence I refuse to believe in existence of this bug, as qualified Gaijin staff would have never made such a ridiculous mistake.
Looks like you had a rough day.
NP - i am not your enemy. You might consider rephrasing your statement regarding “lowest effort research” and everything is fine.
I read this years ago, but with 3 minutes of research i found this (auto-translated) statement:
Dismantlers make no more sense than with fighter planes except for anti-aircraft guns . . . according to Schliephake, the MG151/20 fired almost exclusively ammunition with dismantling, especially the mine grenades and incendiary grenades.
Regarding the 4 seconds, Tony Williams wrote to me that before April 1941 1.7 seconds (750m) of zder were used, 3 seconds (1100m) from that date.
This refers to the book: Flugzeugbewaffnung: Die Bordwaffen der Luftwaffe von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart Hanfried Schliephake - i found this statement here, auto-translation works fine.
I also refused to belive that the first shell in the a belt determines the muzzle velocity of all shells in the belt, but here we are:
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/yzhY4EoYdQqM
This follows the path of XDDDDD ideology. Since I don’t and can’t criticise Gaijin staff, I have to assume this is intentional, to prepare WT players for the real adult life where the world seems to laugh at your suffering. That’s a valuable lesson.
I added your bug report to my post regarding BR changes:
We need historical files. My guess is, gaijin would not take some Youtube videos seriously. And they don’t play the game, neither do they know about air combat irl, so they won’t feel that something is weird.
I have recently created an La-5 issue and it was accepted immediately and will be added to the game just in the next version. In that issue I attached a flight test report directly from VVS, as well as the memoir of German test pilot. I also pointed out the pages where evidence was.
It is not a good idea to assume that Gaijin intentionally want to torture players by adding SD. Around the time of the SD change, they also increased MG151/20’s HEI damage by about 15%. When they nerf Mig-23ML, everyone guessed that they were about the present a new Soviet top tier premium jet, but that just did not happen. It was simply nerfed because someone submitted historical files. My guess is that some of the files attached to certain MG151/20 issues included SD fuze, and Gaijin mistakenly believed that this was the case for all German 20mm rounds (SD fuze is probably for Reich’s homeland air defense only).
All HE autocannon shells self destruct afaik.
I would avoid the word torture - (intentionally?) nerfed looks way better. SD was for a long time wrongly implemented (MG FF/M) - adding a faulty feature to the MG 151/20 shells is simply not comprehensible.
It takes 3-5 minutes for an adult to find out that the SD fuze was time based - and not “travelled distance based”.
If gaijin implement a distance based fuse for the SD of the mine shells (which nerfs the cannon in high speed chases or headons) there are only 2 conclusions possible:
A) Their game engine is not capable to set a SD shell based on a 3 second timer and they simply did not care about this and decided to use to activate the SD based on travelled distance - either fully aware of the resulting nerf or not
or
B) They simply did not have the right people deciding about those issues - or they have the right people to decide, but they decide based on faulty information.
The pure fact that we have enough evidence that certain bug reports were simply ignored in case they have zero impact on jet BRs (where they earn money) is imho not really evidence of USSR bias, but the current result is neither realistic or an improvement of your game play if you use MG 151s.
Something makes feel that maybe there is no real time fuze in War Thunder. In GRB and sea battle, perhaps there is not much difference between time fuze and travel distance based fuze. Perhaps It’s just your conclusion A.
The issue is not that SD fuzes are used, because they should.
The issues is that SD operation is bugged and it doesn’t explode based on a timer but a set range.
This limits the range the shells can be used and the given distance of around 1.2km would only increase with altitude where the shells don’t lose as much air speed.
And 1.2km is more than enough, given the rather bad ballistics of 20mm Mineshells.
It’s of course not the case that it’s not possible to model with the game engine.
Why would it be?
Bombs can have timers, and so can shells.
I continue to stand on position that SD fuse IRL was a choice made to suit SPECIFIC conditions that are not present in game, hence forcing the SD fuse onto player is in the EXACT SAME ballpark as forcing a full crew bailout on penetrating hit, regardless of damage, because that’s what people did IRL (nobody wanted to find out that the smoke was actually ammo catching fire).
And it’s also pretty clear gaijin has no idea how to make it work properly.
IMO it’s better to not introduce something than introduce it completely wrong.
Same goes for German Mk103 “incendiary” shell that is currently a hilarious conglomerate of WORST features of a few other shell types.
IMO the only purpose of SD and that single shell is to nerf the weapons utilising those.
How does SD fuse improve the gameplay? It absolutely doesn’t.
