Claringbould’s book closely covers Ki-43 and P-47 battles in New Guinea. The thing that is noteworthy is that he concludes that the loss rate was around 2 Ki-43s for every P-47 lost and that the 5th Air Force was over-claiming by a factor of about 6:1 while the Japanese pilots were doing the same.
This is from his book.
The problem is that the performance is subjective and there is no way for Gaijjn to solicit any kind of feedback that isn’t biased.
Like even when the A6M5 was at 4.7BR we were still having the same argument that it’s too slow. Heck even in this thread the argument is that in the Air RB environment that it would be balanced if matched against its historical peers.
The Wildcat is superior in a dive and has a higher top speed than the A6M2 so this match up is arguably fair. US players just need to learn how to thatch weave and quit coping. They need to learn just like the pilots IRL. Also the A6M3 is the peer to the F4F as well.
So what sane player is going to try to use negligible top speed advantage to offset massive performance gap in every other category? It’s the same mentality of why people chose to not play the MiG-29SMT when the F-16C was added. Some people back then had the audacity to ask “why don’t RU players know how to BFM” when their chosen plane was massively better in every way.
109 e models thats it only turn fighter
They don’t have to drop by that much and they wouldn’t since apparently they still get high stats
Even 109 Es aren’t straight up turnfighters, although they’re the closest thing to it. You’ll still lose a dogfight to something like a B239 if you’re not careful.
while yes, the A6Ms are overtired, the only ones i actually struggled with the the M5s, the M3s and M2s were a blast to play when i realized that i should be using the APHE belts instead of the HE belts on aircraft
Employ tactics AND teamwork?!! Sir this is a War Thunder!
(lets ignore that the main selling point of the 109 is that it outclimbs nearly everything on its br)
(and also ignore that i never talked about historical matchups for planes)
(i am talking about nation matchups)
The Hellcat first saw combat in 1943. As you’ve said the variant we have in game is a later version and I’d actually love it if we could have early versions added.
I don’t trust kill claims on either side as they should be taken with a humongous pinch of salt but more or less when the Hellcat came online was when the Japanese were on their downward spiral.
A lot of sources now claim the Hellcat’s kill-loss ratio over the Zero is somewhat lower than before at 13:1… but that’s still an incredible record. American sources also claimed that the Wildcat ended up recovering to 1:1. I have doubts over the Wildcat claim but the Hellcat considering how Japan was more or less wiped from the sky could no doubt have merit.
The early models were very flimsy and none of the Oscars could sustain much punishment. But to call it useless trash is incredibly short sighted, it was one of the only aircraft that could supposedly out turn a Zero.
There were a helluva lot of threads mostly from German players as the FM’s for a long time were UFO’s. Both the Yak and La could helicopter climb and retain energy to absurd levels. Even since then people still complain about the Yaks although the main scrutiny over Russian aircraft at the moment is the ridiculous power of the Shvak cannon, and they’re correct to highlight this fact.
The LF IX is far too good for it’s BR. The Ki-84 rightfully got highlighted for its nuts FM a while back due to its lack of stalls, you could yank the stick to your guts and it’d just pull incredibly tight turns with no repercussions. They’ve thankfully since fixed it so there’s far less complaints.
That said there’s plenty out there stating that the LF IX is OP, because it is.
A lot of American pilots have a habit of turn fighting everything. I’m sure we’ve both seen P-47’s trying to out turn 109’s at low speeds not to mention P-51’s getting low and slow. That said the more competitive events (such as the historical ones) tended to attract much better pilots especially when there was a leaderboard involved. I’ve taken part in a ton of the “operations” battles we had back in the day and in Sim at least the American side won plenty of matches.
To be fair the Ki-84 (and this isn’t an insult) much like the F4U4 is very much a yank and bank plane, it’s the easiest type of aircraft to do well in especially when you’ve encountered things like the novice P-51 pilot you’ve mentioned etc. But this happens in all game modes.
Sim EC’s aren’t historical battles we were talking about earlier. Some BR brackets can appear dead and to be honest the whole game mode is becoming stale… in fact the entire game is. Gaijin is more interested in providing new shiny toys to keep the dopamine flowing instead of actually improving the game. Historical battles as a “special event” would massively fix that.
I do, or did. The P-51D-5 can absolutely hold its own against the Ki-84 but its much harder to do. You absolutely cannot sacrifice speed. Hit and run.
It still works out as the opposition can do the exact same thing. In RB certain aircraft are much more uptier friendly than others so they get spammed. But this is off topic for the thread so I’ll stop.
But in general and to get back on topic the A6M’s are in my opinion overtiered at least in SB.
This
The number that you cited is just based on USN kill claims.
This is the characterization that many people make about the aircraft; i.e see claim that Japanese planes were unarmored that get repeated ad-ininitum on the forum.
You have to go back 10 years to find threads complaining about La-7 flight model.
This is dueling video from 7-8 years ago of La-7 vs Bf.109 G-6 (the worst turning of the 109s).
Note how 7 years ago the matchup is basically the same. I am willing to bet if we go even further back into the past it is still the same story.
Literally nothing has been changed about the Ki-84 flight model since I started playing Air Sim. It is still a full stick back plane as soon as you drop combat flaps.
P-47 with the old flaps actually had a chance against most Bf.109s and against most of the kinds of players that flew Bf.109s. P-51 is always going to be low and slow until the D-30 variant considering the early version climbs like doodoo.
And if you pick 10 experienced sim players and look at what planes they play…you will see by and large they prefer planes that don’t suck 90% of the time.
Like yeah I have flown F4F in-game…guess what…it is still disproportionately played less compared to even stuff like Ki-61 for me.
A6Ms are like a full BR lower in SB than they are in RB. What BR do you think the A6M variants need to be placed at to be fair?
I flew F4F-3 against A6Ms a lot in the SB match. In the current game, due to the ill gun damage problem, a pair of F4F had no chance by using Thatch Weave, beacuse the A6M can mostly 1-shot you with their Type-99. Of course against A6M2/3 their 99-1 had bad ballistic that can sometimes to be exploit. In contrast, I often see A6M to use Thatch Weave effectviely, due to the ineffectiveness of 50cals in game.
F4F-3 with 4 early M2 had to aim with great effort in order to land enough hits just to kill an A6M, a lot of time in a stall dogfight with A6M, early 50cals provides no chance of killing a Zero in short deflection shot. I’ve tried 10-20 times, with only one success in snaping the pilot, and very often the A6M5 is easier to deal than an A6M2, because the M5 had worse turn-rate and bigger fuel tank to be hit than the M2.
So we should make cannons do damage like this?
If hypothetically the A6M families got implemented control stiffening, not to kill all of its controls but to remain in the level similar to A7M. i.e. The A6M shouldn’t jump on someone without any concern but still pulls 6-8Gs in high speed pull-out. In the current game, you often see A6M pair with another fast airplane which causes problem. Once been bounced there’s little chance you would survive A6M’s 13G dive pull-outs.
With realistic gun damage been restored, A6M2 should be at 2.7, M3 3.3, M3 Ko 3.7 and M5 been 4.0-4.3. The Zeros came in early IRL which was one tactical advantage it exploited in history.
Why not. If you play early 50cals that is the experience you have to face every day.
I played soviet mains during 2017- 2019 and shvaks at that time was bullshit, I constantly switch between ground-belt/FIT/steath, it still works if you land hits properly near the cockpit. I mostly flew Yak-9u/9p/La-7 and -9, was mostly doing one-person team to turn the tide when facing Japanese main in khalkhin gol and zhengzhou.
I was able to secure the 1st place in monthly kills per sortie leaderboard in air RB, despite using shit shvaks. Also, that is why planes like Yak-9p and La-9 exists, to provide effective 23mm fire if you fell shavks were not enough.
The modern-day shvak and gun damage mode is been cursed for a long time. 1-cannon Yaks keeps 1-shot off the tail of another plane and it lacks any fun to play with, also planes like Yak-9P and La-9 now been placed in trash cans because there’s no need for more guns/ bigger guns.
So basically your opinion is that gun damage needs to be lowered to at least its lowest previous point? This is something that the vast majority of players did not like; hence the massive negative reaction to first iteration realshatter damage.
There was a point where the Yak-3U was at 5.3BR because the gun damage was so low.
I would believe separate gun damage models between RB/SB should be implemented. Or Gaijin could make dynamic gun damage model RNG system. As far as I know and from my previous expericens, most air RB players indeed liked to create kill montage and that requires good gun damage, a bad 50cal damage and a good 20mm damage helps to accumulate good reversal scenes in Yaks and 109s which creates most replays for a video. Moreover, as the majority of players in the game play ground RB, an exaggerated cannon damage helps SPAA to maintain balance between ground and CAS.
For air SB players, mostly they came from old IL-2 so they would believe the gun damage in War Thunder to be too great, and they mostly liked the gun effect previously seen, and there’s much lower demand for a short/snap montage to be created in the SB player communities. So a more realistic gun damage can be implemented and tested in air SB rather than in air RB first.
A separate gun damage model or a dynamic gun damage RNG specifically for reversal can solve the problem.
Gun damage in old Il-2 is abysmal for anything that isn’t 20mm cannons. It’s one of the biggest improvements that has been made with the new Korea game.
I‘ve seen IL2 KOR and its gun dm is even more exagratted than the WarThunder, both for cannons and 50cals. The 50cals would one-shot the wing-root off, or 90% one-shot to cause a delayed fuel fire. The IL2 GB gun dm is conversely too low, 30mm hits like 20mms, 50cals only get access to ball rounds. Which the 1C had created two extremas. The DCS gun damage, seems somewhat OKAY, as well as the IL-2 COD.
I would also believe the old IL-2 1946, with so many modifications been done, and been a semi-open source platform, was good for DM and DM reprogramming. The only problem would be that all airplanes are programmed by different groups over such a long period, which causes values to be not interchangable, and one plane to be 10 times tougher than the other.
Yeah so basically the benchmark you have is that you want guns to do what most players would call “no damage.”
Yes someone would yelling “spark!” in a live stream when they get only a “crit” instead of a “kill” from a single 20mm snap.
Not sure if you are one of them.
