So does anyone think this is good and realistic damage? This is footage pre-ShVAK buff from 5+ years ago?
@dannaryan-psn @Loofah is this realistic or not? Is this where we want to put ShVAKs?
“B-But they have lots of ammo!”
Meanwhile your enemies climb faster, have better sustained turns and are equipped with weapons that instantly punish at the slightest mistakes at the cost of “Not being able to spam your cannons…”
Until you’re having enemies with more cannons or they get machine guns—or had them since the beginning—that have HE filler in them, making them essentially just better versions of .50 cals that shit damage all over the place.
U.S. props become some of the hardest to play by having some of the highest weight, with some of the lowest vertical and horizontal MER, and low climbrates, but hey. At least you can spam their guns and you can be fast or something.
From a balancing perspective that’s complete and utter dogass.
Japan was fighting China in the air from as early back as 1937…
In regards to the Spitfire the upper tank wasn’t protected but the lower tank was self sealing back in the second half of 1940.
I know its tail would’ve been lopped off. Stupid isn’t it?
So we’ll completely ignore the engine protection and armoured glass etc? Not to mention the lightweight construction of Japanese aircraft that in general couldn’t take battle damage like their western counterparts, very much like I’d mentioned earlier. Some Japanese planes are built better than others make no mistake but in general they liked to build them light… and later suffered the consequences of doing so. As I’ve said the 190, P-47, P-40, Hellcat, Wildcat, Hurricane, C.202 etc etc were all known as tough aircraft due to their protection and general construction. Do you feel they’re tough in game?
As I’ve said not that it makes any difference as a Wildcat/Hellcat/P-47 goes down in 1-2 cannon rounds the same way a Zero will.
I’m sure I’ve literally replied to this already. Some shots are not registering from that replay but from what you can see the first tap critically damages the elevator, the P-38 never pulls hard after this and then we can observe the Yak tearing its wing off.
One burst cripples, the second finishes it off. Very much like what we said would happen earlier. If the Yak fired a solid burst the P-38 would’ve been dead much faster.
Compare that to the videos I’ve provided. Which looks more realistic to you? One tap shearing your tail clean off or multiple taps (as per your video) causing damage until the wing is separated? With the one of the weakest cannons in WW2 bear in mind…
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dude
you would have died if your enemy had swedish 50cals since you didnt pull out at all
that guy looks pretty crippled to me
with good aim you should have no problem killing him
(you prob dont even need to since that guy prob doesnt have enough engine power left to fly)
(dovah also just missed tbh)
yea
but with 50cals you were able to hit a shot pretty easily which would have been nearly not doable with a cannon (except shVAKs maybe)
do nothing cripple the enemy*
109s entering flat spins cuz of a yellow wingtip:
lie
not always true
(p51s outrate 109s after the g6)
not all the time
20mms still spark quite often tbh
(at least the 151/20 i dont rlly play other air nations that arent germany so i am not rlly qualified to talk about other guns but i can expect that the hispano mk2s with their rlly not good belts also struggle quite often)
they are also some of the best props in the game
like even the p51d5 isnt that bad imo its pretty okay tbh
lie
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It also fought russia there. By their own admission, the russians were losing as badly as 10:1 in some time periods to planes without armor. The actual ratio would be even higher due to overclaiming.
None of these have any engine protection aside from P-39N and even then it’s very little actual armor. Only Fw 190 A has armored oil cooler.
Ki-43-2 actually has above average pilot armor though.
Lacking armored glass is an actual disadvantage, sure. But not all of them have it and some like Corsair’s are quite thin.
Ignore the pilot taking a 12.7mm AP projectile to the face and only turning orange.
Spitfire was also very lightly built and its air system was very vulnerable.
I was being nice. He was shooting way too low. You’d expect more out of someone whose most played plane by far is that P-47.
but now the deadly area is much smaller and can be protected if planes have armor on the sides, which a lot do in fact have it.
currently I can just shoot the tail and win, or the wing with s tray shell for it to fall.
2 planes merge.
explosive round takes away the wing or tail.
engagement is over.
OR better
One planes fires first in a deflection shot but doesn’t kill it’s opponent because he fired an AP shell, flew inside the wing and out the other side.
meanwhile it’s opponent later on fires a full explosive belt at it from +800m and takes away it’s tail while it is extending.
and once again, if fragmentation is so good then I must suppose you use full tracer belts on mg151/20, totally current explosive simulations doesn’t make them a handicap!
aw thank, maybe try the same since you don’t want to learn to aim without taking away a chunk of plane on each pass nor you want to learn to defend your advantage in energy.
My point was FI-T uses fragmentation like 15mm, which you glazed so much, and has comparable ballistics to other 20mm cannons
And also it isn’t uncommon for german to use the stealth belt because air target belt’s require much more lead.
AND I ALSO SAID, that IT rounds act like 12.7 API-T, they can pen the skin of aircraft and actually make fires.
So don’t put words in my mouth.
which is still a ret*arded excuse, because now you just remove the upside mr. genius.
are 109s hard to shoot down compared to a unarmored wooden biplane?
are A-26s hard to shoot down compared to a unarmored wooden biplane?
are Il-2s hard to shoot down compared to a unarmored wooden biplane?
Equip a 20mm with funni yellow rounds and the answer is a NO
still dead weight, if range was no longer a problem then simply shrink the tanks
more performance and smaller fuel tank to hit!!
on ground battles, on air battles is barely impossible to not be detected unless you aproach en enemy from behind that is atleast 9km from any teamates and the moment you approach you notify the entire enemy team.
Because in real life they didn’t suffer an enormous structural failure from 6g of TNT and a free 7.62mm.
So then designers needed to resign because they kept trying to add “PilOt ArmOuR” and “SelF sEaLing TaNKs”.
And there it is
You drop “WT is a game” when you realize you can’t justify more design choices by ignoring their original purposes.
Since WT is a game I can make all planes pull the same and fly at the same speed? We know how annoying when you barely fall short of a fire solution or the enemy uses their advantage!
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AP shell severs your spar and you die
This is the same plane that took hits from full HE belt F4U-4B in head-on and didn’t lose any wings
Over 800m away? Shoulda dodged.
Why would I use it when 2/5 of this belt is hot trash?
Air targets at least has 2/6 being trash, and one of those is AP-I which is much more useful.
FI-T would have a purpose in FF or FF/M cannons since it is present in more belts, but that version does next to no damage.
All this aside I would use MG151/20’s FI-T shell if I had an option for custom belts. The damage is quite good. You land two of these by the center fuselage and his pilot is toast.
IT from 500m away
API-T from 500m away
With the added benefit that .50cals are available in 2-3-4x the number of guns.
The upside is that ARMOR prevents hits from penetrating areas protected by it. Having armor behind the pilot doesn’t prevent your wing spar from being split in half.
I can’t believe a big gun can still destroy small targets! The answer is yes actually.
Which they did by making them self-sealing.
“is a common trick that also works against SPAAs”
I have successfully used it in Air RB many times. But often I prefer that they know I’m there to maybe get an interesting fight.
In real life we also did not agree to takeoff at the same time from two airfields equally spaced out from the frontline. Like the Wildcat example above, they were often disabled and unable to continue fighting. For gameplay reasons (which is something you guys HATE) you’ll simply be counted as dead when that would happen instead of returning to base scot-free.
And no, having matches devolve into hordes of mildly damaged aircraft perpetually returning to the airfield because it takes Five. Hundred. Cannon shells. to be actually shot down is not good.
Yes, and all of those cost you PERFORMANCE and RANGE. Now, is the TRADEOFF worth it? Is the extra armor gonna get more pilots home and more enemies shot down than the extra climb rate, speed, and turn performance you’d get without it?
Did all the extra armor that late 109s had help them win? The G models added that armor and were widely recognized by their pilots as a DOWNGRADE from the F models due to the extra weight that was not compensated by the more powerful DB605 engine.
It’s very easy to justify actually, the current system is both by far the most popular and one of the VERY FEW causes that actually got the playerbase to unite and annoy gaijin about it until it was fixed properly.
Skill issues are not game balance issues.
enormous wing sections vs wing spar, even from the front spars tend take 50% of a target’s surface.
Situational at best.
What if stealth belt, literally only upside they have now unless it is the mg151/20’s belt
as if stealth belt’s aphe does any better, it’s the same ratio but now your bullets flie almost the same trajectory as ShVAK/B-20.
Normal shells can land on the tail and separate the aircraft in 2.
Land the at the border of the wing root section and snap it.
If the plane is even unable to fly without wing tips then at the very far point of the wing.
Smaller vital target for oneshots and can be protected via armor.
…Aaaaaaaaaand pens the fuel tank. Now I want to see incendiary with to AP and below 20mm what it does, 1 clue, it can’t pen the skin.
AP barely comes into play, these scenarios you make up for it barely happen and are completely negated because I just need explosive shells to brute force it.
Pilot armor? explosive to wing or tail and done.
Spar? explosive to wing or tail and done.
armored fuel tank? explosive to wing or tail and done.
armored radiator? explosive to wing or tail and done.
Pilot sidearmor? explosive to wing or tail and done.
Protected ammo belts? explosive to wing or tail and done.
Incredible look how useful AP is when I can just load explosive and brute force.
And these are single engine aircraft, and most of them already tower over people with rudders of such size can be meet you at eye level at least and propellers as tall as you sometimes
step up the engine count and you meet these monsters…
You really think a shell the size of your thumb can leave these aircraft on the very end of “split in half”?
extra not needed weight, make the tank actually smaller.
Also vs isolated enemies, but stand near an enemy while jumping another and see how your target reacts.
2 planes next to each other and only one needs to near the monitor.
On a fully isolated enemy or dropping towards a groundpounding / furballing enemy?
Also “interesting” to just kill them on the next swoop? revolutionary concept for you I suppose
You AND me said dead pilots will become the main culprit for death, a really beaten up plane needs to pray another one doesn’t come in and finishes the job.
Oh what happened? This heavily armored plane is your next opponent? And your cannon’s pen value isn’t the best (early shvak found on I-16s) or somehow didn’t load AP?
Well you can shoot at the elevators, rudders, ailerons, tail control, destroy outboard engines or the radiators to cook the engines if you can’t reach them. ALL of this while adding more drag , making dodging impossible for your opponent and while bypassing the armor via firing into easy to shred modules, you and your opponent do feel the presence of the armor, you need to plan around it, think smart, your opponent, even if it comes down will know it’s armor did allow a window of time which they simply wasted.
AND specially YOU will feel the lack of AP shells.
Or if you know if the pilot doesn’t have side armor you can just aim at the side?
OR even better, if customs belts are added you can pick your flavour of AP/Explosive ratio even!
And matches are already these short lived furballs with have a chance to turn into a manhunt or simply end there.
Maybe the skill issue is that you can’t comprehend cannons needing more than 5 rounds to take down a plane, or maybe that planes don’t split in half in flashy rapid mid-air deconstructions
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By the way, letting players take damage and escape “unpunished” as you say isn’t necessarily a balance issue either, as long as it works both ways. If you can always just exploit the exact same mechanic to go unpunished yourself too, then trying to frame it as an injustice or preferential treatment makes no sense, you know?
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So turns out survivorship bias was nonsense all along? They should’ve just armored the wings and the tail after all.
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And in the most recent situation where I was actually hit in a head-on against a plane with four cannons, I survived because he did not have any AP.
Then you’re both gambling and you should still dodge.
If it penetrates the armor, it WILL kill the pilot. IT and AP-I will do non-lethal damage, but AP-I will still do more. APHE will also do far more damage if it fuses elsewhere, on top of the damage from penetration.
And you do the same with FI-T and all their control surfaces fall off, most likely.
We don’t get belts full of 12.7mm Incendiary. We do get 100% belts of 12.7mm API-T. But even in the Buffalo where I was using belts that were mostly straight AP with like 1 Incendiary in there, I was getting a LOT of fires.
And I’ve shown several times that “just brute force it” doesn’t work anywhere as well as you’re pretending in actual gameplay.
Spoiler
And they are mostly hollow. Even the F6F which was in the high end for most survivable aircraft, and lost a lot of performance because of it.
Others like the Spitfire could be routinely shot down with just a few 20mm hits.
Yes great idea, when struggling to produce even just the aircraft themselves let’s introduce a second set of fuel tanks for the same plane! Instead of, oh I don’t know, using that production capacity to make self-sealing tanks for a different aircraft.
That’s not very interesting. It’s not like having a little fun is gonna kill you.
And if someone doesn’t?
The game basically just kills you when your tail controls are too damaged in order to prevent that very situation where you’re unloading your magazines at someone who has already lost and already taken “too many” hits.
Why would I feel the lack of AP shells if I’m the one bringing them? Let’s look in a random plane with cannons and…
Oh look! AP shells!
Think smart by, in your words, mindlessly unloading all my munitions at their entire aircraft? The presence of the armor being limited to keeping that guy “alive” even though he has zero control over his own aircraft and zero ability to stop me from unloading all my munitions at him?
which would be LESS HE
It would be even better if we could pick belts per gun/pair of guns, so with four cannons (or more) I could have an AP shell ALWAYS being fired with every gun cycle.
It is instead a gameplay issue. It would make for terrible gameplay if I can just stall right in front and above you with the guarantee that in 99% of cases you can’t actually kill me even if you hit your shots, and when we both stall I’ll be right behind you!
Exploiting the mechanic of… not missing? Knowing how to aim? lol
this isn’t world of warplanes
(i tried them in a custom match and all of it was hot garbage)
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No, it’s not terrible for gameplay because the measure of enjoyment isn’t tied to how explosive or fast-paced killing an opponent is. To begin with, Air Battles isn’t exactly promoted as a purely competitive, kill-farming Deathmatch where individual gunnery and stacking kills matter more than fulfilling some strategic objectives through team cooperation, along with a heavy roleplay element—after all, plenty of aircraft don’t even carry guns to shoot with, and their sole enjoyment apparently comes down to just flying them and pretending to be on some “historical” mission. Besides, plenty of massively popular games feature a high Time-to-Kill without their gameplay being terrible in the slightest (see MMORPGs/MOBAs)
The other day I spent over 8 minutes in an endless turn fight, neither of us could land a lethal hit or even hit each other (the cannon on the Me 262 A-1/U2 is trash), and it was way more fun and thrilling than if it had just ended in a bland head-on engagement.
No. Taking advantage of the fact that the game allows you to absorb a certain amount of damage to gain an upper hand over your opponent (repositioning) or make a miracle escape. Again, there’s nothing unfair about being able to survive a battle if everyone has the exact same chance to do so.
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No, that’s exactly what it is. The fastest and most straightforward way to win is to simply shoot every enemy down.
Undoubtedly seen as some of the weakest around and total free kills, with next to zero battle impact
And plenty of popular multiplayer games feature TTKs in the “how fast can you pull the trigger?” range.
The current state of weapons in general is the result of a massive player effort to return their damage to their previous state after huge nerfs.
Which is also the case right now as for the first time probably since the game was released, every cannon does good enough damage.
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But headons are also gambling? There’s a reason you never take one if you have an energy advantage
It it just so happens it hits the pilot, IT has better firechance.
And the ballistic benefit is still there
Stealth is only loaded because it retains both broken cannon damage and better ballistics
Tracers isn’t loaded because it loses said damage, even if ballistics are improved even further.
Which further proves AP is complete ASS unless you fire a lot of them at once.
In your defense tails could be reinforced because you’ve seen the size of aircraft, did you manage to see the thumb of each person?
Ok but in game incendiary only works if
1- fuel tank is VERY close to the skin
2- you hit an open and exposed radial engine from the front
AP at lower tiers does makes engine fires very common, so don’t confuse those.
With legacy cannon damage that even dicerolled the amount of fragments?
Actual gameplay? oh you mean point, click, ignore all defensive aspects of the enemy plane and have it come down?
Only system only comes in as positive if you don’t actually like aircraft and merely chase an instant sound cue plus a “target destroyed” text.
I don’t see performance drops, only complete structural failures pal.
It’s yellow from an AP round or gone.
“It’s hollow” is whole slice of nothing, because if I made a carboard cube of 10m x 10m x 10m and strapped a firework onto it I wouldn’t see it split in half, just make a hole.
Under explosive rounds or simply AP punching a hole into the pilot or into any critical systems to convince the pilot to bail out?
Under same argument, A P-51C should fold completely under a Ki-27’s fire because a thai Ki-27 shot down a P-51 with 2 peashotters on November 1944. Except it was a fire+killed pilot and not an enormous structural failure caused by a mysterious not yet seen 7.7mm explosive round.
Should 7.7mm now cause structural failures? It’s only fair! 7.7mm do have worse falloff and are harder to aim at distances!
A well/luckily placed shot will take down any aircraft.
And what do self-sealing tanks tanks do? planes will split in half anyways, it will never come into play, better to just make it harder to hit them.
You can have more fun if you tune down cannon damage, more passes, more dogfights, better showcase of damage models and seeing the enemy plane finally come down by slowly gliding or slowly pitching down.
But people need the instant dopamine injection now I suppose and can’t bother to “have fun” nowadays and actually be invested into each plane to learn their entire aspects.
So many planes to pick off yet they all feel the same 90% of the time.
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I specifically said
You really need to try the ShVAKS, trust me, that AP will be useless and you hop into the tracers in 2 battles.
But I suppose ShVAKS are upscaled ShKAS so it’s ok because I flew an I-15 and means I know about them! same argument you used to justify you skipped over 90% of cannons.
You will still kill your opponent, you think +10 rounds spraying stuff all over the place won’t make a pilot mush or atleast cook every system in a plane?
Terrible gameplay because you need to read and think to plan around a lot more.
Exploiting the mechanic of dumbing down every cannon damage into the same, armor useless, AP as a niche round.
You make looking for info and trying to follow it end up as a punishment because those more powerful rounds are locked behind with more AP in the belts
And stop the cope “AP is useful in A2A” it isn’t. 2 explosive rounds and bye.
good enough = 30mm blast damage
Ok pal
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Under explosive mostly with hitting places near modules
I don’t how you think about HE but it must not be a round which require like 30-40 rounds to destroy Spitfire or other fighter
I saw no one here used unique cases to show the damage so this example looks weird (well it show that “flimsy” Nakajima design isn’t so flimsy lel)
Unironically but Japan used 7.7 HEI round called Ma-101 for army planes and it showed much higher efficiency than simple rounds. Idk was it sent to Thailand but it is possible.
Of course I don’t say it is a thing which should one shot structure but even current 12.7mm HEI very rare one shot
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And I did not have an energy advantage. My only options there were to sit in front of an undertiered plane that has 1000rds of 20mm, or risk the head-on.
Ballistics are the exact same for all shells in a belt.
Good thing we don’t fire straight Incendiary. AP-I is right there.
I was spading P-51K last night and the AP-I works wonders. Wings and tails came off regularly, almost everyone was on fire, and many more pilots died than when using cannons.
There’s no armor protecting the wings or from straight up. Even so there’s many fighters that take much more than 1 or 2 shells to shoot down.
An empty Hellcat weighs ~4650kg. A Fw190 A-4 is “just” ~3340kg. The performance drop comes from all the extra metal they put on it.
what the hell
Ok sure, but that’s not common at all lol
7.7s (and all other rifle caliber MGs) already have greatly exaggerated damage except maybe the french 7.5mm. Those actually heal your enemies. Right now you could probably replicate that kill, fire and all.
just take default belts then
clearly not since that’s far higher damage than this thread wants
I’ve shown several times when and where it is useful.
People who don’t obliterate a plane on a defelection shot in 1 pass seem to lose their minds. Cannons should absolutely not be doing as much damage as they are now. ESPECIALLY since mouse aim makes it SUPER easy to aim and get shots on target, with third person also allowing it to make ranged shots much easier than in 1st person.
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i personally agree that cannons are too strong rn
but so are fifty cals
you need to nerf both or none
just nerfing one of them will make it unbalanced
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