Which you can see in-game since it goes both ways, there is no difference in fragmentation from both shells, if anything only caliber determines fragmentation and same rule applies, explosive = fragmentation.
Let me set my views on each shell type
fragmentation = more spread out damage, with fragments able to damage unarmored modules and create more drag, does reduced damage vs spars / engines, area of effect is bigger.
high explosive = concentrated damage, will damage spars as normal and deal extra damage to unarmored modules, however the area of effect is smaller.
AP = deals massive damage to modules but requires direct hits
I = Fire (duh), should at least be able to pen an unarmored fuel tank (it barely can, worse if sub 20mil since it can’t even pen fabric) and have a chance to start an engine fire.
SAP = penetrates skin, deal massive damage to modules, but reduced damage to spars / engines
APHE = SAP with AP benefits, but requires the fuze to actually work.
Curently high explosive and fragmentation have been fused and then cranked up.
The armor penetration would be significantly less. And because ShVAK shouldn’t detach tails or destroy control cables then it would be useless from rear aspect.
This is the clip that Kiwi was saying was accurate earlier. Look at all of the damage and what it does. Literally nothing.
That is whant I want to avoid, ShVAK and similar cannons should be toned down to represent the filler, but not completely destroy it, make it so “fragmentation” part does frag, because in that clip is it simply using explosive power.
Except the argument that has been made is that the clip is accurate because the fragmentation would just get absorbed by the armor plate and that the tail section of the FW-190 doesn’t have fuel tanks or anything particularly vulnerable to fragmentation damage. So therefore the situation where 190 can just keep flying straight is permissible.
This is specifically in relation the the clip that I posted. Basically ShVAK should not do any damage from the rear unless it is lucky to get a fuel leak or a fire.
My point is not that it can kill. My point is that it’s not a magical 1-shotting weapon, far from it.
If I can still not get reliability with 1-shotting people, give me 20mm. Type 5 is of course muxh better than Ho-155, but they still suck compared to f.e. US 20mm.
30mm Type 5 only advantage is a bit of range in some cases.
Now, we have Soviets with lower velocity 23mm and 37mm. Both are pointless when Shvak exists.
I’ve said it a lot of times, I’ll say it again: why the only differences between 20mm are ROF and ballistics?
Why we can COMPLETELY ignore the shell construction/damage due to "balance’, but there’s no issue with German cannons having crap range/ballistics because they were designed with maximum damage in mind.
In such case give me a fictional 108g FI-T with 7g of HA41 at 760m/s and lets be done with it, because that’s exactly what would have been designed if 7g of HA41 could 1-shot single engine fighters.
Enough hits will eventually cause enough structual damage for the aircraft to not be able to fly anymore, or even break apart.
Make enough holes or fire from close enough range against an unware target and you might even fire right through the holes you just made in the airframe.
Of course this isn’t modeled but it’s also not modeled that 20mm API will destabilize after impact and most most likely hit a plate sideways with reduced armor penetration.
Unless this is modeled, the API will always be kill pilots from cloes range, just punching through the pilots armor.
A 20mm is obviously going to be more lethal, as the damage caused to fuel tanks is much bigger.
At 400 yds:
M20 API-T: 40.4g, 566m/s, 1.17g IM-11 Flash powder (modifier 1.0) → 40% chance for single hit fire
At 800yds: 20% chance
20mm OZT: 96g, ~575m/s, 4.13g A-IX-2 (modiffier 0.5) → 66% chance for single hit fire
At 800yds: 41% chance
Of course they are not really directly comparable, since the M20 penetrates through the airframe while the FI-T shell explodes on impact. Most likely it will not have the same effective range inside the aircraft but it will cause more damage to a fuel tank than a single .50cal.
The closer it gets the more damage to the fuel tank and the more damage to the fuel tank, the more sever the fire is going to get.
You also have a higher chance to damage a tank with fragments than with direct hits from a .50cal.
A modifier of 0.5 for aluminized RDX might be too high but for comparison:
The early OZ shell contained 2.8g GTT explosive mixture and 3.2-3.4g Incendiary composition, similiar to flash powder.
This was later replaced with 5.6g A-IX-2, aluminized explosive (74% RDX, 23% aluminum, 4% wax), very similiar to what was used in 20mm Mineshells after they replaced the PETN with HA 41.
So the original OZ shell contained more aluminum, contained oxidizer and was inside the reinforced bottom part of the shell, which most likely made it a more effective as an incendiary shell than just using A-IX-2.
Most likely this was done to simpify production.
On th other hand, the shell would fracture into more fragments and 20mm API also existed to direclty hit components inside the aircraft. And even though the incendiary effect would most likely only occur after striking an armor plate, it it could still cause lethal fuel leaks that could be ignited by other incendiary rounds striking the area.
Fw 190s also had the armor protecting their fuel tanks removed. Previously they had the same layout as on the F-8.
So the fuel tank on the Fw 190 is now always vulnerable by attacks from behind.
Engines should be more reslient in general. Right now every hit takes away a certain amount of HP but of course the actual damage would depend on impact angle and what part was hit.
You can have your engine melted in seconds even from LMG fire, which isn’t all that realistic.
Only 25% of hits against the Bf 109 engine from the front will cause delayed lethal damage. None are going to cause immediate lethal damage.
Only 11.3% of the engine hit by a .50cal is going to result in immediate lethal damage.
But it also shows that hits to the bullet proof glass are going to disable the fighter momentarily until repaired.
That is my point though. More “accurate” damage by your estimation is planes taking even more rounds to destroy. There are basically no circumstances where ShVAK should kill pilot from direct rear. That is supported by your claim of previous clip being accurate by your estimation or that getting fuel tank fire would be lucky.
So would ShVAK be more or less likely to cause fires than it currently does? Would it be more or less effective in causing fires than current M20 API-T in the game?
So should every cylinder of the engine require a direct hit to disable? P-47 should take how many hits to the engine? One per cylinder?
“Realistically” head-on kills should only be possible with cannon equipped planes. But only certain (German) cannon equipped planes.
Basically German planes should be able to glide back to their airfields under most circumstances found in War Thunder and should basically never be shot down unless it is a full sized EC map like Dover Strait.
It simply makes no sense from a gun point of view.
You can have 4 20mm and will to the same job as two 30mm but with the benefit of carry more ammo.
So what’s the point?
Why have a 37mm cannon when you can just have a 20mm Vulcan that will laserbeam cut through any plane?
It simply makes no sense to have this lethal of structural damage when the main damage component would be fragmentation.
Explosive shells are literally AHEAD that release fragments instead of subcaliber payload.
The principle is the same. Make it more likely to damage components inside the aircraft.
They even trade higher muzzle velocity and likelyhood to hit for the destrutive power of explosive and incendiary effect.
But my Ho-155s are onetapping even jets. There’s lots of 50mm 262s at this BR and 20mms don’t always kill them in one hit, even if you have four cannons.
This should change, but we should also NEVER have a case where someone can sit in front of your guns and keep flying unopposed.
How does it not? 20mm did not black out the wing section and did not damage the fuel tanks next to it. 30mm did both. Against the J5N it even reached over, blacked the center fuselage, and damaged the pilot.
In the case of the only two fighters that carry the Ho-155, you do so in addition to the 20mm cannons. There is no downside.
In the case of the Type 5, there is only one premium plane with just two of them, and it is lower than the models with four 20mm cannons. The J7W1 has four and you’ll notice it does not struggle with shooting down things if you can actually get your nose on target.
The benefit is that I hit someone once and they’re basically out of the fight already. By the way I’m only using Japan as reference because I have experience with them, and they offer the greatest variety of 30mm cannons in fighters instead of saddling you with the terrible MK108.
Menawhile, the 30mms cannons that offer “no benefit” over 20mms:
If J7W1 had 20mils instead the story wouldn’t see much difference, except poorer ballistics but improved ammo pool and firerate.
Still wouldn’t hold it’s own at 6.0 lmao, how are players losing to the 1 japanese plane they can reliably outturn and catch.
There’s also the mk-103 and rare mk-101 but last wouldn’t count.
Mk-103 is the closest to your japanese 30mils
The 20mil would have already landed 2 rounds in there and blown the section off, 20mils have superior firerate remember? Except in cases where said cannon has an extra long barrel, usually 20mils come in pairs so it is negated.
(Type 99 model 2 would eat a lot of crap if cannon damage is correctly differenciated)
(longer barrels usually improve muzzle velocity and accuracy but sacrifice firerate, thats why the Mk-108 can fire at 600 rpm despite being a larger caliber unlike Mk-103 at 450 or Type 5 at 500)
The MK 108 is terrible because it’s completely overkill in WT for no benefit.
It fires very large 30mm shells, the Mineshells weighs 330g, while the HEF-T equivalent weighs 440g, which is nearly as much as Japanese 37mm shell for the Ho-203.
The Ho-155 fires 240g shells and the Type 5 350g and both are regular explosive shells.
A P-47 could survive a 30mm Mineshell to the wing but in WT either 30mm blows it right off.
Both Japanese shells are less destructive than the US 37mm. Which faires similar to the 30mm Mineshell, when the attack came from the front, which gave the 37mm a huge kill chance from being able to knock out the engine.
While attacks from behind would be far less effective.
So it’s not terrible but WT damage scaling is terrible.
Or you would otherwise appreciate having shells loaded to the max with explosives.
A Me 262 has four of them when it actually just needs one or two with the same amount of ammo.
It’s a Navy plane, so the 500rpm 30mm cannons would be replaced with 490rpm 20mm cannons. Firerate is identical or worse. So you’re trading more ammo for less damage and worse ballistics.
The issue is that neither are on fighters you’d actually want to ever use. The MK101 is only on a rare event plane and it’s a twin engine attacker, the MK103 is only on fat attackers, fat jets, or the Ta 152 C3 which is the worst of all worlds.
Uh huh.
The AN/M2 and Hispanos aren’t much better at 600rpm.
Would you be so kind as to show me a plane with a single Ho-155 or Type 5? Because as it stands, for the only nation that actually used good 30mm cannons on single engine fighters, swapping either the Ho-5 or Type 99-2 for them is an upgrade in ballistics and damage, and only one type suffers reduced RPM.
It would then be a good time to get upgraded Type 99 cannons - Type 99 Model 4 increased RPM to 620, and Model 5 to 750.
Overkill except when it comes to actually hitting things, which is why nobody uses them. We’ve gone through this already.
Type 5 is ~35kg heavier than Type 99. I don’t know how much the ammo is. That’s negligible on a ~3 ton plane.
You keep dodging the question. The question is very simple.
Do you think the chance of .50 cals causing a fire is currently realistic or unrealistic? Because this factor affects how everything else’s fire chance is changed in relation.
I.E we can reduce 50 caliber fire chance by a factory of 2 and keep 20mm fire chance the same. Now all of a sudden the fire chance for 20mm cannons is unchanged and fire chance for .50 cals is significantly reduced.
But in the past what you and others have hinted at is that fire chance in game is also vastly over-estimated and therefore basically needs to be reduced across the board with .50 cals being hit the most severely.
I also don’t see any compelling reason that fires caused by 20mm shells would be more lethal in-game than fires caused by 50 cals. A couple hundred gallons of
So is 1 shot per cylinder a reasonable set of damage? Or 1/2 shot per cylinder to account for over penetration? Currently 1-2 .50 cals can disable a 12 cylinder engine.
If we follow this logic then at a minimum we should triple the current durability of engines and require 6 shots of .50 calibee vs 1-2.
That would be more realistic would it not? And realism is the only thing we care about for the sake of our
Why do you think bullets would have twice the kinetic energy when fired from the head-on? Just pause for a second and think about the claim that you are making.
The closure rate of the aircraft is not a large factor in the penetration ability of a .50 cal. The propeller driven aircraft in most cases is not going to be traveling at high enough speed to double the kinetic energy of the projectile.
I also think you failed to read my previous post. German cannons should be the only thing to realistically kill from the head on. At worst a .50 cal might destroy some part of the engine.
We also said we weren’t concerned about the variation between how WarThunder handles intermediate damage or how airfields are positioned.
A Bf.109 or FW-190 without an engine in-game can glide around 15km for every 1km of altitude. A little further if you feather the prop.
Basically in pretty much any kind of damage condition short of wings being gone it is easily possible to RTB during an Air RB match. If I head-on a guy at 3km at the start of the match…as long as I am within 45km of my airfield then I can feasibly RTB without an engine. Even with wind damage…if I am within 30km then I am still safe. This is also assuming engine damage isn’t just partial horsepower reduction.
So how does game not turn into plane effectively being damage sponges for one side? Which is what we have had in the past.
LMAO, I’ve shot hundreds of jets with Ta’s 30mm, and the most common result is “hit”, or sometimes critical, as they happily tank a 30mm to the nose or tail, actually can tank a few.
One shotting jets?
Absolutely not.
And while damage in this game is pure BS, Ho-155 does NOT hit harder than MK108.
And with 20mm even at same ROF, you would have 150-180 instead of 60 rounds per gun. Triple firing time meaning you can be a lot more liberal with trigger, which actually helps immensely. Sure as hell it helped my Wyvern in the past.
20mm situation also hurts all Soviet medium velocity 23 and 37mm equipped fighters, because what’s the damn point?
And anything with more than 2 cannons, as even with 2 you only need some time on target if you catch the API/APHE part of the Stealth belt for MG151/20
It means for the same weight you can have two Type 99 and more ammo.
Which makes them pointless.
Nobody used them because they are pointless.
You don’t need to hit a B-17 5 times with 30mm HEI-T and you don’t need to hit it 20 times with 20mm HEI.
That makes it pointless. They don’t give you more firepower because 20mm already give you all the firepower you need and Japanese 30mm are as lethal, when they shouldn’t.
The MK 108 doesn’t hit four times as hard as 20mm Mineshells, which by all logic should hit harder than 20mm Oerlikon/Hispano shells.
So MK 108 HEI-T doesn’t hit as hard as 6 regular 20mm explosive shells, which means they don’t have any advantage worth using.
