imo, should be nerfed to the point that having +3 20 cannons isn’t useless since currently with 2 or even 1 can do the job in the same amount of time.
Same with a 20 round just being a better +30mil round, because the 30mil ends up as overkill with a lot of drawbacks (poor firerate or ballistics + low ammo count)
It should be nerfed to the point where damage is realistic.
Meaning a 20mm AP kills a pilot and deals heavy damage to an engine, while HEF/HEFI damages pilots with fragments, damages cooling system that puts planes on a clock and cause fuel leaks or fires that are going to be lethal.
Not blow every control surface to pieces in a single hit and blow wings and tails off like it’s a Mineshell with 80g of explosive filler.
Realistic where you want gun pods on a Bf 109 to engage bombers or otherwise damage resistant aircraft’s because a single 20mm simply doesn’t cut it other than be just acceptable to target single engine fighters.
Realistic where you don’t want 20mm Mineshells as primary ammo to target four engined bombers because 20mm Incendiary shells were developed for the specific purpose of being more effective.
Quote:
„20mm Mineshells don’t possess enough destructive power to structurally destroy large four engined bombers“
Realistic where you want 50% AP ammo for engaging an IL-2 because you have to put a fric ton of HE into it to destroy it structurally.
Realistic where 20mm are better at setting fires than .50cals, or otherwise what would be the point?
Id still argue that the solution isnt nerfing the bullets, but buffing the damage models.
The former just makes the game worse, the latter makes it better.
Well, they work more or less in tandem.
But sure. Right now a B-17 stabilizer/elevator takes more damage than a smaller Bf 109 wing and a single .50cal AP turns them black for basically any fighter.
Not to mention the structural damage from wings and tails by AP rounds.
So how do you reconcile this nerfed damage with the fact that in-game you can still fly a plane that is missing the majority of it’s wing surface area back to base and repair in 20 seconds? Or with the fact that a pilot can survive a direct hit with a .50 caliber round and only treat it as a minor inconvenience?
This is a land-able plane in War Thunder.
Under the realistic part also falls not being able to fly when hit by a .50cal.
And planes missing parts of their wing isn’t something impossible nor something that happends very often.
The repair time is a gameplay mechanic but causing damage that would ground the plane for some time could be counted as sever damage and as a kill.
We’re also missing a mechanic that knocks out pilots over time from damage sustained.
As well as damage to weapon systems.
Bombs detonating inside bombers is massively exaggerated but somehow ammo cocking off isn’t modeled.
It’s exaggerated visually. In game I have seen bombers survive the bomb cook off and keep flying.
It’s also a plane that’s gonna need more than a paint job after landing.
If tanks are considered killed from knocked out crew that could simply be replaced than why should planes that would take weeks getting ready to fly again not be considered as a kill?
It was possible before sever damage to get a kill for an aircraft that still made it back to base and repair.
That was however removed and now only the match ending will make it count, when not repaired.
And I’ve never seen it because they simply disintegrate when that happens
It is useful if you are inaccurate.
Unless you increase the blast radius to several meters that’s never gonna happen. If you reduce damage instead so these become more common than kills… what’s the point in bothering with cannons if 6x .50s will saw wings off in a fraction of a second?
Blowing control surfaces off on direct hits does sound very realistic.
Which mattered IRL when your average pilot’s accuracy is in the single % digits. Less relevant when we have mouse aim and/or many times more trigger time than them. If I’m shooting directly at their innermost engine or wing root it won’t matter if I have one or four cannons.
How is having a couple hundred KG at least of explosives going off and destroying the carrying aircraft exaggerated? I’ve even caught secondary damage from some B-52s.
A 20mm isn’t going to blow an IL-2 horizontal stabilizer aways that is like more than four times larger than on a Bf 109.
Same with a P-47, a Corsair, Tempest etc.
Right now there’s hardly any correlation with the size of a planes surface and the damage received.
The point of cannons is that they are better than .50cals. because they bring more kinetic and chemical energy into the target.
.50cals shouldn’t rip wings or tails off.
It’s extremely unlikely to happen and it would happen the same with 20mm AP or Ball but more frequently.
The main issue is the accuracy, structural damage and the fact that 20mm have no advantage in fire chance over .50cal in WT.
6 wing mounted .50cals should be sufficient to down single engined fighters but they would be barely as effective as two 20mm cannons.
Compared to 20mm cannons they lack accuracy/range and the ability to cause fragmentation damage, which would make damage to systems much more likely than just penetrating bullet.
But when a B-17 can fly on two of its four engines, using one 20mm destroy an engine in a single pass isn’t going to be enough.
Of course more guns is going to mean more hits in the same time frame.
And time is a resource, as you won’t have a firing solution at all times.
Not to mention allowing you to be able to destroy more targets.
I’m taking about the frequency of bombs blowing up.
You can blow bombs up inside bombers by just hitting them with explosive rounds. Which should be utterly impossible. As the fragments have basically no chance to set of the fuzed inside bombs.
Even with rounds penetrating bombs, it’s extremely unlikely.
Basically impossible with bullets, which simply start to tumble once they impact the metal skin of an aircraft.
Pretty sure that bombs don’t even blow up in any other flight sim game.
This doesn’t change the fact that the plane will be repaired in less than a minute at the airfield and that it will still be a continued threat in the match.
I have shown an example of the game allowing planes to fly while missing the majority of their wings. Is it realistic for this to keep flying?
You don’t need an engineering degree to see that it shouldn’t fly. Yet in game it does.
Have you even stopped to consider what this implementation would look like? Do you model it based off of realistic timelines for blood loss? Or do you model it off of the condensed timelines that we find ourselves in game? Or do we accept a hyper realistic mechanic in a situation that is fundamentally unrealistic? Bleeding out and dying after 25 minutes makes little difference if the game time is less than that.
Why not? It’s a 700rpm cannon. Even if the first shell or two don’t do it, the next ones won’t be far behind.
But they do, and they certainly won’t be nerfed anytime soon.
Currently .50cals have the best ballistics of anything WW2 that isn’t 15mm cermet-core AP.
They’ll be set on fire and eventually die. Alternatively aim for the cockpit.
When not doing either of those I’ve had situations where several seconds of shooting with two cannons didn’t bring a bomber down, so the damage models are not as weak as many think.
Which other flight sims? Because DCS doesn’t model radars, IRCCM, or proximity fuses to the level of WT, and in IL-2 some planes become helicopters after taking some damage.
As for pilots taking damage and dying in flight, we have many cases of them becoming severely injured and flying for hours to safety. So I’d rather not lose to ANOTHER completely arbitrary mechanic like ticket bleed.
And why is that a problem?
This scenario happens maybe once very hundred matches.
Define fly.
It’s got wing roots and a large stabilizer.
It’s not going to take off from an airfield but when moving at high enough speed it could still glide back.
Also could just be a bug of the flight model.
Next, the chance of blowing off both wings at the same time with realistic damage is probably one in a million.
Most of the time asymmetric damage is going to be lethal.
It’s a game. Just put the pilot on the same timer as an engine without cooling system.
What is your problem anyway dude?
Do you have an obsession to turn everything into a problem?
„Oh you want realistic damage but have you considerd this and that and oh what about fun? What about fairness? What about game mechanics?“
Is it so difficult to expect realistic damage from a game that’s basically a simulator with semi-sim and arcade mode?
Where vehicles are modeled based on real life specifications but then we throw it all out the window by making one aspect completely unrealistic?
And don’t even think talking about how it’s not realistic anyway because we can’t simulate actual real life conditions.
It’s a game. It’s a sim, at best, and it doesn’t need to be more holy than Jesus Christ.
I’m taking about single hits, that happen in WT all the time.
I’m not talking about how accumulated damage eventually leads to the destruction of anything.
And that’s why we can’t discuss it?
Ballistics, but I‘m talking about the accuracy of the guns, which in reality significantly reduce the effect range.
So thats were you draw the line.
But when an IL-2 get its wing shot off from two 20mm hits or a 37mm with half the explosive content of a 30mm Mineshell blows the tail off a B-29, that’s acceptable?
But oh no, please don’t make my human pilot be vulnerable to damage.
So you think the game should prioritize your sense of realism? Over being actually fun?
And .50cals are still the best, with the added bonus of much deeper magazines and more gun count allowing for accuracy by volume.
Who says it’s just two? Most shells do not have tracers. The last time I did that, I fired 22 cannon shells at his wing root. Even if only half hit, 11 shells with a mix of HE and AP at such a close range would at least severely damage his wing to the point that it would collapse on the next turn.
And I’ve had the same B-29 tail eat a few 30mm shells and stay on the plane.
The pilot is vulnerable to damage.