This has always been the case with the game. Bombers were super easy to kill even in Birds Of Prey back in the 2000s. You could fly through formation of He.111 and easily down most of them in only a few shots. This is game that you insist was more realistic than current WarThunder.
People want gratification over balance.
People want balance over historical accuracy.
There is a reason sim is a dead game mode that is dominated by mixed lobbies and experienced players taking whatever plane happens to be the most overpowered for the day. There is a reason that experienced sim players always end up on the same team and end up farming a bunch of noobs.
Nobody would play the disadvantaged side in a historical scenario with the way the game currently exists.
Right? Imagine planes like IL-2s, P-47 and bombers to actually be tough.
I mean in ground mode, heavy tank players always complain that they aren’t tough enough,
while other players have to deal with a tank that they can’t simply point an click.
Imagine you want to bring heavier armament or gain more energy before an attack because you know it’s not like every other target and you can click it out of the sky by just landing shots anywhere.
The ShVaK and B-20 are literally better weapons than the NS-23 which replaced them, carrying more ammo and with higher initial velocity.
Attacking an IL-2 with two Italian or Japanese 12.7mm SHOULD be a pain because they are simply not made to destroy such an armored plane.
At the moment it’s at worst a mild inconvenience to not have the same power as 20mm canons.
But in WT it’s not even safe to get shredded by 7.7mm LMGs.
Wooden planes should also be much more vulnerable to explosive rounds, while there’s simply no difference in the game. In fact wooden planes are superior because the wooden structure doesn’t fuze most explosive rounds.
Saved me a few times flying the K-4 and the Yak-3.
While 12.7-13.2mm explosive bullets should be especially effective against them.
Making shooting down Hurricanes and Yaks a lot easier than a Spitfire or P-51.
Imagine if 20mm cannons actually did damage to bombers in the game that @dannaryan-psn praises for being more realistic than War Thunder which was also developed by Gaijin.
Just casually obliterating twin engine bombers with only 2 20mm cannons and 4 30 caliber machine guns.
No wonder the 109 G2 was so revered for years. You could get three such cannons on one plane with good performance.
I’d rather have the .50s than cannons in some cases, the A6M3’s are terrible.
It is irrelevant if the 50mm oneshots or not because nobody uses it, and it is irrelevant if the 37s take one or two shots because mouse aiming is trivially easy. IRL the 50mm would allow a pilot to hit a bomber well outside of the range of defensive gunners (thanks to better ballistics), but this is also irrelevant in WT.
How is it not true if the MK108 fires 500m/s shells and every other good 20mm is at least 700m/s? Even the MG FF/M is much faster at 675m/s, or the short barrel Type 99s at 600m/s (and this last one brings serious range limitations even at 4.0).
Probably because the bombers can see you as it isn’t night time.
This will be the year of the Fw190!
How is it balanced that you can just SIT in front of aircraft of a particular nation because you know their cannons don’t do meaningful damage, even after several hits? How is it balanced that against them, you can take incredible, suicidal risks knowing that there’s a very low chance that they can actually do something against you?
And as said above, there is very little feedback for damage, you can only verify that the enemy is unable to keep fighting when you see his wings or tail fall off, or the engine is knocked out, or the pilot is killed.
If he was attempting to evade and being hit once or twice, sure. But not reacting at all to the multiple 20mm shells going right into his control surfaces makes for terrible gameplay.
Do you realise average WT opponent is actually much better than WW2 pilot. Even if we assume pilot training was f.e. 300 hours in the air (it wasn’t), such pilot had next to none actual real life deflection shooting under his sleeve, even if some training programmes were good at teaching the basics.
Over Africa such pilot was sweaty, possibly dehydrated, suffering from heat, noise and engine vibration. While it’s easy to constantly look around and fly in WT, IRL it was a lot more challenging - with most setups you don’t have to rotate your head more than 40 degrees to look back. IRL if you want to look back, you have to look back. People were.WAY worse at friend or foe, the position of the enemy was a huge unknown, navigation was a HUGE challenge and engine had to be actually monitored for signs of random failure, something we never experience in WT.
Marseille was exceptional, while his opponents were oftentimes pretty busy trying to perform simple maneuvers. Of course he would have smoked a lot of heavily experienced pilots too. But he would NOT shoot down 17 in 3 sorties.
Maybe 4-5.
He was suffering due to same issues, but his experience and skills made the gap much bigger than in WT.
Just like in simple jobs there’s less of a gap between a guy with 1 month and 2 years experience, but in highly demanding jobs a skilled, intelligent employee will get more things done than an entire team or beginners.
Same reason why on the Eastern front people were shooting down IL-2s by the hundreds. Because the guy in IL-2 was a hilariously easy target.
Give me sim setup, 10 hours of sim training and you’d be shooting me down 17 times in 3 sorties too, even if I would be still enjoying a long list of advantages over average WW2 pilot joe.
So why are we revising the claim down to only 4-5? This is even far and beyond any normal correction to pilot claims. What are you basing this conclusion on? Or is it just vibes?
I am asking you a very specific question in your regard to your claim that Marsailles only shot down 4-5 planes instead of 17. This is far below even the fairly common scholarly practice of reducing claims by a factor of 2. Your argument is that we should instead reduce claims by a factor of 4. I want to know how you came to this conclusion.
The plane was still flying well and manuevrable, and put in a fair fight with 302ku who refused to surrender in the noon of August 15th 1945. What would happen to the F6F in-game if type 99-2 landed hits? 1 shot tail blew off, 2nd shot your wing blew away, Lmao.
I also quoted record that a 4 cannon F4U-1C needed consistent burst on Ki-84 and A6M to secure a kill. All of these demonstrated that even with 4 x 20mm IRL still not able to ensure a one pass kill.
Can planes fly without wings in real life like they can in the game?
F4U damaged by N1K2, left wing break apart as the pilot flew it into a high-G spin after recieved hits, the wing also struck the fuselage. He flew back with one-wing.
Makes sense as I couldn’t found related damage surveyed in action report, other than in secondary source as I saw this pic as been a kill claimed by Kanno Naoshi.
What if I tell you that a 37mm and even 20mm cannons can already hit outside of bomber gunners range?
It’s simply a calculation of how many shoots are you going to hit vs. how much ammo does a plane carry.
With 5% hit chance a 37mm with 30 rounds can’t in reality even shoot down a four engined bomber attacking from range on average, but a 50mm cannon that only requires one hit can.
The problem is more that you can’t fly at the same speed as bombers when they have fighter cover, so instead of using range you need weapons that can be fatal within a very short firing window.
In WT you can easily shred a B-17s tail and/or tail controls with a ShVAK from 1km.
Well, each their own. They are absolutely lethal but don’t have a lot of ammo and are best used at 250m or less.
