Cannons doing too much damge

Machinery of War Discussion Aircraft
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614

https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/NKbd80E8GZa1
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/G3hIHS2Czesq
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/Kc727805gFdc

Browning .50cals are too accurate, overheat too quickly (smallest issue) and cool down way too fast.

With how incendiary bullets affect airplanes, they would lose a massive amount of incendiary chance at range, hit much less and would also overheat far too quickly to spray people down from range anyway.

In reality this limits .50cals to fire at 500m at most and in short bursts for accurate fire.

Another big plus for the Italian Breda-SAFAT that has a heavier barrel, making it more accurate and is an open bolt gun, cooling much faster, compared to the US .50cal or the Japanese Type 3 and Ho-103.

1 Like
615

So, in principle, explosion damage should be more harmful to aircraft than metal fragment damage? For example, I always have that doubt regarding HEFI and FI ammunition, since FI ammunition is supposed to focus more on fragments, whereas in the Shvak, FI ammunition has more explosive than HEFI.

616

Explosion damage should be more concentrated, dealing a lot of superficial damage and a lot to modules really close by.

Fragmentation is what mg151/20 FI-T round does, all the damage spread out, being able to hit a lot of stuff at once, so your opponent ends with a damaged engine, cooling system and engine if for example you land a round in the wing root. It also has the benefit of a small incediary chance

Currently only +30mm HEF and mg151/20 are the only one that fragmentate, other “F” had the tag ignored and turned into explosive rounds.
And since HE rounds are way too overperforming (including mg151/20), they basically turned every 20mil into a almost guaranteed one shotter.

You can blame damage models like spars being way too weak or simply modeled wrong with aircraft showing double spars actually having 1 that has double the area to hit with no health than a single wooden spar.

Tails are also weak, literally weaker than wings because they simply rely on “damaged skin” to come off, they lack spars that would need penetrating the skin to hit.

In short: HE and F rounds have been merged into one and then blast damage was super buffed, leaving other rounds like AP class rounds obsolete.

Its like if you lowered the overpressure requirement for all 75mil APHE down to 5g, sent all pen to 200 and made it so they fuse on the first steel plate they see and blew up.
Sure gameplay would be easier, no need to take HE shells no more and choosing is easier and you now need to simply look at caliber to know pen, but was it really worth homogenizing 90% of cannons?

2 Likes
617

If we’re going to talk about it, to please random players who just want to laugh while killing without worrying about anything realistic, the devs decided that all bullets should do the same damage.

618

The main damaging effect from explosive rounds comes from the fragmentation but of course they also blow some holes, just not nearly as large as Mineshells.

Every explosive shell is HEF, while FI doesn’t really exist.

It’s just a translation from Russia, where they emphasize the fragmentation effect.

What in western nomenclature is a HE shell, in Russian it’s a fragmentation shell.

Technically fragmentation-explosive.

Early ShVAKs shells were called fragmentation-explosive and fragmentation-explosive-incendiary.

While the WW2 and later 20mm and 23mm shells were just called fragmentation-incendiary, without the „explosive“ designation.

Probably because they realized that these shells didnt have much of an „explosive“ effects, like blast damage.

Russian artillery shells had two fuze settings, fragmentation and explosive.

Fragmentation meant impact fuzed and the shell would send out fragments.

Explosive meant with impact delay, to explode inside buildings or defensive structures and blow them up with the blast effect, called Mine effect in Germany.

12.7mm explosive bullets on the other result in far less fragmentation but have a relatively strong blast for their size.

After all a 12.7mm MDZ (=instant action incendiary) can hold up to 3.2g explosive-incendiary filler, at nearly a third of the weight as a 20mm OZT shell with 4.13g filler.

But small explosive effects are just not that effective to duralumin planes. But they could be pretty harmful to wooden aircraft’s like Hurricanes, Yaks and Mosquitos.

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619

Also Hispano’s SAPI works in strange ways, but surely not as it should, as the nose-penetrator magically disappears once it explodes.

2 Likes
620

You can also consider that yaks and hurricanes had trouble activating fuses on german mine rounds because of their canvas skin in some parts, specially tail sections.

But yeah, Wood or Metal, double or single or even triple or quadruple, thin or thick

All those differences seen on spars are nullified and also homogenized.

Not only have cannons been merged, damage models are also merged by the same rules, doesn’t matter your composition, structure or volume, everyone recieves a -10% difference randomly and everyone is one-shotted anyways so it doesn’t matter.

621

All of which are meaningl when you can easily fly back to base while missing most of your wing area and repair in 15 seconds.

Or where you have an automatic diagnostic system that lets you know exactly what you can get away with at a single glance in the worst case.

622

But can you still fight?

Missing wing tips basically lock someone to 1 direction to dodge if the plane can even fly without said portion.

Oil leaks force your opponent to end the confrontation as quickly as possible, risking more headons or simply try to run away (hampered by extra drag)

Fuel leaks are yeah, kind of useless, unless the enemy loaded like 17 minutes of fuel or has 1 non-sealing fuel tank.
Maybe make it more likely to set them on fire if they are leaking fuel.

If they got away, that was way too lucky, maybe they nailed the head-on or an ally came to their rescue and brought time at least.

1 Like
623

Potentially. Never seen any mention of that though.

While canvas is pretty soft in comparison, I think the compression of air trapped between the material and the impact fuze would be enough to set it off.

The 13mm shells for example would fuze on 2mm thick cardboard.

But could be that 20mm fuzes would struggle.

British and US Hispano fuzes were quite insensitive, as they used air compression fuzes, with pretty thick covers.

They needed high velocity and/or material of enough resistance to be triggered.

1 Like
624

It’s not meaningless as it might get you killed.

Also repairs can be disabled or overpowered AA guns removed.

It’s not like players returning to base to repair is something new.

625

Is there any proof of this ever happening?
Monoplane reinforced canvas is actually stiff and very tough, nothing like WW1 biplanes made out of sticks, piece of string and some old lady’s underwear

626

In very many cases yes. Especially in Air RB.
Earlier in the thread I linked very old video where Adam514 gets 5 kills in a Bf.109 while having 2 blacked out wings.

This would be a form of structural damage that should not happen since it falls into the realm of “blowing wings off”.

image

This is a fightable plane in Air Sim with the exception of the fire…which burned for a bit before the wing fell off. But the wing shouldn’t fall off from fire if it was realistic. And it also should have much lower chances of catching on fire if we are taking in-game multipliers as being analogous to real life.

Oil leaks simply start a clock before the engine loses power and dies. If you have enough altitude you can glide back to base without an engine or make it far with reduced engine power. You can glide 15km for every km of altitude you have.

Refer to comment about fire multipliers in-game. Realistic fire chance would likely be far reduced from what it currently is. Also if we wanted to be even more accurate then USA planes would be far more resilient since they tested tanks against 20mm rounds as well whereas most powers only tested theirs against machine gun fire.

This is the basic strategy for spamming FW-190 F-8 and abusing the air spawn early in the game. Even when fighting the overpowered guns that people here are complaining about it is fairly easy to just force a few head-on attacks early game against climbing opponents and collect 2-3 kills and it completely breaks any momentum from the other team.

Reducing damage of other 20mm cannons makes this tactic far more effective and far more forgiving. It is no coincidence that most of the people that want massively reduced damage are German mains.

627

Repairs have never been disabled in the games history. AA has also been a staple of the game for 10 years at this point. Those are non-solutions.

Being able to tank damage from your opponent and being able to RTB while your cannons destroy their whole entire plane is a problem. If I can just force head-on you with near immunity it makes things far more favorable to me. Or if you have to take very specific shots at individual components while I can vaguely just fire somewhere on your plane then it favors me as well.

This is why a very long time ago when Loofah was complaining about the G.56 compared to the Mk.14 Spitfire, I pointed out that it basically turns just as well, while having far more killing power at the time. And a tankier damage model as well.

628

Blacked out, not fallen off

109s can fly without a wing tip, but becomes a losing gamble to keep the confrontation in said state.

You have to pray that your opponent crosses your nose if you want to win.
You will put out resistance, but you will still come down.

Structural damage will still happen, If I nail a fighter with multiple 30mil rounds, structural damage is guaranteed.
But at this moment you just need 2 20mils and the thickest part of a section will come off,
Spar durability doesn’t help.

Your opponent will still need to swap behaviour to a more agressive and risky.
You cannot take your time with an oil leak, the moment you take too much time, you will start to lose on energy, not only because of a damaged engine, but also extra drag.

glide if you want, but first kill your opponent, or you will be stuck with no power, will need to preserve speed to glide back (limited defensive manouvers) and you didn’t end the duel, a dude on your tail, good luck

“I took the candy from the baby and now it hates me”

mg151/20 sacrificed ballistics for 3x the explosive filler, current damage nullifies said advantage.

For the one chance of “win head-on” (which is essentially a gamble and a bad habit), mg151/20 loses a lot range, it is more limiting if your opponents keeps dodging since you won’t land a bullet.

Imagine we took everyone’s airspawn because FW-190 F-8s abuse them
Your IL-2s (A2S optimized aircraft) for example would be foaming at the mouth, the bomber player would actually bomb your house for it.

And to clarify

mg151/20 is also overperforming

2 Likes
629

It’s a trade-off. 20mm Mineshells are no auto win option.

They have by far the worst ballistics out of every cannon, they are hardly better than MG FF, Oerlikon FF or Type 99-1 shells.

ShVaKs already out perform them and the Hispano does so massively.

And your argument doesn’t make much sense as right know you still have 2/5 AP in MG 151/20 belts that potentially don’t deal any damage flying through the airframe. So it can already happen that a plane „tanks“ shots.

It’s the same trade-off with the MK 108 were you get massive damage on the entire airframe for bad ballistics.

Whats supposed to change is that neither 20mm Mineshell nor HEFI is going to one shot kill your plane structurally, unless some rare cases, and that all 20mm shells would be much more lethal to pilots and fuel tanks.

You hit the right component and have enough guns to make hits in a short time and the enemy is going down.

Or you fire a big shell that, if it hits, is very likely to take a plane down in one shot.

1 Like
630

Cannon damage vastly scales based on the ammo. IMHO cannons have to be modeled because of their nature. They’re harder to aim, so the landed shots need to be rewarding. Compared to M3 browning .50 cals, which do good damage with multiple hits, but not single shots. Their volume of fire and speed compensates the damage.

Like how a 5cm round from a Me-262 A1/U4 are heavy and slow, and don’t fire fast, that round is going to take down any plane it hits.

I feel like the exception to this is the 45mm in the YAK, it fires fast, has a decent velocity, and kills in 1 shot.

631

Well, it’s in the nature of cannons.

.50cals need to hit components directly, while 20mm explosive shells make hits count more due to their fragmentation dispersion and chance to actually cause real damage.

An Oerlikon FF or similar cannon weighs as much as US .50cal but trades velocity for higher damage and likelihood to cause lethal damage per shot.
Whatever they hit, they will cause more damage.

Cannons are the better option but carry enough .50cals and you can also dish out enough damage.

2 Likes
632

Well, so does the 37mm.

And then there’s the MK 103 which fires even faster and one shots pretty much any plane with Mineshells.

Which of course shouldn’t be the case unless it’s a single engined fighter.

The 50mm is of course pretty much overkill against anything but the largest bombers.
For which R4M rockets do just fine. Not that we ever need those in WT unless we get like AI B-17s or B-29s.

633

When the video was made it was entirely possible to survive multiple hits of MK.108 to the wings. They were very temperamental a long time ago. Sometimes they would do no damage.

Literally just this. No engine from 37mm hit. Do lazy porpoise dodge and successfully glide back to base. This was status of the game 7 year ago.

Damage was low enough that Adams go-to defensive maneuver was to cut throttle and just lazily roll around and wait for opponent to fly past him. That was considered the peak of defensive flying 8 years ago because short of quad cannon or MG.151 you would probably not take any significant damage.