Note that common theme in Soviet interviews is targeting at ranges that are even closer than what Americans or Germans would consider point blank.
The La-9 did not fly until 1946. The heavier armament was likely driven by a counter-bomber consideration and not a counter-fighter consideration. It should also be noted that the Soviets also liked to use their fighters for strafing ground targets.
And yet when the British requested that the Mustang receive the same armament as the Spitfire, the AAC squashed that suggestion and remained standardized around the .50 caliber armament. In fact the P-51Bs and P-51Cs were armed with only 4 .50 calibers.
The fighter that arguably broke the back of the Luftwaffe starting in late 1943 was only armed with 4x.50 cals.
Adopting 20mm cannons for anti-fighter work was not seen as necessary by the AAC during the war. This was in spite of having multiple on-going cannon projects throughout.
ShVAKs have been good aircraft cannons for around at least 2 years prior to Realshatter implementation. Guess what? The exact same person was still complaining about getting his wing shot off in 1 shot and that ShVAK should be nerfed.
The ShVAK is OP argument goes all the way back to the old forum. I think that prior to that the same people were upset about how effective incendiary rounds in Berezin and .50 caliber were.
This whole argument has been a continually shifting goal posts that basically amounts to German LARPers wanting their pet fighter to be the only relevant one in the game.
The fighter that broke the back of the Luftwaffe was the P-47 in 1943, it was the mainline U.S. fighter that saw the brunt of the Luftwaffe forces before the P-51 was adopted for an escort role partially due to politics and costs.
Air force kept with .50’s as long as they could due to having not only a large stockpile, but tests showing that, .50’s were in theory more efficient than 20mm’s and matched the 30mm’s in a short burst.
I remember this. .50s in 2014 were literally one shot lights but had absolutely no damage structural damage to them. I remember when they nerfed the flame chances so hard that .50s literally had no capability of killing, so you had people swapping over to ground targets for awhile and you could wind up in fights where a 2-3 second direct burst from someone could still be survivable.
An unfair advantage… oh, like Mineshells being the only shell that truly worked?
Lack of gun balance is what we had when MG151/20s were nuke slingers, Hispanos were called Hisparkos, and we watched an armorless plane tank a dozen shvak shells for no noticeable flight performance decrease. Only one nation being able to play the game properly is not “balance”.
That’s funny, because I was playing the Shiden just now (got a 10 kill match) and having 4 cannons instead of the two in other aircraft definitely felt much better. Especially when I had to quickly ensure a Ju288 died right then and there.
The circumstances of my team sucking basically forced me to wipe out more than half of the enemy team on my own (plus 3 AI Su-6s as a freebie). Thanks to my pretty good accuracy and favoritism for getting close before firing, I had 116 shells left when I made a forced landing right as we won the match.
Now, how many 20mm HEF-T shells do you think is “balanced” and “fair” to take to shoot someone down? Because I’m pretty sure that if you had your way with cannon nerfs, this match would be impossible once you factor in that I’m by no means 100% accurate, and especially since I had to shoot down a P-47, a 190 F-8, and a Ju288 (planes which you’d make extra tanky) and others which I had to ensure died quickly so I could engage the next threat.
And frankly, I’m entirely against reducing the impact of individual players even more after the increase of team size from 12 to 16 already did.
WG removed weakspots because armor became irrelevant at times, especially with gold ammo. Thus the only way to get players to grind, buy, and play new tanks was to offer something better - more DPM, more armor, or more damage are by far the most relevant stats. They did not hold back powercreep, and it has been killing it for years now.
This is different. We are not continuously increasing how much damage guns do, we have leveled the playing field so nations other than germany and usa can enjoy the game.
Funny you say that, because when I died earlier, the little popup said it was to an AP-I shell.
Also, the thing you say never happens, happened:
A 20mm HEF shell hit a P-51’s wing, did not detach it, and instead set him on fire. Guess what? He still died.
What’s the difference from this to him simply losing that wing? He died anyway!
And different… how? Because you’re just describing the legacy system again lol
190 A-5s pushed head-ons because hisparkos and shvaks were never doing enough damage to it to matter. I dunno how Type 99-2s were back then, but certainly not as good as the german gun.
Why do anything else when just a single hit from MG151/20 would instantly kill the enemy, and it has twice as many guns with greater ammo load.
You stay at high altitude and lure him into a classic upwards spiral. It’s easy. Ki-44s have no power up there.
For the record, “multiple tons” here, actually means ~1300kg.
And I know numbers are hard, but do try to be honest.
In your “figures” you are purposefully going much faster than their level speed in order to give the Ki-44 as much ram air as you can and make up for its poor altitude performance. It’s also very convenient that you don’t have propeller efficiency nor thrust on there.
Ah, would you look at that. Almost 100hp more, 7% higher prop efficiency, and this is against a cold Ki-44-II that hasn’t had to cut back on RPM to control its severe overheating - all the Mustang has to do is open its very efficient radiators that barely affect top speed, or even don’t bother with MEC at all as it’s very flyable without.
The one where you almost entirely miss a Hellcat doing highway speeds right in front of you.
That’s the claims you guys are throwing out.
Again, for the record, “hyper specific target” here means “anyone I get in front of my nose”, and they died extremely quickly in almost all cases.
Real! Actually, I died once to a Yak today so this clearly means ShVAKs are doing too much damage. It’s only realistic if I can make a mistake and get away with it, learning nothing in the process.
The P-47 did not have the range required to go deep into
Germany and in 1943 the Luftwaffe tactic was to deploy their fighters beyond the range of the escorts.
The P-47 wasn’t “held back” due to politics. It didn’t have the capability.
This is a specific area that I am quite well versed on.
AAC development during the war was focused on a .60 caliber projectile that they thought would provide the best balance of ballistics and payload. Also on the development of advanced gun sights.
You could break the game into different periods and at any one point something was ass. There was a 2-3 year long period immediately before the ShVAK buff where Berezin was just better and taking the triple cannon Yak was just a pure downgrade.
I spaded the La-7 for a 1v1 tournament during that time period. It was prob hands down the worst possible gameplay experience. I spaded the plane and endeavored to never play it again.
This was at a time when I could get around 2-3 kills per game with anything carrying MG.151 or even Hispano Mk.II. My kills per battle in La-7 at the time was basically 1 kill and 1 assist. If was abysmal.
There was a period where the Yak-3U was at 5.3 and where the primary use for the BI was to ram bombers with it. My friend actually a bomber ramming montage with the plane at the time.
Me with friends were calling its bullets as “Imperial socks” (and it was called so before I came to the game) so it can be guessed why it had name like this
That was my experience in the 190’s back when I was new to the game (2020).
I just knew that the odds were around 80% in my favor in pretty much any headon. Here and there I would trade with .50cals snipping my pilot or setting me on fire, and a couple times I was humbled by the old AN/M2’s x_x
Oh. So it’s still not much of a difference from my initial claim. Lol. I simply started at 7k, dove to the altitude, and took the picture.
Bold of you to claim I was purposely trying to falsify data. From hereon out. I will assume that everything you post is an attempt to lie or mislead. Since you’re happy to lie about me.
So you’re purposely misconstruing what people are saying. Lol. Bad faith actor. You’re not even worth talking to anymore.
It did have the capability. 200 gallon Brisbane tanks were offered and made and were available, but drop tanks being put into service were hamstrung at every nook and cranny and turn by Hap Arnold’s edict. It’s why projects like the YB-40 were made.
The navy did the same with the Mark 14 torpedo. Not wanting to admit or even fix it’s faults until having to fix them later.
The continued development of the M23 also competed with the .60 caliber projectile.
And you just happened to choose an altitude where the Ki-44-II was above its critical altitude and the supercharger is unable to compress enough air to keep the engine running at full power, where the P-51C is still MAP-limited and cannot make more power regardless of how much ram air you give it, and got the Ki-44-II to 676kph TAS, a speed it can only reach in a dive, in order to make the power difference be as small as possible.
Right. It’s all very convenient. Of course, it wouldn’t help your case if you went down to 2km where the 44 drops below 1400hp and the 51C is happily chugging away at ~1650hp.
You control the keys you press.
Now, tell me how I’m misconstruing your exact words? Or is your “single round” just like your “several tons”, where it actually means something completely different?
You may not remember that or deliberately omit this, but I’ve been saying M-geschoss is overperforming for a long time and it should also be weaker than it was pre-real sh*tter.
But since you’re denying German guns their damage advantage, why don’t we just give them same ballistics as, lets say, Shvak? Or even better, everyone gets same ballistics as Hispanos?
Why not?
Why, again, having different plane flight performance (you can’t just glue yourself to a Spitfire while flying Fw 190 f.e., if you ever slow down around most other single engine fighters you die), different ballistics, rof and belts is somehow “OK”, even if differences are actually huge and make playing certain aricraft simply painful, but god forbid somebody had better HE shell damage in a way that matters?
Brisbane tanks were not offered in Europe and would not have extended the range far enough for the P-47 to allow it to escort bombers deep into Germany. It also wasn’t developed until the second half of 1943. Hap Arnold was also very well aware of the development of the Brisbane tank. The Brisbane tank was manufactured in Australia. It also wouldn’t have been compatible with 8th Air Force P-47s by the time it was developed.
This whole narrative around the Brisbane tank and the “Bomber Mafia” is pushed by Greg’s Airplanes, Trent Telenko, and Pierre Sprey is complete nonsense.
The AAC / Arnold made fighter range extension a high priority starting in very early 1942. Republic was actually directed to adapt the P-47 for the Lockheed style tanks that the AAC had standardized around 1941. This includes wing tank connections.
In-lieu of this modification, Republic opted to develop their own drop tank that used their own connection system and not the Army standard. The tank they developed was not suitable to combat use.
The decision to let Republic do its own thing lead to the AAC not having a good drop tank for it until 1943 and also resulted in the plane not being able to utilize drop tanks developed for other planes until late 1943 for centerline tanks and not until 1944 for wing tanks.
It also meant that the stockpile of P-38 tanks that were left in Britain when the 8th AF had their 4 squadrons of P-38s transferred to the Mediterranean theater for Operation Torch, and over Arnold’s protests, were completely unusable by Thunderbolts in 1943.
This is also ignoring the lack of internal fuel that would limit the P-47s ultimate range until it was increased to 370 gallons; these planes were not available until the middle of 1944. Bt that time the P-51 was already completing the escort mission and doing a better job of it.
Not exactly true.
In earlier days, weakspots on f.e. E-75 or IS-4/IS-7 were big enough to aim at some distance.
This meant that if 2 heavies met, good aiming was required, but once aimed, you were hitting quite reliably without gold.
Then WG made weakspots smaller and/or only working with gold ammo while also removing the artificial nerf to angled armor (so called normalisation). So they buffed armor 2-fold compared to what was before. But they did it to make models and penetration more realistic, except nobody needed “more realism” in WoT.
WG did not have to introduce unlimited gold ammo.
But they did. But even with unlimited gold ammo, I was still having fun using rank IX heavies, but I mostly switched to mediums.
But then came rank 10 TDs and general powercreep and further weakspot revisions.
F.e. they introduced tanks that had very small weakspots that could not be consistently hit in the form of US TDs. So even with aiming, you had to either load gold or count on your luck.
And this game was NOT balanced for gold ammo anyway.
Once this whole shitshow further developed, I left.
Some time later I learned WG actually introduced my idea of arrillery working as stun/crowd control weapon. Too little, too late.
WoT was the most fun when IS-4 and E-75 were slugging it out on rank IX, mediums and TDs went only to rank IX, and before french techtree (which was the 1st major blow to the gameplay due to autoloaders that proved to be completely busted, as I predicted, damn I remember all those smart guys in the forums telling me I have no clue only to be proven wrong time and time again). Those were good times.
Amyway, in WT we have just made all guns ridiculously powerfull, to the point magical insta-gib cannon would have changed NOTHING. But we for whatever reason still have non-full HE belts for many nations. We have realistic ROF and ballistics. Which makes 0 sense, as we have already decided to “level the playing field”, but apparently not, we want certain weapons to be way superior. There’s 0 advantages of MG151/20 as air combat weapon over Berezin UB right now.
Actually, it’s mostly PerscusionCap arguing that a single 20mm needs to hit like a 30mm because otherwise game balance is destroyed, you thinking it’s unthinkable that a fighters dares to survive having part of their wing shot off and addtionally doing literally everything to find a counter argument for every single argument of others, not to make a point but simply to tell them that what they said isn’t valid.
LIke what’s the point?
You say they removed guns on lend lease aircraft, because why, they weren’t needed?
They put in more powerfull guns in a Hurricane, because why? To ground strafe?
So they deleted guns because that’s all they needed because one guy from an interview said so?
What about the part about ground strafing? Don’t you want more guns to ground strafe in your fighter?
So should two synchronized US .50cals now blow wings off everytime you start firing at fighter, because that happened a few times on film and some russian guy said it’s so powerful that two guns is all you need?
Maybe if your plane is outperformed, it’s better to get rid of some extra weight, lose some firepower to be able to have a firing solution.
Otherwise what are P-40s going to do against Bf 109 Fs and Fw 190s?
This is imho not correct - as nobody broke the back of the Luftwaffe in 1943.
The Nazis were doomed since 1941 as they had to shorten pilot training due to lack of fuel and their inability to conquer the Caucasus. There are a lot of analysis about training hours, fuel distribution to flight schools and training quality online.
I recommend to do some research about actual plane and pilot losses of USAAF fighters above Western Europe in 1943. Look up the numbers.
You see the same myth about P-51s - it boils down that their 5,000 A2A kills (with 2,500 combat losses) were nice, but just a result of playing the numbers game.
If you have way more operational planes (20:1 advantage in 1944) and the fuel to train your pilots everything else than a crushing defeat would have been a miracle.
Besides that: The LW command saw (single engine) fighters not as threat - fighting bombers was their primary objective.
oh no, it’s because if cannons are even touched a little bit japanese props will be uptiered more, which I mean. Ok? Isn’t that a separate issue with stadistics?
I have already addressed this. I agree that the MG151/20 ballistics nerf was unfair, as other cannons weren’t affected at all or nowhere as badly. They weren’t super oppressive before this, as other guns also did great damage.
There is “better”, and there is “the enemy has guns that work and I don’t”.
Right now you could correctly claim that the MG151/20 has superior damage output than a Ho-5. But the Ho-5 is still fully capable of bringing aircraft down in not much time. It works well enough that it isn’t dragging down every plane that uses them.
I’m not disagreeing with a ShVAK nerf, but it should never be nearly as bad as it once was, because that just makes for bad gameplay. Earlier I would have survived recklessly flying in front of a Yak-3P, a huge mistake on my part, and learned nothing from it if they didn’t do good damage. That’s not a good thing.
I have always said 30mm cannons should hit harder than 20s, and provided evidence that they do in fact hit harder NOW, after the huge increase in fragmentation.
This is better damage than what we have lol. Am I supposed to believe russia has some kind of magic soil where cannons become much stronger there?
Worth remembering that fighters often engaged in ground-strike.
A 37mm cannon helps a LOT in strafing enemy positions.
People for whatever reason have this idea that WW2 air combat was a bunch of people in the stratosphere duking things out over big bomber formations but fighter-bomber operations were a significant component of actually winning the war (taking out trains, trucks, artillery emplacements etc. Oh and boats. Can’t forget anti-shipping/anti-ferries) and in such circumstances lots of cannons and larger cannons made a significant help.
