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.
It’s not about the damage of 30mm cannons, it’s how effective 20mm cannons have become, with damage that should only be possible by 30mm Mineshells.
Like detaching a Spitfires or P-47s wing or tail in a single hit.
20mm Mineshells were buffed more, after other 20mm started to do the same damage or more, so now a 20mm Mineshell will kill most planes just like a 30mm Mineshells.
Even 2x20mm = 1x30mm
is still a huge difference compared to reality, where the ratio was 4:1 for large bombers and still most likely 3:1 for most western allied fighters.
But even if that was the case, we still would kill a B-17 with a single 30mm Mineshell or just 4 20mm Mineshells, unless something changes.
They make wooden aircrafts, and plywood doesn’t exactly bend or stay together while getting blasted by a pressure wave and showered by fragments like duralumin.
12.7mm MDZ-3 makes a 110mm diamter hole into a duralumin wing, or it blows 50x50cm pannel out of a wooden wing, like it’s a 20mm Mineshell doing the same to a duralumin wing.
The Bf 109 had a 20mm dural layered screen, protecting pilot and fuel tank like a 4-6mm steel plate.
Guess how much wood you would need to get the same protection?
