Yeah well incendiary has been useless forever, probably partly if not mostly because it is included in the stock belts of many planes. That way inefficient incendiary including stock belts incentivises people to spend GE to buy better belts.
Don’t know how valid it is to use that as a reason to keep it performing ahistorically at this point in the games lifecycle, as the RP requirements for unlocking modifications at prop tiers are quite low and new belts are easier to unlock than in the past.
so cope argument lol
Use AP to pirece the , no armor" to kill the Plane!
The biggest problem I’ve been seeing is me watching a bomber falling to the ground after I make a pass, and my team just comes and steals the kill ngl.
Edit: the best preforming / most spammed bomber I keep seeing is the G8N1 which seems a bit tankier than the rest from what I’ve been seeing.
Yes the lack of severe damage, even after most/all engines have failed or control surfaces of one wing (+tail sometimes) are destroyed, is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.
Edit:
Yeah it seems pretty popular, could also be the defensive armament contributing to the popularity.
I mean what definitely annoys me is the 1 shot 1 taps from the precision aim off the G8N. (Just so happens to be pc users)
What annoys me more is how different the control schemes are between m&K and controller, they are so far apart in air it’s not even funny.
(It honestly makes me want to vomit it’s so bad)
@TheAnnoyingFinn btw
Meaning… and I don’t want to expose this… but apparently controller users are just free kills that are forced to fly straight despite their settings while using gunnery.
Yeah as a controller player it lowkey sucks. Most I can do is wiggle my wings.
I think it’s due to aiming being the same stick as flying…
You could rekeybind it but it would be so erratic…
Meanwhile M&K just used wasd, and other keys.
I read elsewhere that Gaijin somehow managed to apply a blanket change that gave bombers about 10mm of steel armour, rendering pure HE useless because it simply explodes on their surface, resulting in 0 fragment or blast penetration - this is why they absorb missiles. That would definitely explain what I’ve seen.
The wings and fuselage of bombers are big, empty spaces with nothing to damage except the fuel tanks (which barely even spread fires to the rest of the aircraft), individual control lines or crew, so you have to hunt those down individually with AP.
Now, the only reliable way to kill bombers (in under several minutes) is by sniping their pilots. And Browning .50-cal. MGs, because they have high kinetic energy and AP, are outperforming everything else including (and especially) the rounds that were designed to kill bombers in the first place - like German mine shells.
These changes to armour were also wrongly applied to attack aircraft like the Soviet Su-8 and TIS-MA, which have quickly become the bane of ground battles. Bombers are probably less accurate now than they have ever been in the history of this game. They can simply camp and gunship airfields like AC-130s, ignore AA, and swat or chase down fighters. Not just BR ranges, but entire game modes have been kneecapped by this absurdity.
These catastrophic changes should never, ever have hit the live server. The sheer incompetence of this “rebalance” staggers the mind. It’s frankly beyond words that aren’t ban-worthy, so I’m going to leave before I utter them.
I’d love for them to fix helis next and make the Mi-24 actually durable like irl
Yeah helis should get the same type off buffs
Maybe not all of them… an AH-6M wouldn’t be super durable.
But the “flying tank” aka the Hind is an extremely durable heli.
At 1km 12.7mm AP-I wouldn’t pen it from reports I read.
Even 23mms struggled a bit.
But in game a simple 7.62 erase a heli.
I’d love to see buffs to some big strike air craft like the Hs 129, Me 210 and Me 410, and all those other big boys!
Do you know where the list is of buffed planes?
Should be on the major update post
I built a custom test mission to see how bombs interact with aircraft in mid-air.
A B-17 was used as the target, with bombs dropped from very short range under controlled conditions. Both aircraft guns were disabled.
The bombs physically collide with aircraft, but they do not detonate on contact.
Some behavior looked possibly unintended. In some cases, an 800 kg bomb could pass partly through the wing, remain on the aircraft after impact, slide backward along the wing, and end up hanging from it without exploding.
Physical collision: yes.
Mid-air contact detonation: no.
In practice, the bombs behave more like heavy falling objects than explosive weapons on direct mid-air impact.
I tested the Ki-109, Ki-102 Otsu, Ki-45 Toryu, and J5N1 Tenrai (Japanese heavy interceptors) against the B-17.
Some of these matchups would not normally happen in regular battles because of BR differences, so this was done in a controlled custom mission to compare damage behavior.
My conclusion is:
The 75 mm cannon can still blow the B-17 apart with a lucky hit.
The 57 mm cannon is already much less reliable and requires very accurate placement.
With 37 mm and 30 mm cannons, simply scoring hits is usually not enough. In many cases, you need to keep concentrating fire on critical areas, or set multiple engines on fire, before the B-17 finally goes down.
And of course, in a real fight, you would need to maintain that level of accuracy while being exposed to the bomber’s defensive gunfire.
Conclusion: even with Japanese heavy interceptors, big guns alone are not enough. You still need very precise aim, and doing that while the bomber is shooting back is another problem entirely.
The more I play, the more torn I am.
I just shot a B-17 with 45mms (about 35 hits) with APHE and no fires.
Shot him with plenty of 23mms too.
But when returning an F8F turned on me, I shot the hell out of his plane with the TU-1’s 12.7mm defensive armament but he seemingly took 0 damage, and set me on fire in both engine with only a couple hits.
So I’m split on whether it’s op or not.
In my honest opinion, it’s like some shells aren’t doing what they’re supposed to I guess, and others are over preforming?
Of course the B-17G taking so many 45mms was a bit odd…
But earlier I blew a Halifax’s tail off with two shots.
So, I think shells aren’t doing what they’re supposed to tbh.
Then I played my f7f-3 earlier and couldn’t kill anything despite getting many many hits on a G8N.
Then was riddled and killed by one in my He-177…
Seems to depends a lot on the round. The HE round is doing something each hit, but it usually takes more than one hit to cause enough cumulative damage to break something. This seems to be due to bomber parts being coded take less explosive damage(?), and because bomber skin is treated as thicker armor that’s more likely to prevent HE from piercing(?). That’s the explanation I’ve heard at least from people digging in the datamines, but I’m not 100% confident if that’s actually how it works. Despite this, I use HE against aircraft because it guarantees consistent progress.
The 75 mm APHE rounds the are technically more capable of one-shots, but is highly luck based. Because the round deals a lot of kinetic damage, it can just outright destroy spars and other modules it one hit, and can pierce through to the bomb bay. The issue is that the fuze sensitivity is too high to reliably trigger against most of the aircraft, so most shots will do very little in actual combat.
AP works against bombers for lower caliber guns since they can use volume of fire to compensate for the individual rounds lack of AoE, but it doesn’t really work that well for slow firing guns with limited ammo.
