What he wants is a stealth belt that is also more effective.
At the moment 50% M23 Incendiary are just a downgrade compared to having 100% API.
Of course this wouldn’t be the case, if Gaijin implemented shells properly.
There is the issue with a lot of planes having acess to shells that they wouldn’t have used.
For some reason US 12.7mm M2s and ShVAKS (which only affects around 2 planes) are the only guns that are devided into early and later war belts.
In general, if rounds existed, then it’s because they were effective and served a purpose.
While in WT in generally boils down to chose a single ammo type that is the best, with a selection of outdated and final versions.
Makes no sense that ShVAKs would put the early models of HEF into belts, when the later developed FI and FI-T (calling them FI instead of HEFI is dubious anyway) are already much better.
Infact the default belt with 1:1 FI-T and API is basically already perfect against all types of targets.
The ShVAKs shell development went from:
91g
Fragmentation-Incendiary (same as above but little explosive, lots incendiary)
To 96g:
API
HEFI
HEFI-T
With the later exposive-incendiary shells having several iterations of explosive and incendiary mix, before settling on the current A-IX-2 (RDX-Aluminum mix) explosive.
Yet the HEFI round is only present in a single belt (Stealth) and only a single round out of every 4, with the rest being the pre-war explosive-fragmentation round.
Troble is it wont matter what you put in your belt as gaijin will balance it one direction or another. On your screen you see bullets, but computer code does not, its all chance to pen, chance to set fire depending what belt you have
They mostly do changes nowadays due to player backlash.
We could probably get a free Abrams, if we just pressured them enough.
If they introduce custom belts and everyone just starting to use the one round that does significantly better then others, Gaijin will probably never make any changes again.
Maybe they’ll look into something when 20mm outperform 30mm cannons, or 12.7mm HMGs 20mm cannons, and players demand some changes.
But other than that I don’t have much hope, unless they re-work gun damage.
I’ll take that over being locked into suboptimal belts because someone said so. I don’t think everyone will use just one type of shell, as even with very good HE it’s still a good idea to pack in a few AP for when you’re directly behind someone and need to punch through fuel tanks, pilot armor, etc.
And some will prefer more tracers, others less, it’d be interesting to see what would come of it.
I think RealShatter was little more than a year ago.
20mm AN/M3s were the first, doing way less damage than before. Gradually, more 20 and 30mm cannons were changed. Then some months afterwards, they buffed them all - some more than others.
This also changed how good each cannon is compared to the rest - MG151s were the best many years ago, now they’re some of the worst. Hispanos got improved a lot. ShVAKs are deadly now.
I remember when Hispanos and ShVAKs would deal like no damage to planes and it was like using 8mm MGs while Mineshells blow planes to pieces.
All 20mm were much weaker against bombers and I would fly out the G-6 with 3xMK 108 to hunt B-17s. Good times.
Japanese and Italian 12.7mm didn’t have explosive rounds modeled and only acted like Incendiary really. They did hit harder than 7mm MGs but had worse ballistics.
Then after many years of some players bug reporting it over and over again, Gaijin finally gave Japan and Italy explosive 12.7mm rounds that actually exploded.
Except they turned them into some crazy fragmentation rounds, with a single 12.7mm outperforming German 20mm FI-T because Gaijin never implemented a system that scaled the damage in a realistic way.
So for some time these 12.7mm explosive rounds would just constantly pilot snipe with a couple of hits, due to a sphere of doom that hit pilots from 2m away, wherever they impacted the plane.
Swedish 13.2mm were added and hit like 20mm cannons due to Gaijin deciding to scale all damage based on explosive filler, turning them into low BR Hispano cannons with US 20mm M3 cannons being completely insane due to Gaijin implementing their entire explosive-incendiary filler as 11g Tetryl despite the fact that Hispano and US 20mm ammunition use practically the same HEFI shell.
That was like 3 years ago. You can guess whether Gaijin actually fixed the incorrect filler that was reported several times.
realShatter was added which removed the sphere of doom for now randomly generated fragments in whatever direction the game feels like it.
First it was crap, then it was over the top, then the damage was quite realistic until we are now back to explosive rounds just taking off your wing and plane all the time in 1-2 hits, in addition to killing pilots or engines with fragments.
LMGs → API with same level of pen as AP
HMGs → API or API-T, but explosive rounds are pretty much on par
cannons → Any HE with realShatter. For larger calibers without realShatter
I played a bit around with realShatter and it seems that most fragments will infact turn up at the front of the shell. However where those fragments go is random.
Most of the time they either deal heavy damage to crews near them or non at all.
Explosive rounds also have some blast to them. So if they get close enough to crews they will always knock them out, which makes 20mm Mineshells with their 3-4 times more TNT equavient in-game super lethal to open top vehicles because the blast has a bigger damage zone than fragmentation from even 23mm HE rounds.
Yeah but 20mm HE rounds are suppose to have a lethal radius of around 1-2m.
I don’t think you’ll get that even with 19g explosive, by blast alone.
It’s pretty much univerally known that fragmentations increase the lethal range of explosives compared to blast alone.
The only application for blast is demolition. Be it aircraft structure, buildings or fortifiications.
Of course the argument can be made that due to the forward momentum there’s much less fragmentation that is going to hit the crews on the side of the shell, in that specific example.
From my testing most fragments seem to emerge in a forward ark.
I think since the introduction of overpressure, blast damage is way too lethal compared to shell fragments. But what can you expect when it takes 2-3 8mm bullets to take out a crewman?
