German 20mm HEI(minengeschoß) shells low damage compared to other 20mm guns

A short remark: Punctuation marks are outdated, ik. But they would make your posts way more readable…😉👍

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I have no clue what you mean by that.

Are you referring to Mineshells velocity of 785m/s being 15m/s slower than ShVAK shells with 800m/s?

I’ve posted some images about structural damage in my topic about aircraft ammunition:

It also has one image showing 20mm Mineshells damage to a He 111 horizontal stabilizer, with and without delay charge.

Causing enough structural damage to a large bomber with 20mm shells simply isn’t feasible.
All you do is create 0.015-0.03m² holes into planes with 100-200m² total area.

There’s a reason why during WW2 almost every airforce put 1:2 to 1:1 AP rounds into their 20mm cannons.

Having kinetic rounds hit a bombers engine or cause fuel leaks that can be ignited would result in much greater chance to take out a bomber than just firing 20mm explosive ammunition.

In contrast, if we consider that a Mineshell, with 18.7g blast enhancing explosive, explodes inside a wing or stabilizer and destroys 0.25m² of that area, then we destroyed a total of 5m² with 20 rounds, which was the number to take our four-engined bomber, based on German estimation.

But they still developed 20mm incendiary shells and even shells that would explode when they hit the fuel tank, instead of just firing nothing but Mineshells.

Generally they had:
API vs. engines and pilot armor
Incendiary vs. fuel tanks
Mineshells vs. control surfaces and fuel tanks

In WT we have Mineshells or explosive shells vs. everything since all you need to do is rip a wing or tail.

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On a side note, german I-T round for the 20mm gun is designed to penetrate the wing, ignite the incendary material and push it out of the front over a certain range, while the main projectile body continues to travel forward to penetrate fueltanks and such.
There was a drawing and text, but i cant find it anymore. Similary, the bigger 3cm AP-I rounds, were the same, but backwards.

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yes is that the poor ballistics your talking about ?
or you talkin the lower fire rate

Velocity doesn’t equal ballistics.

Mineshells are light and don’t have the best aerodynamic shape.

They lose velocity much faster than any other 20mm shell.

So they take much longer to reach long distance and the ballistics drop makes it more difficult to hit due to the great shell drop.
Doesn’t help that the tracer rounds have better ballistics, so if you hit with tracers at long range you’re not hitting with 20mm Mineshells and vice versa.

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The nose part will generate plenty of fragments and the guide ring area also has some potential, it’s a bit of an overstatement to say it has no fragmentation, though indeed good part of fragmentation is irrelevant, though even the thin parts of body will sometimes produce some bigger shards that may pierce a few things (depends on how it impacts od course!)

I mean, remember average person has no idea, and when they read “practically no fragmentation”, well they see a rather inaccurate picture :P

Other than that - you’re absolutely right.
M-geschoss is super painful vs jets as it turns some parts… light yellow. And that’s it.
Meanwhile Shvak will make the same part red or black.

Anyway, current state of the air to air ammunition is quite sad. Essentialy Gaijin went from one inaccurate model to another, even more inaccurate model, incendiary shells are in limbo, AP shells are useless.
At least MK103 APHEI shell finally kinda works :D

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Considering the very low HE mass of these shells, I wounder where the fragments take the energy from to wreck the whole airframe structure. The metal beams and metal fuselage. The damage is absurd.

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Well, they shouldn’t.
They should deal damage to cooling systems, maybe control rods and cables, crew and fuel tanks.

Oh and weapon systems.
Dealing damage to ammunition and jamming guns.
Which isn’t even possible in WT.

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… and hydraulics - you disable hydraulics or the actuator and aircraft like P-51s or Spitfires can’t use weapons, flaps or gear. Even prop pitch was steered by hydraulics…

Btw: This is also one of the reason why Fw 190s had electric motors for critical stuff - no hydraulic lines, no pumps etc needed which increased their survival rates…

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Right 🤔

So in WT fragments are inherently worse because of the lack of systems they can damage.

Kinda how helicopter are super tanky because they have hardly any systems that can be damaged.

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I made this bug report a year ago about this,
you can see here: Community Bug Reporting System

But so far absolutely nothing was changed about it even tho it was accepted.
@KillaKiwi as someone who is more used to reporting things I have a question… is it worth bumping reports that were already accepted?

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Probably not, they’d just be on par with the rest of the cannons.
Cuz realshatter doesn’t care about TNT equivalent that much, you can see how many 30mms that use it are lacking in terms of fragmentation.

Hispano 20mm HEI [9.28g TNT equiv]

Spoiler

Type 5 30mm HEF-I [27.5g TNT]

Spoiler

The result is pretty much the same since there’s not enough fragments created or spreading properly.
Mineshells would prob have a similar result to this 30mm.

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It not only worse than other 20mm, it also worse than some of the .50 that have HE filler in it, the air target belt in Ho-103 and BredaSafat can easily scratch enemy into piece by landing few bullet on the wing but the Mg151 sometimes you can’t even critical a plane after fire you whole belt on it

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Yes I know, it’s worse than pretty much anything that uses realshatter at the moment.

No clue. Sometimes it takes years for issues to be fixed.

This has probably a priority as low as it can get.

I have so many reports about incorrect aircraft ammunition that aren’t even accepted yet, after years.
And I’m still waiting for them to remove AP and API(c) from Soviet 12.7mm aircraft guns, which probably is never going to happen.

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Im still waiting for 15mm AP-I(c) to HVAP change, with 1050m/s.

So, do you guys think it is worth to create a pool or something for pp to vote; cuz I saw that the custom belts suggestion topic from 1 and a half years ago just got accepted for review to the devs, so maybe there’s a chance?

I saw by accident that gaijin closed my bug report as they were not satisfied with the linked source:

L Dv 4000 10 Munitionsvorschrift Fuer Fliegerbordwaffen Teil 10 1944 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

…despite it is online available, highly official and clearly states that the self-destruction of mine shells will happen after 3 seconds - and not much earlier like currently implemented.

If somebody want to try it again: Feel free to to try it again - i am done with this kind of behaviour.

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Well, I also have a report on self destroying shells.
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/dvxLt7m0iE7k

But it’s just about the the incorrect implementation, that shells exploded based on distance traveled and not time.

They probably copied that implementation from the Rocket self destruction setting, which is also based on distance from the aircraft.

If your plane is fast enough you can shoot yourself down, by putting Rocket self destruct distance to 100m, because the rocket will just explode 0.1s after launch.

While this gives you nice numbers to select, it’s completely meaningless in actual combat, since the Rockets will explode earlier the the plane travels.

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