Which appears to have HORRIBLE ballistics in game.
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I think 7.92mm AP-T have similar ballistic as most LMG bullets.
Which means that pretty much all of them are underperforming, with only 7.92mm AP having realistic drag.
I would like to mention one important thing:
German 8mm AP bullet was very well designed from ballistic point of view.
This is a boattailed bullet, with a weight of 11,55g, which is pretty heavy for the caliber.
Every single .303 British AP/API I could find had a normal spitzer bullet with the bottom cut flat and these bullets also look shorter, though I can’t prove it…
Don’t know how heavy they were, but a lighter bullet + flat base + no tracer = significantly worse ballistics
Gaijin is probably using some kind of “default” bullet modelled, which may very well be some very sub-optimal shape, and they just modify the range when mass/velocity is added, and they are using this “default bullet” for every type of ammo that hasn’t been provided with real life ballistic data.
This is the 20mm situation, only the other way around - your ballistics are bad, till you prove it otherwise.
With 20mm - your ballistics are otherwordly (I would guess Gaijin has some kind of “general formula” adopted, which is simply spewing out ridiculous results way higher than it should), unless some document surfaces.
According to German ww2 data, other nations bullets had a weight of 10g.
Well, 10g for Brits + flat rear = less range (Mauser has a higher bullet diameter, but it’s not that substantial and also higher diameter can be partially circumvented by proper design).
Should the difference be this big?
No idea, probably not.
Anyway, it’s obvious that ballistics in this game are all over the place and Gaijin’s tool, while extremely limtied (it should allow us to see the speed at each part of the flight, same for penetration chart - it should be speed AND distance at the bottom) has proven to be quite useful in demonstrating this.
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Guns fire at the same ROF, the density is basically the same.
Single hit is enough anyway.
And by “just” do you mean “summer 2023”, so 2,5 years ago? Because ever since Real Sh*tter 3.0 all 20mm were absolutely nuking planes, every single 20mm HE started dealing mor3 damage than MG151/20 which was already overperforming. There might have been some time with some additional bugs recently, but I’m talking about the general solution to damage, not some specific bug, like f.e the everlasting plywood bug.
I’ve been saying the same thing since July of 2023: 20mm HE is too strong, anything bigger is absolutely pointless, .50 cal is hilariously bad compared to 20mm because of this, even though .50 cals are actually overperforming a lot regarding aerodynamic damage.
Right now ki-27 is just as tough as P-47. That is: paper and dead in 1-2 hits. But hey, this is apparently fine because at some point some bug disabled HE for some limited time. How the hell is that even logical?
I wonder, have you played ARB at all in the span of the last 6 months? Because since the Leviathans update, most HE shells in this game have become hilariously inconsistent, to the point where there was absolutely no reason to play anything but american .50 cal planes.
I want to reiterate, ARB has been completely overtaken by .50 cal spam at every BR for the last 6 months, and you are saying that HE was too strong and fifties too weak? That statement is completely detached from reality and makes me question your real in-game experience.
It has only been 2 days since the cannons got better again, and it is far too early to comment on that.
Yes, it was way too strong.
When did that “bug” get fixed?
Here’s Shvak 1-shotting Bf 109 on november 12th, a month ago:
That’s how most real sh*tter guns have been working for me for the past 2,5 years.
I’ve been playing Ground RB in the last few months, but I was usually just having fun killing CAS in Ta-152H.
Of course some inconsistencies happened too, but these bugs have been in game for basically forever, ruining my SPAA experience:
Were you shooting soviet aircraft while these inconsistencies happened? Because in May the plywood bug 2.0 started and it’s still on-going even today (though MG151/20 is no longer affected because it now has 0,001mm fuse).
But that’s not the fault of guns, just Gaijin artificially making soviet aircraft waaaaay tankier than they have any right to be.
Plywood bug made me quit Air RB for quite some time
More about it:
No, I highly doubt it had anything to do with plywood. Just off the top of my head - MG151, MK108, Hispanos, Japanese Type 5 and Ho-105, ADENs, DEFAs, T-160s, M39s, NR23/NS23s, BK27 and HS852 often did little to no damage on direct impacts using HE shells in the matches I played during the last 6 months.
And this isn’t some hallucination of mine either, as this has been shared by many experienced players and bug-reported repeatedly, thanks to which the damage has finally been improved this patch.
If you truly believe that HE shells have been anything but extremely unreliable since Leviathans, then perhaps it’s best to leave it at that.
Do you have any proof of this increased unreliability? Any videos illustrating the problem? Do you realise that weapons in WT have always been inconsistent, but since I actually noticed plywood bug and you guys didn’t, why would I trust you?
Also, why would I discuss bugged performance? I don’t care about it. I care about how weapons work when no bugs are present. And everything launches goddamn nukes.
So wait? We are coming full circle and saying that cannon damage needs to be nerfed to the levels it had before the most recent update?
Answer this.
How many shots of 20mm SHVAK should it take on average to destroy a control surface? 10? 20? 30?
Same question for MG151. Same for MK.108?
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It’s a simple question. How far does damage have to be nerfed for you to be satisfied? The whole impetus for this thread was that .G.151 wasn’t doing enough damage…and now you are saying that it is too much.
Prior to this patch it took probably around 4-5 cannon shells to consistently kill a plane. Now it’s probably around 2-3 shells.
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It only “wasn’t doibg enough damage” because it got powercrept by literary EVERY other 20mm HE shell in game.
See, the problem was not the damage per se. It was great, even maybe a bit too much.
But when everything else was hitting harder with better ballistics (even when it made no sense, like Ho-5 HE and practice rounds having better ballistics than MG151 AP and IT rounds) then people started calling for more damage.
Meanwhile I was calling to nerf everything back to reasonable levels, with noticeable differences between guns.
Now the plane is usually dead or crippled after 1 (one) HE shell.
Reasonable values for wing removal via middle part hits of medium sized fighter plane would be 3,5 to maybe 7-8 (maybe 6-7, who knows) 20mm shells, depending on the cannon.
So you want damage levels that are worse than pre-real shatter implementation? Basically revert to status quo of 4+ years ago where only consistent cannons were MG.151, AN/M2, and API .50 cal?
You have short memory if ypu think planes were losing wings in 3 hits pre-real sh*tter - this basically only happened to pre-nerf AN/M2 and MG151/20 and people were rightfully claiming these are a bit too powerfull. Of course at some point Shvak got gigabuffed, and not that much after real shatter started in its early forms.
A lot of guns were much weaker than that. They were too weak of course. Hence I’m asking for 7-8 hits tops with some awful 20mm like Ho-5.
I want MG151/20 to be weaker than it was. Same for AN/M2, and for Shvak and Ho-5 to be noticeably worse, but still hurting the enemy properly.
Pretty much depends on the size and what we’re talking about.
I mean those are holes that ShVAK HE rounds make in a Bf 109 wing:
And that’s what a 20mm Mineshell does to a He 111s vertical stabilizer, if it detonates inside and not on the surface:
Here’s a 20mm Mineshell hit against a Spitfire wing:
And that’s the damage visualized:
Compared to various explosive shells:
So the 20mm Mineshell deals like 10 times or more the structural damage to a planes wing or control surface.
But at the same time it creates hardly any fragments that would cause any significant damage to fuel/oil/water tanks/pipes.
So while it’s very unlikely that a single 20mm Mineshell is going to bring down a fighter, a 20mm HEF or HEFI shell can do it, even though the chance is also very low and it most likely isn’t causing immediate destruction, unless it’s a fuel fire.
P-47 shot from the front has a 6% chance to go down after 5min and 12% after going down within 2 hours, when hit by 20mm HEFI.
That also means that 90% of shells won’t cause any significant damage.
Also noteworthy is that .60 API, which would be very similiar to 20mm AP, is as effective in bringing down the plane.
That’s because in reality both AP and HE can cause kills, depending on the component they hit. While in WT for the longest time you just use HE because it’s so much better.
Players are so used to planes going down in a short burst from 500m that they think a “Hit!” is the ammo not working, when it should be pretty much constantly happen, unless you hit the right component.
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So what is the reasonable conclusion for a laymen? 10+ hits of cannon fire to bring down a plane as long as it’s in the same hotbox component?
Or should maps and missions be made to scale so sustained damage kills would eventually count because you would have to fly much further back to base?
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That is what I said. You want everything to take more hits to kill and return to inconsistent gun damage of 4 years ago that affected everything that wasn’t basically the two guns you mentioned. But also you want those guns to be normalized around inconsistent damage or longer times to kill.
And you want this insta-gib mode with paper-mache toy planes with 0 immersion and where every weapon designed for high damage is absolutely useless, because even 30mm deals only slightly more damage than Shvak with 6g of TNT.
Also screw realism.
Why bother with kinda realistic flight models and parameters, if we go with totally unrealistic 20mm nukes?