Hard to say. A ShVAK with 5.6g explosives causes roughly 15 times less damage to the wing than the 18.6g of a 20mm Mineshell.
So technically 60 ShVAK shells to cause the same damage by blast damage to bring a P-47 down.
It sounds like a lot but we need to remember that wings are one of the biggest components of an aircraft. They are easy to hit but you won’t cause a lot of damage, unless it has fuel tanks inside or maybe ammunition.
Also it’s basically impossible for a plane to open fire at P-47 and hit nothing but one particular wing, and then 60 times.
It’s much more likely that you will hit other parts or the wings at such an angle that fragments will deal damage to other components as well. Knocking out the pilot, causing a fuel fire, or simply damaging engine and oil tanks.
You are just not causing any structual damage that would cause the plane to go down.
In WT you hit a B-17s wing 3-4 times in an are the size of a single P-47 wing and the wings breaks off.
Completely ridiculous.
If a B-17 like bomber wasn’t carring any fuel in the wings. Attacking them with tiny 20mm HE rounds would be stupid. At best you knock out two engines but it’s still got two that will bring it home.
In WT a 37mm HE will break the wing or tail of any bomber in a single hit.
Germany developed 55mm shells and rockets that carry 420g explosives to kill a bomber in one shot.
Sure a 20mm will kill a bomber in one shot but the chance is basically 2-3%, so you need a whole lot of hits to make it happen.
So basically we need to take ShVak damage from 10 years ago where it took around 10 hits to the same component to bring down a plane and reduce it even further? And you think this would ultimately be good for the game?
This is a game where you can safely fly a plane that is missing over 1/2 of its wing area and make it safely back to an airfield that is almost always directly next to the battle area.
Just to further drive home the point; here is a rough comparison of German belts today against a P-47 since that is the standard that we are using.
13mm and 20mm will down the plane in roughly 3-6 shots into the same component. The MG.151 test is skewed because I could not consistently hit the wing every time. Roughly speaking the current performance of MG.151 would satisfy the 4 hits to the wing to potentially bring it down…and keep in mind that this is a low estimate in regards to mine-shells. If I am being generous then to make the game “realistic” we would not really reduce current MG.151 effects on planes.
However if we look at 13mm it is also around 6-9 hits…those are better than what ShVak should be by a factor of around 10! That is if we are taking 60 shots to a wing at face value. Even if we are generous and cut that estimate in half and say that because of fragmentation damage / non-explosive damage…it should only take 30 hits to wing to render it unusable…we are still off by a factor of 5.
Keep in mind as far as 20mm cannons are concerned, ShVak should be our low end value and MG.151 should be our high end value with everything else falling somewhere in-between. For reference…the closest thing that would satisfy this damage requirement for ShVak would be equivalent to current in-game damage of .30 caliber machine guns.
So what is the actual ask here in terms of gameplay? Well we have already had something that was maybe half-way there in the form of ShVAK circa 6-8 years ago.
This for reference is ShVAK damage from 7 years ago against a B-17. This is far more realistic insofar that it forces the player to rely on killing the crew instead of damaging the plane. So what are the consequences for fighter vs fighter gameplay?
Well this is from when the game was first released and Shvak was more realistic. This is around 10 hits in center components of airplane and it just flies away more or less fine.
Similar story here as well. Just pitch up and sit in front of the guns and wiggle around. Around 7-8 hits in this clip as well. Guy completely overshoots and pitches straight up and stalls. He gets the kill purely because of low gun damage.
So what this quest for realism translates to in reality is that the only 20mm cannons in the game that would have any consistency would be MG.151 and everything else would be multiple orders of magnitude worse. What this actually translates to in gameplay is that you are forced to make multiple passes against single targets or make sure to only engage from direct 6 o clock with long shooting times. What this also means is effectively the only planes that can convincingly deflection shoot are MG.151 equipped plane or potentially planes with quad cannons like F4U-4B.
And to make matters worse or better…the game is balanced on average player performance. There was a point that the Yak-3U was a 5.3 aircraft purely due to gun damage.
I said that ShVAKs shouldn’t blow an aircraft wings off that easily.
I was also talking about blast damage.
It’s very difficult to judge how fragmentation would affect the structural integrity of the wing surface and spars. It’s possible to blow the wing off, if a few rounds land near the same area and hit the spar directly. Likely on a Bf 109 but again, P-47 have tripple spars. So you’re not going achieve much with tiny firecrackers.
Also I’m talking about explosive shells.
Because structure isn’t an amazing target for regular explosive shells, is exactly why your also firing kinetic shells as well.
Depending on the nation and current doctrine, planes fired up to 50% 20mm AP or Ball ammunition against
aircraft.
So by loading 1:1, 1:2 or even 1:3 AP rounds, your not going to have just HE rounds harmlessly exploding on the surface but actually kill the pilot or puncture fuel tanks in fuselage, which than can be ignited by the incendiary content of 20mm HEFI or LMG/HMG incendiary bullets.
The scenario changes completely when the aircraft is carrying wing tanks. Now your HEFI shells have an actual target to bring down the aircraft.
If you refuse to aim for the wing fuel tanks, then what else are 20mm shells are going to achieve firing into a giant boat that is a B-17?
To bring it down you need to either:
Kill two engines and damage a third
Kill both pilots in the far end of the fuselage
Somehow destroy the controls, which isn’t very likely
And finally and most likely: Cause a fuel fire in the wing tanks
Alternative you damage engines, oil tanks or cause fuel leaks that would bring it down after like maybe hours of flying.
Not really something that’s interesting for WT, though.
Unless the devs make adjustments to increase fuel/oil bleed and engine deterioration for a 25 min RB match.
What happens right now:
You open fire with one, maybe two 20mm ShVAKs:
If the bomber doesn’t blow up immediately from a bomb detonating you instantly rip its wings or tail off.
A B-17 elevator, the size of a Bf 109 wing, gets obliterated by 6-7g of TNT equivalent.
How does that make sense?
Germany already had their amazing Mineshells but that doesn’t help when you increase the planes structure by a factor of 5-10.
So why did they do? They developed 20mm Incendiary shells to deal with bombers.
Because unless you bring 300-400g of explosive into the target, you’re not going to bring a bomber down.
And yeah it’s the shell type that is the least effective in killing any plane in WT since 2012.
Remove the airfield, from the equation, which is at worst three minutes away from the fight, and he would crash after 5-7 minutes from his engine getting cooked.
It’s the same deal with ground vehicles, where crews can magically repair their tanks in 30s, like nothing happened.
So we have unrealistic mechanics and to counter that we have unrealistic damage from APHE shells against tanks and explosive shells against aircraft.
The problem with that is that it’s stupid, because it completely throws any logic out of the window and different ammunition types become useless because they can’t compete in an environment where other types can break the laws of physics.
Right now the only thing that differentiates cannons from each other is their RoF, their ballistics and how much HE they get in their belts.
With the later completely determining how effective the gun is going to be.
ShVAKs get full HE-T belts while Hispano 404 and Mk Vs get at best 50%.
Luckily Hispano AP can also one shot a wing like HE, at least if you hit the spars but SAPI is straight up worse than even AP.
So Hispanos and MG 151/20 are less effective than they could be because they don’t get full HE belts.
But if we give every cannon just HE belts, than whats the point of having other ammo types?
They are useless, because penetrating armor or hitting fuel tanks with incendiary is redundant when HE just blows off a fighters tail or cuts the entire wing of a bomber.
the problem when this and other threads were made was that mg151/20s used old formulas to estimate damage, while other 20 mil were updated and recieved more fragmentation and damage compared to them.
Then cannons broke on an update, don’t remember when but gaijin’s solution was FIX the old formula of mg151/20s and then, buff every cannon to oneshot, making german 20mils redundant.
every cannon recieved mg151/20’s promised damage without the below average muzzle velocity and drag issues.
Edit: found a screenshot of me survivin a FW-190’s strafe on me from said update.
Just had a match where a Spitfire had basically a dead engine (my doing). Dude pulled nose up, sprayed all over the place, hit my F8F ONCE from 1100m away, and broke my entire wing.
It’s hard to describe how annoying the current situation is, where essentialy a stray 20mm shell can insta-obliterate you. It’s exactly what I have described - no need for consistent gunnery, panic sprays scoring kills, with Germany being the only nation that still has issues because max range of MG151/20 is around 600m.
Strongest in what sense? There’s basically no weaker 20mm round than the ShVAK and B-20 FI-T shell weighing just 96g with merely 4.13g explosive filler. Well, there’s the German counterpart and the Ho-5 firing and even lighter shells with 4.53g filler.
Larger 20mm shells have at best 10-11g explosive or explosive-incendiary filler.
It’s actually not 100%. Even when a surface turns black.
I tested it quite extensively, firing at IL-2s with a single ShVAK.
If you hit all over the place you can hit them 5-7 times without much effect.
Sometimes you one shot a wing or tail but often it requires two hits in the same area.
Then again, it switched my ammo from tracer to some other belt. So sometimes it was an API hit.
