I blew off the wings of a PB4Y with a spray of fiddy cals from over a km away the other day.
They need to tone them down a smidge
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Shvak and 50cal also nuke the bomb load too easily. Especially in Arcade its a menace. Playing anything with bombs is suicidal.
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For everything with no ballistic data Gaijoob uses super optimistic UFO performance calculations.
But Germans did some ballistic testing which sealed the fate of their shells in war tinder.
Shells simply have a ballistic value depending on RL data, at least under ideal circumstances.
FI-T and IT have the best ballistics, followed by AP and then Mineshells.
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there youre asuming that gaijin uses RL balistics data, whats far more likely is that the base the balistics just on a drag coefficient that they estimate, caliber and velocity.
In game FI-T and IT have the best ballistics, followed by Mineshell and AP
And again i dont think that gaijing taks into account the tracer at all in the calculations, here the 30 mm HEI and HEI-T and the soviet 20mm FI and FI-T they have the exact same balistics.
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They do, for German shells.
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I didnt know, seems to be an exception for 20mm as looking over the datamines other 20mm canons usually have the same drag coefficient for all ammo types on the same platform, shvak have a 0.47, hispanos 0.44, the Ho-5/type 99 0.45, so the only variables on these are mass and velocity
That’s because German ballistic data is super easy to get. 0 effort required.
For Soviet guns it’s a bit more tricky, but still doable.
For Ho-5? Good luck.
What is inexcusable is for Gaijin to use some “absolute magical unicorn fart scenario” for every cannon they do not have real data for.
Hence 80g Ho-5 HE round has way smaller drag coefficient than German pointed-nose 117g AP.
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Well, because a lot of ballistic data is simply wrong.
Gaijin used wrong data or copy pastes data to shells that should be different.
Gaijin doesn’t understand what is wrong or right. They only changes things when it’s written somewhere and seems to be correct.
So they never change something because it’s wrong, they change it when there’s data how it should be.
One of my report changed German 7.92mm AP making it much better than other LMG bullets but they didn’t change the ballistics on AP-T.
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Funny thing is, that instead of taking German ballistic data and applying it to other cannons, we live under an assumption that German shells were magically dogshit from ballistic point of view.
I mean, maybe round-tail M-geschoss indeed is not great, but god damn, AP doesn’t have an airbrake attached. It’s a normal design. So is IT/FI-T.
BTW would love for incendiary rounds to, one day, get some proper explosive/fragmentation capacity. I mean, never gonna happen, but one can dream.
Anyway, there are 2 options only - either German testing was flawed for some reason (some kind of testing method error that grew worse with distance travelled) OR Gaijin’s using extremely optimistic assumptions regarding drag coefficient of non-German shells.
My bet is of course on the latter.
Worst part is, we can tell them 1000 times that this doesn’t add up, physics are all wrong etc. and they’ll just tell us “find us proof of exact ballistic performance of Ho-5”.
now, even if I got a full 3d model of Ho-5 HE shell and ran it through aerodynamic simulation, that would be just a waste of time, as by Gaijin’s standards - it would have 0 value, as they are not interested in facts and truth, they are interested in what somebody wrote on paper.
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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.