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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
Well, planes should neither lose wings or tails in general, unless it’s a lot of structural damage.
Ideally you are firing 1:1 HE and AP to either kill the pilot with a direct from behind with AP, deal significant damage to the engine or cause massive fuel spilling with hits to the fuel tank.
Then you have HEF or HEFI to cause fragmentation that is more likely to cause damage to fuel tanks, set leaking fuel on fire and kill the engine in the long run due to damaging cooling systems.
Technically it’s also possible for AP rounds to snap a wing, but for that to happen the round has to scrape over the surface and rip it completely open, which would rarely happen. Not sure if Gaijin could model that, since every module is basically just hit or not.
We’ve already had the game in a state where everything that was shot without something like MG.151 or AN/M2 would do insignificant damage for the majority of its shots.
This resulted in average stats for Yak-3U being bad enough that it was all the way down at 5.3 BR at one point. It also resulted in planes like Re.2005 moving up to 6.0/6.3BR at one point because the plane was essentially modeled as LF IX but with much more useful cannons and much more capacity.
Except damage models in WarThunder are not 1:1 to real life. Planes in WarThunder remain much more capable with larger amounts of sustained damage than any of their counterparts. This is due to “parts falling off” being used to represent something not being aerodynamically useful.
A perfect example is the P-47 by the way. The plane is essentially built around it’s turbocharging system and its a module that isn’t even modeled in War Thunder. A lot of the useless hits we get in the game would not be useless in real life and would significantly reduce the performance of the plane and reduce it’s flight envelope.
Even in Air Sim, you can rip off an entire wing, and still safely fly back to base. This is because the visual damage is essentially different from the real damage effects.
And right now the damage is “consistent” because shot to the fuselage does basically nothing, and shot to the wing can range from instant wing removal to “nothing huge” because a lot of planes do just fine with just module damage, and 1-shotting wings is like 50/50 chance. And for what?
So people incapable of consistent gunnery can just spray and score kills as long as they hit anything?
So guns designed for high damage are a laughing stock, because you don’t need big HE filler or lots of kinetic energy, because everything hits just as hard?
Why?
What is the point?
In a lot of games one has to work for a kill.
Why WT has to be “insta-gib” mode all of the sudden, if the entire appeal is “planes fighting kinda like during the war”?
WW2 planes were sturdy warbirds, not paper mache jokes disintegrating when anything touches them.
A lot of useless hits would indeed not be useless IRL. But P-47 would not go down from 1 Shvak hit to the wing. Or 2. Or 3. Maybe from 12, maybe not. Hitting wings or control surfaces with Shvak was sub-optimal and there’s nothing wrong with some weapons performing worse in certain tasks.
Thing is to make guns reasonably powerfull while retaining the immersion, differences between weapon systems and platforms. Of course more detailed damage models would be welcome. And mind you - I know WT’s effects of aerodynamic damage are neutered. That’s why I want the guns to still be way more effective than IRL, and still be a bit closer to each other than they should.
But no 20mm should come close to 30mm M-geschoss, while currently there’s maybe 20-25% difference between 20mm and 37mm.
F.e. Yak-3U should be small and nimble, but also fragile and have below-average armanent requiring more time on target than competition.
Instead right now Yak-3U is just as tough as P-47 or F4U, because 1 hit and you’re dead, and nothing has more firepower vs fighters, as 2xShvaks 1-click planes easily. No need for MK108, La-9 is also absolutely useless, because 2xShvaks require basically same time on target anyway.
There’s barely any advantage of having more cannons, and there’s no real reason to properly track people through the maneuver. If you can hit once, it’s enough.
Currently Yaks are pushing head-ons vs everything. Because honestly, they have the best chance to win due to good ballistics and great maneuvrability, super small size, 100% HE belt (and plywood bug as a bonus) so why wouldn’t they?
And finally - it’s been 2,5 years since Real Sh*tter 3.0
Yak-3U continues to sit at 5.7, while now we also have Yak-3 at 4.0. Absolute cinema. Meanwhile La-9 still sits at 6.0 with useless armanent. And BI is 6.7 while actively ruining every match it appears in.
Do you honestly believe anyone is going to balance things all of the sudden?
And even if they do - we are still in a world of paper planes where it doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 2 or 4 cannons (currently there’s 0 difference between J2M2 and J2M3 other than higher ammo count, if you hit with HEF, it’s over), but if you have MG151/20 or Hispanos - you are always shafted (because of ballistics and belt composition or just belt composition for Hispano).
So the solution is to make all guns do even less damage on average?
Having good and consistent gun damage also means that when players with bad aim get reversed and they fly through your guns for a small moment, that the 2-3 20mm shells that do hit them will do substantial damage to their plane.
Your complaint right now is that all guns are too high damaging and have always had too high of damage.
It is a video game. Planes don’t respond to damage the same way they would in real life. The daamge mechanic is meant to balance that out and make it fit the sandbox that Gaijin has created.
A P-47 is most likely not going to continue a maneuvering fight with a Yak if it gets hit with some 20mm shots in the wings. Asymmetric lift would make it much more prone to stalling. This is something that is broadly speaking not modeled in the game unless you get black wing roots and will only cause some planes to actually stall and fall out of the sky.
I have survived hits from Shvak in the past 6 months while in the P-47. It’s a pretty tanky plane. It seems to me you just think that it should be a bullet sponge.
Everyone has always pushed head-ons with every gun in the game. This is nothing new.
And yet the Yak-3U sits behind the LF IX in terms of kills per spawn in RB for the past month. The two biggest factors in average statistics in War Thunder are usually guns + turn performance followed by climb rate. Also BI was at 6.3 with old Shvak…so that was a lot of fun wasn’t it?
This is a flyable plane in WarThunder by the way. Lost 1/2 of one wing and 3/4 of the other. 1/2 the elevator. Still managed to land safely.
Ok, bravo. Meanwhile 99% of me getting such wing damage is me being dead. The fact some planes can sometimes survive lots of damage is not an argument in favor of 20mm nuke.
You are wrong on “everything pushing head-ons”. For a long time most people in planes with worse armanent dodged. They no longer do, because there’s no real significantly “worse armanent” outside of MG151/20 which has just absolutely horrible range and ballistics, thus is super easy to be dodged, every 20mm will end you instantly.
And I’m not saying P-47 with 10-12 Shvak hits to the wing would continue a dogfight. But there’s a very decent chance it would fly well enough to land with no issues. In WT 8-9 hits is enough to remove both wings and tail, kill the engine and the pilot. Maybe it can be done in 6 with right shot placement.
And lower damage can be just as consistent as higher damage, what’s the issue. If you reverse someone and land 3 shells - OK, their performance will take a hit. Want them dead, land more. The only weapon that have problems with landing hits after reversal is MG151/20, that should also deal the most aerodynamic/structural/control surface damage with 3 M-geschoss hits BTW, I’m not saying other guns would do nothing, far from it, they were just not designed for such task, with much thicker shell bodies.
Again, I don’t understand why do you want planes to have different performance metric, and just give everybody same HE shell. Why do you want different ballistics, when everyone gets same damage.
Do you realise nobody would bother with different shell designs if 6g of TNT equivalent would rip aircraft to pieces?
Every single gun designing team would do the same:
Germans would just roll out an improved FI-T weighting around 108g with 7g of PETN at 760m/s and they’d be golden. But they went with light, high capacity HE shell because that shell did the job way better vs fighters.
So if you want all planes to only differ in performance, why not just give all planes same “default 20mm”, same ROF, same shell, same ammo count, that just simply kills you in 1 shot no matter where it hits?
Your approach to damage makes just as much sense, as an idea to give every plane in game same turn performance. If we are throwing any realism regarding armanent out of the window, why is performance even important?
Ability to take and deliver damage is also a part of plane design.
If this one can be 100% ignored and everybody gets effectively a 1-shot wonder, why can’t other things?
If immersion is absolutely non-important (and with paper mache planes insta-breaking apart there’s no immersion and no satisfaction in landing long burst, no reward for good gunnery, as shit gunnery will give the same effect), if realism of guns is non important, why the hell do we even care about other aspects of the planes?
Me too. But remember that there’s the default belt, which is 50% API, which will hardly do anything to 80% of the plane.
You mean how people have always turned with Zero’s, even when they have no chance of winning?
That argument doesn’t cut it.
In the past neither 20mm cannons nor .50cals would demolish your engine with just one or two hits so you might end up with engine damage that hampers your performance but you wouldn’t just instantly die because one or two rounds hit you.
I mean how do you explain the Yak-3 being 4.3 (pretty sure it used to be 4.0 years ago) when a 1944 D-9 used to be 5.3 or even higher?
It was because the firepower was very lacking and you had to rely on the flight performance to get kills.
Going head-on with a Bf 109 or Fw 190 was very risky, since they had deadly Mineshells that could blow off your wing while you needed a lucky hit to cause a fire to bring them down.
Now, not only do 96g HE shells blow off your wing, they also kill your engine the same as AP shells do, making AP completely worthless.
Better than an untouchable plane which will click you out of the sky
I am playing sim and mainly against people who constantly fly the Yak-3. They are not shooting default belts.
He makes the insinuation that increased gun damage has caused people to push head-on attacks like it is a new behavior.
.50 cals would absolutely demolish your engine in the past. They still do. My whole playstyle around the P-47 was basically predicated on demolishing planes with .50 cals from long range and shooting in the head-on is one of the best opening moves for a dogfight. Forcing the other guy to dodge out of the way or lose his engine immediately sets you up for an advantage.
How long have you played the game? The game is 10 years old and it has changed over time.
The match timer used to be 40+ minutes long and games were not 16v16 like they are today. On top of that the player-base was smaller and the prop player population was not just transients that were grinding for top tier jets.
Fw-190D moving down is a byproduct of Ju-288 spam and 6v6 matchmaker that plagued the game for the better part of 2 years.
When I first started playing it was entirely common for most teams to climb to above 5000m in the opening stages of the match. And it was not uncommon for a few players to climb even higher. Nowadays most of the fighting will happen below 3km and due to team composition and numbers…you have to participate in it or watch your team evaporate.
The firepower was not just lacking; it was practically non-existent. I remember spading the La-7 in the old days and I would only get around 1 kill per game. Any other plane and I was doing roughly double that. Shvak was the most inconsistent gun in the game. If old Shvak damage returned then the plane would probably move down by a full BR. There was one point where the Yak-3U was at 5.3BR because the guns made it that way; now the average player is even worse.
I played Bf.109 F-4 tonight in sim. Most of the kills that I got took around 3-4 hits of MG.151 with the exception being a few times that I directly hit the fuel tank. I also managed to survive quite a bit of 20mm fire from Spitfires.
At 6.3BR or lower…it would still click you out of the sky. It would just take 50% of its ammo and then fly back to base to do it again.
ShVAKs were so bad that you might as well just had 12.7mm Berezin. But that doesn’t change that they are now a comletely different league.
