Planes went from light weight wooden concstruction to lift them with underpowred engines to structural extremely strong full metal planes that carry armor and can pull 10g.
LMGs were extremely effective to take down early planes because fueltanks and pilots were unprotected and planes had a hard time flying with their pilots bleeding out or fuel running out or getting set on fire.
The wings could also easily snap due to relying soley on wing spars for structural strenght.
Armor plates protecting pilots from a single bullet taking down the aircraft and self-sealing fuel tanks
made LMGs extremely ineffective, requiring larger calibers to have the same effect as before.
That’s the first issue with the game. A Pilot requires 2-3 LMG bullets and 1-2 HMG or even 20mm rounds to take out but at the same time is armor not effective enough to stop HMGs bullets.
By Gaijins standard should all plane armor be changed to High-Hardness Armor, giving it a straight 1.25x armor modifier against all rounds.
Then there’s also the issue that bullets hitting armor indirectly through the airframe would greatly reduce their penetration.
All of this gives larger calibers a clear edge, with 20mm and larger cannons having the most potential.
An IL-2 is literally a flying tank with armor protecting the pilot, engine and fuel from all sides.
At high obliquity impact the bullets might perforate the armor but still ricochet away from it, resulting in little damage to whatever is on the other side of the armor.
Of course the armor is designed mainly to protect against rifle caliber bullets.
Even 20mm HE rounds could penetrate 4-6mm of armor before exploding behind it, knocking out whatever the armor tried to protect, meaning that 20mm FlaK could make short work of IL-2.
Of course the armor was quite effective in stoping fragments from explosive rounds.
So it was still vulnerable, just not as much as other planes.
Explosive rounds have always been an issue in WT.
At times the amount of explosive was pretty much an indicator to the resulting damage, making 20mm Mineshells like 4-5 times more effective than other 20mm rounds.
Or in other words: Every 20mm that didn’t use Mineshells was extremely gimped by the explosive shells dealing far too little damage to be worth using over AP.
Right now, every 20mm cannon hits just like Mineshells did in the past, making them redundant.
I killed multiple fighter in ground RB by taking of their wings with a single 20mm explosive round.
While that is great for making some SPAA with slow firing 20mm cannons more effective, it’s just completely unrealistic. Unless you hit near the engine, fuel tanks or the pilot, 20mm explosive rounds would have little chance of downing an airplane.
During WW2, 20mm ammunition off all nations made a shift from firing soley explosive rounds to using explosive-incendiary or just incendiary shells at the end of the war.
Turns out that while a single 7.7mm Incendiary has little effect on a self-sealing fuel tank.
A 20mm Incendiary on the other hand has a very high likelyhood of setting the fuel on fire.
Again bringing the plane down with a single hit, while also having the ability to perforate armor and damage components, like engine and pilot.
In WT Incendiary ammunition ranges from barely useable to downright useless, leaving only explosive and AP rounds to deal damage.
But when a single hit can blow off a fightes wing, whats the point in setting them on fire or hitting them from behind with AP rounds?
realShatter made fragmentation barely more realistic but instead just added an RNG factor.
The same hit can either instantly kill a plane or deal hardly any damage, just based on the roll of a die.
Which is somewhat similiar to incendiary rounds working on the same principle.
