You can also kill someone with a .22LR, doesn’t mean that soldiers are running around using that.
So what kind of argument is that?
A few bullets to the engine or oil tanks and a single engine and even a lot of twin engine planes will go down after 5-20min, and you don’t need 12.7mm or 20mm guns to do that.
Kill claims were generally like 3-4 times higher than actually loses. So when pilots put a lot of lead into the enemy and seeing some black smoke, they would think the plane would be going down, sooner or later.
20mm cannons were not that effective in taking down 4-engined bombers, hence why most nations bumped up the calibers to 30-37mm for these tasks.
Likewise 20mm was also lacking as AA caliber, since single engine aircraft could easily survive multiple hits without going down, hence why 37-40mm guns were widely used for that role.
There’s simply no way for a 20mm HE round to destroy a large bombers spar:
There are tons of flight sims out there, and I bet in not a single one will a heavy bomber lose its wing from a single 20mm hit.
But sure, WT of course is the only game that models plane damage model true to life. lol
petty strawman argument, we are talking large calibre weapons here not carnival toy range calibres. and in a very lucky precise shot here.
a pebble killed goliath, a static shock burned the hindenburg and a single bullet can take a plane down.
like what exactly? how many modern dead accurate sims have B29s and correct structural degradation of loadbaring parts after taking a hit?
metal is weaker after a hole is torn through it and weakens around that tear with torsion, quickly sheering off entirely when hit in the right spot. do they have that modelled?
Spitfires were able to shoot down the Luftwaffe with only .303 inch bullets.
What is that suppose to mean?
Of course every gun will down aircraft, that doesn’t tell anything about how effective it’s going to be.
Yeah, a single bullet that deals critical damage but a 4-engined bombers wing spar is simply not going to fail from a single 20mm hit.
What is the argument here? Because WT doesn’t do anything to physically accurate model damage.
It’s just components with hit points that take damage.
So this whole argument is simply: In WT a B-29 can lose it’s wing from a single 20mm hit, therefore it must be true.
If this didn’t happen in the game, no one in their right mind would argue in reverse: Hey, please make B-29 make lose it’s wing, when a 20mm hits the wing spar once.
It’s difficult to see but that metal looks like it is something in the order of 1/4" (6.5mm) thick or maybe more - that’s pretty substantial.
I’d be worried for the integrity of this if a shell hit the 3-way joint between a spar cap (thick sections at top and bottom), a rib (vertical sections at 90 deg to the web) and the web (flat plates between the ribs and caps).
At a guess, a hit solely on a rib or web would likely not result in enough stress concentration to cause failure - but at the join of all 3 components I’d be at least very nervous!
This is a terrible debate lmao. From posting a b17 that survived a direct flak 88 hit as proof a 20mm hit to the wingspar will kill a b17 to claiming a 30mm hit on a Blenheim (a linnen skin airliner converted to bomber) is proof a b17 would get its wing ripped off by 20mms.
This bf110 is armed with a bare minimum of 2x 20mms and 2x 7.92s and is armed with a claimed 2x 20mms and 2x 30mms. And the b17 does not give a shit.
And before one of you numbskulls says something stupid like “he didnt shoot the wingspar” id like you to preform this exact strafe in war thunder and tell me how long the b17 survives.
Ive seen a number of gun cam footage from fighters in ww2, and ive seen a number of people attempt to recreate them in war thunder. What ends up happening is the wt footage from bf109s ends up looking like irl footage from yak 9ts. The second the enemy plane is struck, the wings go and the entire plane is a ball of fire.
Try it yourself.
This game uses a healthbar system, and it causes issues. Idk why yall are trying to defend it as historical, but your logic is flawed and your evidence is dubious at best.
6mm is not that thick especially since its aluminum and from the looks of it the cap takes up most of the thickness, the web itself is thin and could be prone to failure when hit.
The argument is with the assumption that the enemy got an extremely lucky shot on the spar itself. Its plausible but not easily reproducible. However WT does not model components that well and its well known that bombers are fragile.
The debate is pointless now anyway now that we’ve seen what actually happened in the server replay. It was a desync kill (the rounds didn’t even touch the wing), I don’t know if that one bullet actually caused that damage or if it was the sum of multiple bullets registering as one.
This argument is renewed because bomber are not know as fragile aircraft lmao.
This does not help your argument.
In terms of my argument, my argument is that bombers breaking apart at the slightest touch is both boring to fight and awful to experience. Having planes built specifically for extreme structural ruggedness actually preform in that way would promote actually playing smart when killing bombers.
There is no need to aim for engines when you have 20mms, aim for the fat ass tail and it will fall off. Engaging bombers at higher brs than 2.7 goes from needing to know how to approach and where to hit a bomber to take it down, to ‘let me spray my guns wildly infront of this bomber so that it instantly dies as soon as 5 round connect.’
Aiming for the cockpit for a quick kill rewards player skill, having a cannon like mg108s or the ns37 promotes an actual risk and reward of playing vehicles with those armaments. 'Should i take the 30mm to kill bombers easier even though it gives worse preformance than not bringing it.
The current ‘who taps the loot piñata with a 20mm first’ state of bombers is unrealistic, boring, unfun, and just plain stupid.
tldr bombers are broken as the damage model is wack and lots of people in here have little to no understanding of material science, engineering and physics…
6mm is very thick for aircraft structure - the skin is more likely to be 1mm of thinner, and takes stress in a “stressed skin construction” - which is what the structure is.
The web is the least important part of the structure as it has multiple redundancy paths in every single piece. It’s job is to stop the rectangle of the caps and ribs from collapsing - a rectangle is not a stable structure until you put something holding it across the diagonal - which is what the web does.
But it doesn’t take a lot of structure in the diagonal to make it stable - so you can blow a hole in the web, and it will still work.
That is why many webs on aircraft omit any material from middle like this - it saves weight for little or no cost in strength:
Yes its very thick for aircraft structures what I mean is combined 6mm aluminum is not thick as armour.
The web is absolutely important, its what holds everything together and takes a lot of the load which is why there are circular flanges there to make the web itself more rigid and difficult to bend without the need for trusses. Those aren’t just cut outs they are pressed so that that material protrudes outward making the sheet metal very rigid.
Like this
I did get the armament right? My argument is the 20mms dont disassemble b17s. Most of the people whove posted this video claim its 2x 20mms and 2x 30mms but i dont have a source for it. I said it has a bare minimum of 2x20s proven by the obvious exlosions on the b17.
The bare minimum is 2x 30mm MK108, plus a twin 7.92mm MG81 flexible mount on the back. Two or four 20mm cannons can be added.
The 110 is only firing a pair of 20s because we can see two lines of tracers coming from below the gun camera. The 30s are on either side of that gun camera so it can’t be them.
