Is it just me or is the Yakovlev Yak-9 a little overpowered? I mean i don’t mind it. But it’s pretty dope if you ask me. Any thoughts on it?
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“Little overpowered” compared to the absurd number of Fighters equipped with 500lbs bombs?
https://wiki.warthunder.com/AN-M64A1_(500_lb)
And I’m meaning a very specific weapon.
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I absolutely love it!
i have gotten over 8 kill matches in that plane alone.
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Gun/Cannon CAS is overall more annoying to fight when compared to “Traditional CAS”, and it has vastly higher total potential for kills in a single sortie.
The only changes needed are another look at the penetration of the round, increased dispersion for the 45mm gun and an increase in SP cost for all high penetration APHE/HVAP ammo for middle BR medium caliber cannons.
Identical performance to the ground based 45mm is questionable, considering the significantly reduced powder charge of the aircraft 45mm gun. I would expect the projectile to be lighter in order to retain similar velocity to the ground gun, even accounting for the air gun having a 51 caliber barrel compared to the 46 caliber barrel of the ground gun.
While APHE is generally slightly harder to use, the ability to one or two shot tanks is worth the trade off. HVAP has such terrible performance that the increased penetration is rarely worth the additional SP. Both should have the same increased SP cost.
Belts made primarily of HE/Ball/Practice/AP-I should be made free, to not stifle the efforts of players wanting to counter CAS with CAP.
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Most cannon CAS planes suffer from poor performance and also killing power.
The Yak-9K is the complete opposite.
It can destroy any tank it sees while mainting the performance of a fighter.
Personally I think the addition was very dumb. You’ve heard stories about Ju 87 and Hs 129 being succesfully used to destroy tanks but there’s not a single instance where a Yak-9K was ever credited with destroying a tank, yet it’s now suddendly the best AT plane that ever flew.
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The dispersion of the 45mm cannon is already high. It is absurdly high when firing quickly. Also, the AP belt of Yak-9K is already overpriced at 200+ SP.
Overpriced at 200+ SP?
You can easily make 10+ kills per sortie with APHE belts that cost far less. 10+ kills per sortie should be exceedingly expensive. Well into the area of guided AT weaponry and smart bombs.
APHE for the NS-45 was a mistake, and it should be corrected with appropriate measures. Such as high SP costs, high dispersion and recalculated penetration. As one of the few weapons that historically damaged the aircraft that carried it, that gun should be extremely hard to use. Reliability and self damage aren’t implemented in the game, so these are literally the only fixes that can be applied.
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One or two 500lb bombs don’t have the same kill potential as the 9K’s 45mm APHE.
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it should either cost much much more or the belts should taken away again. imagine if germans hat a duck with flight characteristics like a fighter… everyone would poop their pants.
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or you know, take away all the good flight characteristics of the Yak9, cause those cannons actually ruined the air frames. The recoil on the 37 was so strong that once you fired the 2nd or 3rd round the airplane begins to wobble and lose all those flight characteristics. Which on top of every round fired it ends up damaging the engine and other components, one wasn’t allowed to fire the cannon at speeds below than 350kmph, less one go in a tailspin and meet the earth.
And as for the 45, that is the Russian equivalent to the Panther 2, Tiger 105, and Ho-Ri “Production”. Cause if you thought the 37 was bad for the air frame to actually make the intended role as “Tank Hunter” useless (even the best pilots could only get a 6% hit rate); the 45 took everything about the 37 and made it worse: It actually damaged and ruptured the engine and coolant every time it fired. Thus any ideas of producing Yaks armed with the 45 to be outright canceled along with plans of Yak-3s being armed with 37s. The 37 would never be put on another air frame till the Mig-15.
I would say the T and K need these performance downsides to balance them out. Which for every time they fire the cannon they slowly damage their engine. Which would force them to return to base instead of being constant menaces in the sky.
And this isn’t the first time Russia thought of shoving a large gun caliber into a light air frame that couldn’t handle the gun, see the SU-27 and how much “Gasha” caused problems for the plane.
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Yak-9k is just another example of overpowered, ahistorical soviet nonsense that only reinforces the theory of Russian bias in this game. The Yak-9k historically had poor flight characteristics and would almost knock itself out of the sky when firing. In this game, the Russian-loving developers make it the ultimate tank killing machine with exceptional handling abilities beyond most aircraft at its BR. I’ve been playing this game since the beginning and its always been the same crap.
3 Likes
I disagree. The Yak9k dispersion is no problem for me or anyone else who knows how to fly a plane. I hate versing Russia, back in the day it was because the “Stalinium” T34s then when they fixed that it was the random mass death caused by Pe-8 superbombs and the Tis_Ma. But while that is still a thing I find being continually killed by Yak9Ks, the other Yak9 with the 45mm gun is just ridiculous since they added that new APHE supershell to the airborne 45mms.
Historically the 45mm gun was a fail on the Yaks, it was horribly inaccurate and damaged the aircraft when used. At lower speeds firing multiple shots could cause the plane to depart controlled flight. And I don;t beleive that round was ever issued to aircraft, although I don’t think anyone has posted absolute proof - post WW2 russian records have been hard to access and proving a negative is always a challenge.
But of course in Warthunder they get the magic APHE rounds, they are highly accurate and cause absolutelt no problems for the planes while wreaking havoc on everything on the ground.
2 Likes
One issue with the NS-45 was that there wasn’t any space left in the Yak-9T for a larger barrel.
Which meant the had to use the same barrel thickness as the NS-37 but bored out to 45mm.
Which only left 6mm of barrel thickness, if my memory serves me correctly.
This was only possible with some new steel alloy but even then you are still left with the problems of a thin barrel:
Fast overheating, which then results in
→ Loss of accuracy for continues fire.
Probably the reason why they mounted 4 in the Su-8.
→
More guns = less shots fired per gun for a specific number of rounds on target.
The NS-45 is a crazy light gun for the caliber after all.
In fact it was even lighter as the NS-37, which makes sense considering the thinner barrel.
I didn’t consider this before but on the Dev server they made the German BK 37 overheat in just 6 shots. But the gun is based on the ground AA gun, which can fire 60-70 shots before overheating.
Compared to the NS-37‘s 160kg, it weighs 450kg and one of the reason is the much thicker barrel, meant for AA work on the ground.
While the NS-37 was a purpose built aircraft gun.
Now the NS-45 not only uses a lighter barrel than even the NS-37, the larger caliber also means that more heat is being transferred per shot.
So while single shots might be accurate, a burst would heat up the barrel very quickly, increasing dispersion.
Combine that with the strong recoil, at least comparable to the NS-37, which in WT has practically no effect on the airframe, and you have a gun that was simply a design failure for any of its intended purposes.
Now even if the NS-45 had all those drawbacks in WT, it would still be effective, simply because mouse aim makes lining up a target so much easier than in RL.
2 Likes
So are the morons who decided to buff/add the APHE to these Yak series, going to actually fix it?
A bit stupid to have to watch a few of these just one tap tank after tank.