MG151 realshatter discussion/BIAS

Machinery of War Discussion Aircraft
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41

Having experience in 20mm across every single nation from every era, I can without a shadow of a doubt say the MG151 20mm HEI rounds are amongst some of the weakest 20mm in game.

The USA BF 109 F4 gets more kills with the x2 7.92mm machine guns than it does the single MG151 due to just how weak the rounds are. I use APHE to avoid the HEI problem, but this just results in a majority of rounds over-penning in a pass. Im almost certain even the 20mm IT rounds are more likely to cause serious harm to aircraft in game compared to the HEI mineshell rounds.

1 Like
42

Don’t bother with TNT equivalency, it’s no longer a significant parameter to determine damage in-game thanks to realshatter in it’s current state.

They have to change something in it’s code or server side in order to buff it if the plan is to keep it on the old formula.

If they send it to Realshatter, then they’d have to adjust the value in the code that determines the amount of fragments produced.

Cuz realshatter as it is needs tweaking for all guns. The part of the code called countportion that determines how many fragments are produced has a default value of 0.3, which is roughly 70% less fragments than we had pre-realshatter but with more damage.

The issue is that Gaijin uses that value for all aerial cannons, no matter what caliber or TNT equivalency.
So a 20mm cannon with 7g of TNT will basically have the same efficiency as a 30mm with 75g of TNT.

You can visualize it here:
20mm Hispano HEI - 9.28g TNT

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30mm GSh-30-1 - 74.69g TNT

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They need to realize that the guns need more fragments and spread to them, especially higher calibers.
I’ve been trying to report it to them without explicitly saying these values cuz they don’t accept datamined values on reports but it’s a tough battle.

Giving you another example, this is how a gun with 0.75 countportion would look like in terms of fragment amount & spread:
- Note that I was only able to thankfully visualize this cuz when Gaijin released the testing parameters for APHE months ago and when I checked the code I saw that it uses a higher value than all HE.

German APHE 7.8g TNT with realshatter at 0.75 countportion:

Spoiler

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My suggestion is to make the default value for 20mm around 0.5 countportion, 0.6 for Mineshells, 0.8 for 30mm and all the way up to 1.0 (pre realshatter value) according to the caliber and TNT equivalency.

So that way TNT equivalency or atleast the caliber of the weapons can mean actually mean anything and have it’s advantages over lower caliber.

2 Likes
43

The problem is that MG151/20 projectiles have much higher drag than any other, they’ll quickly lose all their speed and drop like rocks.

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44

They might as well remove fragmentation from mineshells, since they contribute so little to the overall damage.

What realShatter did was turn every HE round into a German Mineshell damage wise.

Because players will apparently riot when a plane takes 1-5 min to die instead of being obliterated instantly.

It’s bad enough that pilots can’t bleed out and take even direct hit from 20mm round in some occasions.

45

The ShVAK ammunition is 100% overperforming ballistic wise.

There’s simply now way that they perform similar to other 20mm shells which weigh around 130g compared to just 96g.

Early ShVAK shells even only had a weight of 91g, so similar to German 20mm Mineshells.

Their ballistic performance just doesn’t add up.

2 Likes
46

Please! I want to play with bombers, but they need to be less vulnerable! They don’t have to be indestructible, but they need a better damage model and more useful AI machine gunners, without going back to when they were extremely accurate even at over 1 km
Also I don’t believe in bias but in “excessive” workload that can confuse ideas about what has been done and what has not been done. I don’t know the specifics of the Minengeschoss, but if it was designed to hit targets at close range, then I’m fine with its ballistics being similar to that of a potato launched by a skeleton — as long as it does as much damage as it would in real life. If the other cannons are too powerful and not realistic ballistic, I’ll accept that too, as long as it’s not just talk. Well, with that said, o7 +1!

47

Unfortunately, this simulator is unreliable. And let me tell you a secret: if you analyze the damage from the simulation above, the mine shell will explode under the wing. The damage model is changed to black, but I don’t know if the damage actually went in

48

In addition to bombers, this also applies to heavily armored fighters such as the P-47 and Do-335.

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49

Ouch, ouch, the P-47 is already quite durable (but it could be more so >:) ). Imagine improving it by adding the ‘turbosupercharger’ model. Almost no pilot death in rough emergency landings, and a real bullet sponge!

50

I don’t think this will ever happen. WT is a PvP game first and foremost, and having a way to automate getting player kills is an extremely bad idea. Agreed on the rest.

I did get pretty annoyed when I saw my 20mm shells go straight into the cockpit but realshatter said all the fragments should go the opposite direction of anything worth damaging.

BUT WHEN I GET HIT-

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51

No I didn’t use protection analysis to show the Mineshell damage here. That’s a screenshot from back when Gaijin released the testing parameters for APHE.

I just used it to illustrate the amount of fragments and spread we could have if they tweaked some of the values in the realshatter code. The round you are seeing there is the APHE, but if Mineshells had the same values, that’s the outcome you’d have - except it would detonate on the aircraft fuselage instead of inside it.

52

Do you remember how they were before 2019? They could land a few hits — sometimes a critical hit, and if the Snail was benevolent, even a kill — and scare enemies away. The player was always required to improve the consistency of the results. Combined with the fairly robust damage model, you could destroy a base and get a kill — sometimes dying in the process, sometimes returning to the base. That was the real gameplay loop for bombers; not being sitting ducks for fighters (or fake bombers)

53

Imo, what we had before realshatter made more sense. I still wonder why they changed it.

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54

What realShatter changed was add fragmentation cones, which is more realistic than the sphere we had before, but shells produce so little fragments that the damage result is completely random now.

The same shell can either kill a pilot or don’t damage him at all.

This makes guns very inconsistent at times and also lead to devs buff fragment damage to the extreme so that they would actually kill planes.

It doesn’t help that fuel tank fires are also a completely inconsistent mechanic that makes no sense.

2 Likes
55

RealShatter could stay, but if a bullet breaks into three pieces, then one of the fragments must cause more damage than a fragment from a bullet that broke into multiple pieces. Bigger = more damage right?

56

This. Cuz for some reason they do not feel like buffing the amount of fragments, rather the damage they do. With more fragments we would have more consistency overall which is good for the players and even for the devs, since it would mean less reports ab guns underperforming or doing 0 damage at times.

Yep, roughly 70% less than before.

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57

Realshatter will stay, there’s no going back afaik.

I don’t think that’s the case in WT. Back when realshatter was bugged and would only generate 0-3 fragments all the time, the damage was very very low.

We had a slight improvement where it can produce around 12 fragments, however there are times that you still can have 0 cuz the countportion is still too low.

If we had a buff of around 15-20 fragments, you’d probably never face the same inconsistencies for guns again, cuz a bad hit would probably still generate around 5-7 fragments which is prolly enough to Crit a wing, even if they lowered the damage per fragment.

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58

Always having lots of fragments or, as I proposed, having different sizes and damage may be the solutions. Bwah, I understand little, I am not the one who can decide

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59

Yeah, always having many fragments is probably the better option for now since it doesn’t involves creating new code, doubt gaijin would go that far.
But it’s what u said, I cannot decide anything either. We can just hope that they read the reports :P

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60

I wasn’t around in 2019. As far as I know you were quite likely to get randomly pilot sniped while flying perpendicular to it from well over 1km away, which is just broken. Their damage models also allowed them to park on enemy runways and sit there all game, that is if they chose to actually play the game that much and didn’t just AFK in space.