Dude, did you casually ignore my comment and discussed your own fantasies about it?
Nice. I literally just clarified your comment. Do you SERIOUSLY think I don’t know fragments of the shell are LITERALLY fragments of the steel “shell”? Who do you think am I? Do NOT make assumptions that make absolutely no sense in a civil discussion, and show respect. It’s so simple.
“Layer steel” - don’t know what it is, but planes generally are mostly built from aluminium. And if you strike wing spar (again, aluminium, just thick) with M-geschoss directly, it will get heavily damaged. But it won’t get seriously damaged by overwhelming majority of fragments, be it from Shvak, M-geschoss or even Hispano, unless it explodes really close and the total mass of fragments delivered is… substantial.
And no, kinetic energy is not “mass by speed”, jesus christ :D It’s mass times speed SQUARED and everything divided by 2 (see, I can play this game too).
20% higher speed means 44% higher energy.
20% higher mass means 20% higher energy.
But fragments also lose the energy the faster the lighter they are and the faster they go, as you mentioned. But it wasn’t really that important anyway.
My ENTIRE argument, which you clearly ignored was:
- fragments going to the sides are strongly affected by chemical energy. M-geschoss has thin walls, but TONS of chemical energy.
- fragments going forwards are affected by both chemical and kinetic energy, and MG151/20 launches some seriously big chunks of metal forward.
Of course there are also fragments flying at oblique angles, for each angle the situation is different, but it should be fairly easy to understand, that more kinetic-energy reliant shells will have a way worse performance once they slow down compared to chemical energy powerhouse M-geschoss is.
Now regarding Shvak FI-T vs M-geschoss. Russian HE is 90g heavy, with 4g of explosive. Maybe it has a few grams of incendiary too. But lets assume 2.
A few grams are taken by tracer, lets asume 5 (4 or 6 - won’t make much difference).
So we have 90g of steel - 11,6 = 78,4 gf steel to form fragments. And funny part - there’s a LOT of steel at the back of the shell, which gets NEGATIVE benefit from chemical energy, which COUNTERACTS the kinetic energy.
M-geschoss - 92-95g (lets assume 92). 92 - 18,6g of explosives = 73,4g of steel, and barely anything at the back of the shell, which is very nose-heavy - other than the thick driving band part which will form fairly decent fragments).
You can come to a useful conclusion yourself.
Both shells will launch the most fragments forward. Nose part of M-geschoss has plenty of steel in it too. Shvak will launch some bigger fragments overal, but since it’s heavily kinetic energy reliant, the damage should drop off quite dramatically as the impact velocity decreases (when firing at longer range or at enemy flying much faster). And the advantage in fragmentation damage will only show itself at longer range from explosion, where, guess what, Shvak’s fragments slow down A LOT too. Just slow down less than Mg151/20 fragments, but still their ballistics are mostly kinda bad and 6g of TNT won’t do wonders.
So both shells will be truely effective vs. things in front of them, and the further to the side we go, the less damage we’ll see from both with Shvak having ADVANTAGE here, but not as big as some like to think.
EDIT:
Regarding B-17 vs Tu-2 - do you realise each plane’s modules have HP pool. And this HP pool is arbitrary and Gaijin can EASILY make a plane with same amount of bigger modules that also have way more HP. That’s why F-89B is notoriously hard to kill because its modules have insane amount of HP, allowing it to survive prolonged clobbering from MG151/20, f.e. you can land shots to the fuel tank and not damage it at all. Engines are also notoriously hard to damage on jets.
