Assuming the shots actually connect (the hard part, so much spraying. But hey, you got basically infinite ammo so nbd)…
Less than 1 seconds of burst from the F4U-4’s 50 cals torched both the Ta-152 and FW190.
Video:
I think the U.S has more than enough firepower.
And for CASing, as mentioned: you can stuff this thing full of very heavy bombs and kill things with fairly bad aim. It’s 4.3 and you said “U.S has no 4.3 lineup.” Well, you can take it into up to 5.7 and probably remain competitive against enemy planes, and that 1000 lbs will kill just fine against ground targets.
.50cals will suffice if you’ve already won the dogfight but in any scenario where you don’t get perfect consistent shots on a straight flying target, they’re simply worse.
at (for example) 0:35, you hit the Ta 152. If it were 20mm instead of .50cal he would’ve died, but because it was .50cal he lived and had more opportunities to fire at your teammate.
If it were 20mm, I likely wouldn’t have even landed a shot due to lower RoF making it harder to track/walk shots. Plus, I likely wouldn’t even have tried to shoot since 600 rounds vs over 2000 (basically infinite).
Cannons do win for snap-shots, I won’t argue that.
I seriously don’t know where people get this idea that 20mm are so much harder to score hits with. 90% of my kills with 20mm are a couple of ~6-12 shot per burst. .50cals often needs hundreds of rounds. the basically infinite .50cal ammo load means nothing but added weight when 600 20mm shots is plenty.
Troops are FAST, armor is slow. Supply lines are slow, troops are fast. Troops are one of the fastest things in the military. Everything else is playing catch up trying to support them. Troops don’t get to move forward because they don’t have the lines set up to resupply them. Or they get stranded because they moved too far too fast.
Tanks, helicopters, airplanes, armored transports all came about, as tools to move the infantryman faster or support him in his mission.
Tanks were developed to help infantry break the stalemate of trench warfare.
Parachutes were developed to allow the infantry to move quickly and strike behind enemy lines
Helicopters were optimized to expand this capability by picking them up and moving them behind enemy lines as well as supplying them while they were back there.
Everything bigger than the infantryman in the military exists to support the ground. Even if its mission is defending the carrier, or being a cutting edge 5th Gen fighter. The mission boils down to doing its part so that other things can directly support the man on the ground.
Everything, is faster than the infantry. Which is the paradoxical part of war, the infantry man is both the single cheapest and most fielded individual unit, and also the most critical, because he is the unit the makes everything work. A truth that often gets overlooked / forgotten by other units especially since it’s been so long since we fought a real war.
They’re not much harder, but .50 cals tend to have a higher fire rate compared to similar-BR cannons. High fire rate means you shoot a stream of death that has fewer gaps for missing from unsteady aim or enemy maneuvers.
Another thing in favour of 50 cals is bullet drop. They seem to experience fair bit less bullet drop over cannons, making long-range snipes easier to pull off.
This video highlights the drag/muzzle velocity differences pretty well:
Yeah, the sp alone already tells us how much 🩼 🩼🩼 they need in order to kill something that cost 10x less to spawn lol not enough ground skills to fight fair so have to compensate by spending more sp to do it.
We all have a love-hate relationship with this game. Anyone saying otherwise is either extremely new to the game or just a master at gaslighting themselves lol
Because none of the RP you get in the plane contributes to your ground research, which is already slow enough. (This confuses me most about the american CAS spam).
