It’s too good as a fighter to justify its ability to one/double-tap tanks with APHE.
APHE + capability to genuinely compete with bf109s: Not at all comparable to Duck and Stuka.
You could compare it against the 4B, which is 5.7.
Yak-9K is not 5.7 material.
But with its APHE it is more capable than any other 4.3 pure air superiority or ground-support plane.
It has multi-role capability.
4B is also multi-role. it’s 5.7
P-47s are multi-role and same/less BR. They’re horrible fighters at low altitude and when slow.
Yak-9K thrives at low-speed near-stall conditions.
F4U-4 is multi-role, and while it’s my favourite plane IRL and love flying it when the lobbies don’t suck (ju-288 needs to be shoved up to 6.3 or 6.7)… I hate seeing it in GRB in my KV-1 Zis-5 and could probably go up to 5.3 like it is in SB to compensate for its multirole capability. Like the Yak-9k, it also thrives on roll rate and has amazing near-stall control so not having altitude isn’t that big of a deal. Does need altitude, but 1 km is sufficient diving room.
D5 mustang is technically multi-role at 4.0, but like P-47 it’s neutered by not having diving room (with diving room it can kill Bf109K4s who think diving away and scissors are win conditions).
F6F-5 Hellcat is a pretty good multi-role plane and just 1km alt is enough for it to do its magic. I don’t really see it in GRB due to its low BR so i cannot judge.
UT is not better as it turns much worse. It’s faster, but it has to pull up earlier. Generally, Yak-9K is a huge pain in the butt to balance, as with some short learning period, it can just repeatedly slam everyone through the roof at relatively short range. Even if German 30mm got APHE belt woth 48mm pen, it wouldn’t matter as no MK103 armed plane can pull up as late as Yak-9K can.
I find UT to be incomparably better due to much less time required to regain energy and 20mm being enough to deal with planes by itself.
Being able to save up 45mm on tanks only is a huge advantage.
Besides quicker energy regain it is also faster overall. In fact it doesn’t turn much worse than 9k and it actually doesn’t even matter. 45mm has a very quick RoF and if you are good enough with it, you will be taking everyone out within one or two shots.
You may need to pull up earlier due to higher speed, but more often than not you don’t need this advantage at all, since unless your aim is really bad, you won’t need that longer diving time at all. Shooting enemies down from higher altitude is actually better, since you are less vulnerable to Anti Air which is a bane of gun CAS as a whole
Yeah, but UT should probably be 6.0 or 6.3 in GRB.
Also, Soviet 12,7mm MG with Universal belt is 50% HE and these HE bullet essentialy can rip a wing/tail off in 2 shots or at least will cripple your plane, all thangs to real sh*tter 3.0. I feel fairly confident innmy ability to shoot down 2-3 planes with MG alone. My aim may be well above zverage, but it’s still not great. Almost anyone can do that.
9k deserves to go up from 4.3, but definitely not to 5.7, it’s ridiculous. This is 5.0 material at best.
1x 12,7mm is not reliable against planes regardless of how good it is. And won’t be to even higher extent at higher BR.
With 20mm at least you are more or less guaranteed a decent critical damage with a hit, with 12,7 it can vary a lot.
If you are fighting someone that allows you to shoot as much as you want it’s not a problem. But in a close dogfight each firing window matters. Your 12,7 decides to do nothing in that short moment when you can shoot and you might as well end up dead because of that
it would still be able to do the EXCACT “fun” thing at a higher br.
Hell… ive been one tapped by a Yak 9 many times at 6.7 in an American heavy.
So no, the only thing that will change is the enemy might have a bit better defence against it, but i guess that’s the problem, not being able to eradicate the entire enemy team with a few Yaks.
It’s not fine, when a struggle-bus like Ta-152C3 with no APHE (the best shell is stealth 30mm which makes aiming more difficult, it has 58mm pen and horrible post pen), horrible turn rate, worst mid/late 20mms (the only cannons of the era outside of Hispanos where enemy fighter can tank 8 shots and still fly home just fine, but MG151/20 has horrible range and velocity bleed on top of that) is 6.3 for some reason.
UT is a bit slower on the deck. And that’s it. Everywhere else it’s just SO MUCH better.
It is more effective than 6.7 Me-262 with 50mm because 262’s gun is inaccurate, 262 is an absolute bus, fragile as hell, fairly big and has no other weapons outside of 50mm which is a hit and miss vs planes.
I fire Berezin in short bursts. Just like Shvak as both are hammers of god. I fire Hispanos and MG151/20 in long bursts because I know I need to land at least 8 shells to be sure.
The fact 90g Shvak shell with 5g of TNT cripples planes with 1 hit while Yak-3U gets hit with MK108 330g shell with 90g of TNT in the wingtip and only loses aileron (wingtip stays attached) and another in the tail (loses half the elevator, pulls like nothing happened) and only dies because I landed 4-6 MG151/20 shells to the engine/fuselage and set him on fire is pretty damn telling. Without the fire, even id every other shell landed, he would have flown away, lol.
Are you confident you are hitting with the Mg151/20 shells and not the machine gun? I’ve gotten angry before at just how tanky some planes were, went into the replay and watched it and saw my 20mm rounds flying past the target harmlessly while my mgs were hitting.
The cannon is often on the bottom of the nose, not on the top. This can lead to scenarios, especially without vertical targetting, where you land hits with the machineguns but not the cannon.
Stepping the frames 1 by 1, around 3 shells hit the engine pod.
The bottom tracer is the mg151/20. In this screenshot, it was fired with 300m convergence vertical targetting, so all 3 tracers impacted on the same point. Without VT or outside of convergence range, the mg151/20 will start falling behind the machinegun bullets.
Depending on what belt you use (stealth vs universal vs air targets), your 20mm cannon either fires 785 m/s rounds (stealth) or 720 m/s (air targets, universal). Meanwhile your 7mm fires 905 m/s on universal. The two also have significantly different ballistics so at longer ranges diverge greatly.
My experience with Bf109F4/Bf109G14 has been that if I shoot a plane where my guns converge + vertical targetting and I have proper lead AND ping is ~60-80 AND shoot enough so that I fire off 1 HEI shell in my belt and not just IT/AP-I - the plane I shoot turns into a fireball provided it has a fuselage fuel tank or I hit the engine.
Ta-152H has no machineguns.
And I routinely watch replays to see what the hell happened. I was kinda surprised that after a really rich burst I gave that Yak-3U it just continued his maneuver, luckily the fire did the job.
MK108 to wingtip does not destroy the wingtip.
2 shvak shells mid-wing and entire wing is gone. That’s how the game works nowadays.
Berezin will also de-wing your aircraft if you land 2-3 HE bullets from 800m away.
I would gladly switch 4 Hispanos on Wyvern for 3 Berezins. And I would gladly switch 2xMG151/20 175 RPG + 1xMK108 with 90 RPG on Ta-152H for 1 Type 99 Mk2 with 170 shells or for 2 Shvaks with 270 ammo total.
Japanese and Soviet guns are just that good nowadays.
You yourself said it should be 6.0 or 6.3 and it is 6.0 as of now.
I’d say that with amount of uptiers 6.0 ground gets, it is in a fine spot. 6.0 is domain of stuff like Corsair, Bf 109K, Yak-3U or late mustangs and spitfires. Yak-9UT is by far an inferior fighter to all of those.
I mean, around 6.3 it’s still way better than Ta-152C3, Me-262 A1U4, AD-4 etc.
A1H is better but it’s typical pay2win case.
AU-1 may be just as deadly, but again - pay2win + it’s a boat with bombs.
UT based on its ability to kill ground targets can go to 6.7 Ground RB no problem. Which opens up a slot for 5.7 Yak-9K. :)
In Ground RB being an inferior fighter whole being the best attacker doesn’t sound like that much of a problem. Yak-3U can strafe some guys with 15mm top armor and some open tops. And that’s it.
K4 can drop a single bomb.
Ta-152H can’t do shit.
There’s a big price to being a better fighter around that BR. F4U4B is a better fighter while still retaining reasonable ground attack capability. Thing is, F4U4B with bombs is a vastly inferior fighter, while Yak-9UT can dogfight with its full anti-tank load no issue.
And UT is a better ground attacker than U4B.
It will never be better than Me 262 A1 u4. Even if Me’s accuracy wasn’t greatly improved like a month or 2 ago, it was always much faster allowing it to be close to immune to enemy fighters and it always had double the penetration.
Sure RoF and maneuvrability is better on the Yak, but Me 262 surely deserves the higher BR, especially now with improved accuracy.
I wouldn’t say it’s much better than AD-4 either. Sure AD-4 has smaller kill potential, but has an advantage of bomb CAS being generally much easier to use and being less vulnerable to AA.
When it comes to TA idk, i have never played it, but from what i remember it’s not even a dedicated CAS plane so why would it matter? A much better plane to compare Yak to would be Do 335 B-2 which at 5.7 seems to be comparable to Yak in most regards.
Yak-9UT at 6.7 would be a joke of a plane, just like Yak-9K would be at 5.7. How do i know that? Because i used to uptier my Yak-9UT to 6.7 a lot when spading USSR rank IV. It just gets owned by all of the AA in that BR range, let alone fighters.
And yes, being an inferior fighter in GRB makes a difference, because surprisingly people can and do play dedicated fighters in GRB. A single good player in a decent fighter can deny enemy team from having any air support. Yak-9 is already inferior to other fighters at 6.0, at 6.7 it would be no different from a fat attacker.
Pretty sure the discussion is about Ground Battles and the Yak-9K or UT have easily more ground vehicle killing power than most fighter bombers or attackers while maintaining fighter like agility and speed.
The difference between the Yak-9T firing 37mm solid shot is light years apart from the 9K firing APHE.
Dude. Taiwan, be careful. Habby stalked me and followed me into a GRB match and Teamkilled me by strafing my M44 with his pitiful Bf 109 F-4. All he can do is TK cuz he can’t get enemy kills and also can’t beat us in arguments. IMO he talks crap and acts like crap, just spam reporting my messages to hide them. Bet he’s got 10 alts spam reporting me.
