The only thing I hate on FH...

... is the gunnery! Why are the admins keeping guns' lethality on such unrealistic dweebish low level????????!!!!!!!!!!!

Look at WW2 Pilots' memoires: good burst from 8 .303 mg's in BoB could rip wing from Do17; Polish P11c's armed with 2 7,9mm machineguns could down a me109 or me110 with only one short burst from close range; Mustang's 4x 12,7mm was devastating to any German fighter even from 300-400 yards, and so on, and so on...
Here? 30mm works fine, all right. But 20mm is good for hunting ducks and with .303 peashooters it's close to impossible to shoot anything down unless you don't hit pilot.
It's laughable! It allows pilots to fly without watching their six and sometimes even ignoring pings when someone is shooting at them because they know they won't get hurt; pings are usually equivalent of rear view mirrors here on FH.
IMO if you make mistake in air combat - you must die, this is how it was in WW2. I believe most of FH admins tried to fly in AH or on German Gamesmania WB server where damage models were pretty close to RL, they found it too difficult or what? There must be an explanation why guns' lethality is kept on such hopeless level despite of many protests from majority of pilots flying on FH.





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--stec
CO Polish Fighting Team

 

Yeah, the 303s were so strong the British saw no need to put 20mms on their Spitfires, and the 4x.50 on the early P51s were so great that the USAF couldn't see a reason for putting 6x.50 on the later models.

It's right the way it is. Plain old bullets just aren't that strong: have you SEEN a .303 /7mm round? It's puny. Even a 12mm round isn't that impressive, especially since it's non-explosive. The old gun camera footage you're seeing only shows a very select portion of the air fight. You don't see the footage where a fighter puts its entire ammo load into an enemy aircraft, which then flies away, or where several people repeatedly spray an aircraft.

There's a reason almost everyone started putting cannons on their aircraft. The only reason the USAF didn't is because they felt a large ammunition load was more important. It says a lot that they were the only one of the warring powers that felt that way.

 

.303 was a rifle size calibre, OK, but the gun had much longer barrel. With high muzzle velocity and rate of fire, .303's were pretty effective at close range. Polish fighter pilots downed about 130 German airplanes during september 39' and all Polish fighters were armed with 2 (few aircraft had 4) 7,9mm mg's. Take Me109E and fly it on FH using only 2 mg's. I wonder how many kills you would get...

About guncamera films - there is one of Bud C. Anderson, where he shots down 2 me109's flying P51B with 4 MG's. On that footage, every 5th buller is a tracer and after approx 5-8 bullets Me109 explodes... Wonder how many bullets of that calibre you would have to put into me109 to cause it explode...

About 20mm: 1 shell in inline engine and good bye.. you are looking for safe place for forced landing. Same with fuel tanks, oil tanks and cockpit. My best result on FH i 30something 20mm bullets put into spit from point blank range and he just flew away.

It's absurd, you still want to defend it?



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--stec
CO Polish Fighting Team

 

It's a permanent thread about gunnery.
The Host is of BETA version, so every aspect is still under debugging.

 

Yes stec, it COULD be done, and it CAN be done in FH, too. A lot of it has to do with accuracy, convergence range, and sometimes a little bit of luck. Putting a full burst from a P-51 into a weak spot of an aircraft at convergence range could blow them apart or take off a major flight surface with only a short amount of fire (I've done this) but on the other hand, you can hose down a Zero at range and not do any critical damage (I did this too in an FM2 not too long ago -- 114 rounds at 2.5 times my convergence distance)

As for the 20mm, I'm not sure what you're seeing...I've never seen any fighter survive more than 10 hits of 20mm. Quite often, my kills are done with only 1-3 hits of 20mm (my last sortie, I blew Spits into flaming *pieces* with 2 20mm hits from my Dora) The only way you can survive a single 30mm hit is if it goes into the engine, otherwise it just blows you apart. Convergence matters much less with cannon, but it can still amplify the effect.

It's absurdly weak at times, it's absurdly powerful at times. Most of the time it's pretty average. That seems pretty accurate to me -- I defend it because I have a hard time believing the "MGs are death rays!" argument. If they were as consistently, incredibly powerful as some people, then it doesn't make any sense for five of the six major nations in WW2 to ALL independently hold tests and ALL determine that, even against fighter targets, a plain old machine gun just doesn't cut it, and to ALL begin arming their aircraft, early in the war, with autocannons.

The one exception is the USAF, and they did this because they valued volume of fire over potency of fire. They felt that 12mm was "good enough" since it let their unskilled gunners spend more ammo, with more guns, making it easier to score hits. I personally think it's a mistake (what good is a weapon that can't do the job well?) but that's what they thought then, and that's what we get to live with when recreating air combat in WW2 USAF crates.

You'll just have to face it that spectacular gun camera footage like that is a fluke, and flukes like that are properly represented in low occurence in Warbirds & FH. If that was common occurence, it wouldn't be so spectacular, and played over and over, eh?

 

mekh, let me say this: you are wrong

of course convergence and accuracy matter, but what you say was a fluke actually was *the norm*, and, in RL a fluke was:

* a 109 which kept on flying after receiving 260 .303 hits form ca 180 - 200 yards

* a 190 which kept on flying after taking 200 .50 hits

* a Spit which is able to land after 11 20 mm and about 40 13mm hits

All of which happened to me in the last few days (and yes, I was in that Spit .

In WW2, a Spit or Hurri pilot returning from a sortie with a hole in the wing after a 20mm hit became an instant hero.

Sometimes to his squad mates, more often to the medical personnel of the nearest RAF hospital .

The small size of the .303 bullet is not that important - what is important is that it posesses enough kinetic energy to damage or destroy any critical part of the aeroplane that it hits. And with 8 mg's and a rapid rate of fire, it is quite likely to hit one critical part or another.

Yes, most AF's preferred cannon to mg's because it can do much more damage with a single hit, and that is obvious. All it means is that cannon were more effective than mg's, not that mg's were ineffective.

Finally, as you probably know, US airplanes armed with 4 or 6 .50's shot down thousands of enemy aircraft, they were in combat since 1941, and had their armament been ineffective, keeping it would have ment that Americans were morons, which I think they were not )) In fact they liked their efectiveness so much, that F-86 jets used in the Korean war were still armed with good ol' 6x.50 cal mg's.

And hey - they really did kick MiG-15's ass, did they not?

 

But what you're not mentioning is the situations where a burst of TEN bullets gets lucky and blows a target into pieces, or that the norm is between both extremes. You're only focusing on the far end of the equation, when you have to take it as a whole. I am not the best shot in the world (far from it) but even I don't regularly see enemy aircraft take major damage from my guns and survive.

Yes, 12mm armed aircraft shot down many enemies. Guess what, that happens in FH too, as there are plenty of Gold deaths on a regular basis

As for kinetic energy: the size of the projectile definitely does matter. Kinetic energy is a proportional relationship of mass and velocity. The velocity of the 303 is not high enough to compensate for its very low mass. A quick websearch pulls up:

.303 M2 fires a 9.73g projectile at 835 m/s = 8,124 multiplied together (very simple math but it gets my point across)

.50 M2 fires a 48.5g projectile at 870 m/s = 42,195

20mm MG151/20 fires a 115g projectile at 710 m/s = 81,650 before its explosive damage

30mm Mk108 fires a 312g projectile at 505 m/s = 157,560 also before explosive damage

So you see the rough comparison of the projectiles. The .303 is a peashooter, and there's no way around that fact.

 

hehe this is a 3 man flame

anyway.. plz remember that there is the spray factor. hit all hits in one part and thats different than a bit in each part of the plane.

sure i notice 7mms are kinda useless, but try punching all those 8 guns in the same part for 1 second

see if this helps
nic

 

To be exact, kinetic energy is relative to velocity squared, and that would change your calculations, albeit not by a large margin...

Also I see you are not really contesting my point about .50s being quite effective?

Well, I am not arguing the fact that 20mm is more effective than .50 and that .50 is better than .303 etc... All I am saying is, .303 may be a peashooter, but only until it hits you on the head .

Remeber BoB? .303s shooting down He-111s 109s, 110s, and bombers? pilots claiming multiple kills in a sortie? And what stec said abot the Polish campaign? How on earth dit that happen? Peashooters?

Can you actualy imagine bringing ANTYTHING down with 2x7.92 mm in WB with this gunnery model?

I've been flying Spit I vs 109s yesterday and - from my score, I used on average 190-200 hits to get a single kill. And that includes an odd pilot kill or two and quite a few times where the 109 run on me and someone else finished it off (granted, I had assists too, so 190-200 rounds per kill seems about correct).

I had never seen any 109 lose any critical part (maybe an elev once) except for oil (engine) hits.

I was shooting mostly at, or close to, my conv setting which is 200 for Spit I.

I have yet to bring down a 110 in the Spit (I think I did once, but this was too, a "delayed" kill).

Two kills in a sortie in Spit I is almost an impossibility.

I don't know, maybe all this is right, but somehow I think that any complex piece of machinery, such a 109 ;-) should break down after having 80 or 100 holes punched in it, even if quite at randonm ;-)

Granted, later in the war the planes (such as 190 and american "tanks") got progressively tougher, so armament needed to be progressively stronger. But 109 was never a 'tough' plane - quite to the contrary.

And as for .50s... P-51 was a classical 'boom and zoom' machine, and the tactics towards the end of the war were heavily biased towars BnZ, no turnig fights etc... that means, the majority of kills were made in a quick attack, where the firing window was quite small, and only lasted a few seconds... yet those 190s were falling... Again, this is all based on a feeling, I can't prove that the FH has got it wrong, but somehow.. it's not right to me.

ok.. enough of those musings time to get some sleep.

 

Yeah, and at that time the "good ol'" .50 became a pea shooter itself. There are many recollections like, "The MiG absorbed my entire ammo load and got away." The maximum officialy recorded number of .50 hits to a MiG-15, that have returned to it's base safely, is around 250.

And why on Earth did they want to install 4 20 mm cannons in Sabre by the end of the war?

As well as MiG-15s kicked F-86's and many others'.

[This message has been edited by freddy (edited 03 August 2001).]

 

This is not correct, either. Some weeks ago I was harrassing rgreat in his P51b with my 110g and at d3 I was pumping shells from all four cannons into him for at least five seconds scoring so many hits, my whole text buffer was filled with both 20mm and 30mm damage reports to him, and it took me at least ten to fifteen 30mm hits to finally let him disintegrate and that is really not correct. One hit should have been enough to blow him out of the sky!

Thanks rgreat btw for flying straight and level that time



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Zerstoerergeschwader ZG76 "Haifisch"
- We have enough 30mm for all B17 Customers -

 

double post deleted


[This message has been edited by -strat (edited 03 August 2001).]

 

..

Hmm.. "many" recollections like this one...?? what are your sources may I ask?

This is exactly what is called a fluke One or even several similar cases during a 3+ year war were baound to happen.

Ley me just say this - for all those cases, there were 550+ MiGs that did *not* return to base, and I doubt that the average number of hits needed to bring one down was anywhere near 250, or even 150 for that matter.

For the same reason they use AMRAAMs and Sidewindewr nowadays =).

You are nmissing my point - I never said .50's were as effective as 20mm, my pioint is - .303s and .50s were much more effective than WB would have us believe.

Incidentally, if I recall correctly.. in WB, one .303 "WB bullet" is the equivalent of 2.5 real .303 bullets, and one .50 is the equivalent of two real .50 rounds.

Which means that an average of 500 .303 hits is required to bring down one 109...

This is insane.. why can't you see it?

 

sources of 550 lost mig-15's?
i doubt there were 550 migs-15 at all, in Korea.

 

C'mon

The official losses of the 64 OIAK are 345 MiGs and 120 pilots.

The Chinese and North Koreans admitted the loss of 231 MiGs.

For a total of 566.
Do you have any info to the contary?

 

Don't forget lag. What could have happened, is that all the 10-15 30mm shots hited his FE at the same time.

How did you got your "whole text buffer was filled with both 20mm and 30mm damage reports to him" without gunstat ?


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Major -fla--
Commander of the Jambock Subgroup and Contact Officer.
Axis Foreign Volunteers
Squadron
ICQ#54040734

 

in fact i even not recall then i fly p51 last time

just not my plane

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Roman aka rgreat

 

I prefer the Ki43 to the P51, but that's not news
You you guys don't let me use it vs P51D, I have to use the Fw190

Now going back to the beta thread.... I want 2 9mm machinepistols attached to my Ki43. I suppose that my aircraft will become even more lethal, according to this latest thread

mcosta
Sturmtruppen

 

It was at the time when gunstat was still implemented.

V.



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Zerstoerergeschwader ZG76 "Haifisch"
- We have enough 30mm for all B17 Customers -

 

it`s time for Boroda to come in