I'm so sorry but your hipster warbird choices are incorrect. For once the boring normie conventional choice is also the right one, the P-51D was the best US-built fighter of the war and would kick the shit out of any of the others in a fair dogfight at any altitude given equal piloting skill. Also the H variant of the mustang was possibly the greatest piston-engined fighter ever built.
The mustang wasn't the best dogfighter and had shit armament.
It significantly contributed to winning the air war by being decent, not the best, and being decent at extreme ranges for a single engined fighter. That and superior allied pilot training meant hordes of competent P-51s raping mostly incompetent axis fighters while the few elites could rack up high numbers of kills.
One on one in a dogfight say a Spit would win against it though.
It was a good dogfighter, at least as good as contemporary German piston fighters and six .50 cals is actually very good armament, enough to shred basically anything else in the sky within its range. It's true that it couldn't out-dogfight a Spitfire (not much could) but it had better energy retention and was faster at most altitudes and in dives, and besides, spitfires were basically purpose-built defensive interceptors while the Mustang could do almost any role decently from CAP to ground attack.
>P51H
you mean the johnny-come-lately superprop that was still outnumbered by P51Ds in Korea?
Yes, that's the one. Every day I curse God for not allowing the P-51H its time in the limelight, it would have been so fricking cool. 487mph in level flight.
Not this fricking meme again. .50 cal's were great for fighters vs fighters with their great ballistics and incendiary properties. They only struggled vs bombers, which in 1942+, what Axis nation actually had threatening long-range bombers capable of frequently hitting Allied airfields.
Regardless of stopping power in .50's vs 20mm's, the fact that the P-51 had 6 .50's and the P-47 had 8 .50's meant that any loss in high explosive power was made up for in the ability to walk your shots in and hit your target with a lot more incendiary bullets. Most German fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose, or a maximum of 3 20mm's in the late war Fw-190's. Hell, most British fighters only had 2 20mm's and a 4+ .308's, Russian fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose for the most part of the war (I swear to God if someone claims the Russian 37mm was somehow good in an anti-fighter role...), and the Japanese Zero only had 2 20mm's with insanely low ammo capacity. That was another boon for the .50 was that you had a TON more ammo to use rather than be limited to an average ammo load of 120~ 20mm's shells.
The point isn't that the armament suite of the American planes was weak. The point is that it could have been lighter and or better for the same weight:
Compare P-47 and Typhoon: for similar armament weight the Typhoon throws out the equivalent of 12 .50 cals at similar ballistic performance.
Compare P-51 to 109/190: the American brings 6 .50, the 109 at lower weight 5 .50 equivalents which are all centreline and therefore much more accurate, the 190 with 2*13/2*20 brings 8 .50 equivalents at same weight which again are much more accurate due to centreline.
If the Marines would use AK-47s in Iraq they'd still blow the iraqis out of the water, but still everyone would ask why didn't you use M4s like the army?
>Compare P-47 and Typhoon
One was widely successful with the highest survivability rate of the war, the other was SHIT.
>Compare P-51 to 109/190
It beat both planes in practice. Whether for reasons of training, doctrine, or otherwise, the fifties were good enough and much easier to supply logistically. Whether or not the qualitative comparison is fair to make, the quantitative effect was superior, no plane in your air force will ever run out of ammunition if they use the same gun that's mounted on every ground vehicle in your army.
1 year ago
Anonymous
I'm comparing armaments not planes. Even the fricking Germans bombed to rubble could load their planes, logistics aren't really relevant and even then: you'd rather want your plane burning a ton of fuel per trip with the best guns rather than weaker guns (meaning less kills per lost planes and burned tons of fuel)
Let's also not forget that the biggest copeBlack person here is comparing the M3 of the Sabre, which was 1.5 times as effective per weight than the M2 on the WW2 planes. Even the M3 got mogged by 20s, so the M2 gets blown out of the water.
1 year ago
Anonymous
So did the Americans remove guns from every jet?
No they didn't, they are still installing guns.
Which ones?
20mm. Keep coping you moron.
Reference WW2 aircraft K/D ratios before posting again
How did cannon armed Japanese aircraft fare against inferior .50 caliber armed aircraft? Surely the cannons would allow for dramatically better performance right?
1 year ago
Anonymous
How did cannon armed Jap aircraft handle inferior .50 aircraft?
They did BTFO them, even though the Zero was armed with a really shit 20mm that shouldn't even be part of the conversation, it's MG/FF tier and those were replaced for a reason.
Once the Americans caught up and surpassed in performance and tactics and numbers the Japanese got torched, but the gun didn't really matter that much. Any armament suite was enough for that. Late war wildcats were dearmed from 6 to 4 .50s because weak armament was enough against those paper planes.
Yet still 2*20 would have been better and lighter.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>How did cannon armed Jap aircraft handle inferior .50 aircraft
Jap aircraft are a sidegrade really.
Americans seethe a lot about losing the early battles, but they always forget the pilot factor; they were a green air force going up against experienced pilots. A certain degree of blood had to be paid for the American pilots to learn proper aerial tactics. But they learned fast.
Truth is the Zero sacrificed protection for speed and could be defeated especially if lured into a dogfight, using manouevres like the Thach Weave for example, or Lufbery Circles.
>shit armament
Not this fricking meme again. .50 cal's were great for fighters vs fighters with their great ballistics and incendiary properties. They only struggled vs bombers, which in 1942+, what Axis nation actually had threatening long-range bombers capable of frequently hitting Allied airfields.
Regardless of stopping power in .50's vs 20mm's, the fact that the P-51 had 6 .50's and the P-47 had 8 .50's meant that any loss in high explosive power was made up for in the ability to walk your shots in and hit your target with a lot more incendiary bullets. Most German fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose, or a maximum of 3 20mm's in the late war Fw-190's. Hell, most British fighters only had 2 20mm's and a 4+ .308's, Russian fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose for the most part of the war (I swear to God if someone claims the Russian 37mm was somehow good in an anti-fighter role...), and the Japanese Zero only had 2 20mm's with insanely low ammo capacity. That was another boon for the .50 was that you had a TON more ammo to use rather than be limited to an average ammo load of 120~ 20mm's shells.
>They only struggled vs bombers
They didn't, they struggled against armoured fighters
Bombers were too slow and could be riddled with enough MG fire to bring them down regardless of calibre
1 year ago
Anonymous
>They did BTFO them
A6Ms and Wildcats were evenly matched, but USN deflection shooting training may have been a factor.
>Late war wildcats were dearmed from 6 to 4 .50s
The early F4F-3s had 4 .50s and the added pair in the F4F-4 was disliked by pilots because the planes were heavier and had fewer rounds/ gun. Are you thinking of FM Wildcats?
1 year ago
Anonymous
>I'm comparing armaments not planes. >Even the fricking Germans bombed to rubble could load their planes, logistics aren't really relevant and even then
See it's this kind of small-minded thinking that loses wars. Logistics are literally always relevant, part of the reason the Luftwaffe got smoked so fricking hard by the western allies was because their logistics train was so shit and their priorities were moronic, for example, building V2s when they were falling behind the allies in basic things like making piston engines that could output +2000hp. Anyway I guess when 80% of your fighter force is destroyed then maybe finding ammo for the rest of them won't be such a problem but it doesn't change the fact that they'll be a bigger drain on strategic materials that could be used to make other things if they use cannons as opposed to HMGs. Now tell me all about how the Tiger was the best tank of the war while it gets gangbanged by ten Shermans produced for the same price.
So did the Americans remove guns from every jet?
No they didn't, they are still installing guns.
Which ones?
20mm. Keep coping you moron.
>Which ones? 20mm. Keep coping you moron.
Literally the first line of the post before the one you responded to: >obviously if you can get 20mm PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons, that's the best of both worlds. My point is that having a higher number of .50 cals vs a lower number of 20mm cannon in world war/cold war era fighter vs fighter combat was an acceptable trade-off and produced demonstrably superior results, which I have given multiple examples of, which you have been unable to refute.
Anyway you sound very emotional, much like a histrionic woman on her period. You haven't actually introduced any new points and seem to be frothing at the mouth, tripping over yourself to say the same disproven arguments in different combinations of words.
Maybe it's time to take a break from /k/? It's making you behave irrationally. Have you tried reddit? That may be more suited to someone of your labile emotional state and subnormal rhetorical skill
1 year ago
Anonymous
You're over-egging the logistical issue, the Germans had no problem manufacturing 20mm cannons and shells.
You're also overlooking the proven firepower of the 20mm even in fighter combat, which has been discussed by WW2 fighter aces - some were for, some were against.
Lastly, other anon was correct that 20mm became the postwar favoured weapon.
Your objection that >PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons
is not valid, because 20mm was adopted long before modern rotary autocannon.
The Gloster Meteor carried four Hispano 20mm.
The deHavilland vampire carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Dassault Ouragan carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Saab Tunnan carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Sabre D and L, as noted, carried four Hispano 20mm.
The US also adopted the AN/M3 20mm and then Colt Mk12 which are derived from the Hispano 20mm, and used it on many aircraft from the Tigercat all the way to the F-8, the "Last of the Gunfighters".
You can't tell me that all these aircraft were only intended to fight bombers.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Jet combat is not WW2 fighter combat.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Yes, jet combat is actually faster, making WW2 fighters even more vulnerable to the 20mm Hispano.
Objectively speaking, the P-51 was better, but it was also a product of the late war, which might as well be calling it Martian tech compared to weapons from the start. The P-40, on the other hand, was in the position of being there when it was needed and being good enough to get the job done, which is more than can be said of just about any other Allied fighter in the Pacific of 1942. The P-40 was the line holder, the P-51 was the flex, and I love them both.
The a6m zero was made of japanesium spirit and cumsocks and folded over 1000 times
...
But the F4u was made of Marine cumsocks and folded 1000... and 1 times
STRONGEST PLANE IN THE PACIFIC
Remained in service much longer than Mustang. Poke a hole in a liquid cooled engine and it dies. Radials have had whole cylinders blown off and flown home.
That's why air-cooled engines went on most Navy aircraft because there aren't many divert fields in the Pacific.
Also slathered Norks with nape in Korea and served France etc in COIN.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Poke a hole in a liquid cooled engine and it dies
planes had redundant, sometimes armored water tanks for exactly this reason
The P-40 had weak armament and no performance to compensate. The .50 cal is the most overrated piece of shit to be ever installed in an airplane, all the victories the Americans had were despite it lackluster performance.
>the .50 cal is the most overrated piece of shit to be ever installed in an airplane
I always wondered why American aircraft were allergic to cannons.
British aircraft ended up using arrays of 20mills and sometimes 30 mills exclusively. Soviet Union and Germany kept trying to one-up each other for having the most cumbersome, massive borderline-light-tank-cannons installed on their planes. Japan used a lot of heavy turnfighter aircraft armed with cannons early on so it didn't matter
America…4x browning 50 cals should do the trick…???
because we didn't fight bombers
We had cannon armed fighters in WW2: The P61, the P38, P63, P400, P39. We just didn't bother because 50 cals are a pretty potent weapon against fighters, and cannons have a big downside.
Yeah the use of 6-8 50cals makes a lot more sense when you consider both the typical target (small, fast, lightly- to un-armored) and the typical engagement with that target (brief, highly dynamic)
It really doesn't. The Hispano brought 50% more lead on target for the same weight of gun. Unless one single .50 bullet has a high kill probability, an idea obviously moronic, it is completely irrelevant if you hit a small or big target, if you hit with few or many bullets. What's relevant is if the amount of lead from a 20mm is deadlier than twice the amount of bullets for much less total lead and chemical energy.
Would you have at low accuracy one explosive 20mm hit or 2 .50?
Would you have 3 20mm or 6 .50?
Would you have 10 20mm or 20. 50?
Would you have 20 20mm (enough to kill a Fortress) or 40 .50?
All those muh fast firing arguments are just cope. Jets are faster than any 190 or Zero yet everyone uses 20mm.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>amount of lead
a 20mm shell wasn't ball, it had an explosive fill. it's a SHELL, not a bullet. it exploded and spread fragments and set flammable stuff on fire. it was much more deadly than being hit by a rifle cartridge. 0.50 BMG was of course bigger than a rifle cartridge, but it wasn't explosive.
because we didn't fight bombers
We had cannon armed fighters in WW2: The P61, the P38, P63, P400, P39. We just didn't bother because 50 cals are a pretty potent weapon against fighters, and cannons have a big downside.
Navy find out MGs were really inadequate and expediate 20mm cannons for its fighters even before the end of WW2.
>Navy find out MGs were really inadequate and expediate 20mm cannons for its fighters even before the end of WW2.
This was mostly due to the kamikaze threat fwiw. Needed something big enough to blow those frickers out of the sky quickly.
They had different targets to fight. US planes mostly fought fighters or rather fragile japanese bombers, so a high volume of fire to facilitate hits was preferable, and the .50 bullet was still easily able to deal with fighter sized targets or japanese twin engine bombers with non self sealing fuel tanks.
The British had to discover that the German bombers they faced were quite difficult to shoot down with the .30 cal guns they started the war with, so they shifted to a mix of .50 cal and 20 mm.
The Germans had to shoot down large, rugged and generally very well defended four engine bombers, a task requiring their fighters to sport enough punching power to knock down a bomber in one pass. Because repeatedly strafing the same bomber in a combat box formation of 100+ planes just isn't possible.
Notice how the moron who doesn't know what he's talking about uses the word cope still.
Hey dumbass, the Brits used cannons for other targets besides bombers after the bombers stopped flying, but not against fighters. They still used guns for dogfighting, not the cannons. The reason they manufactured planes with various mixtures of weapon loadouts was because they didn't want to guess what any next phase of the war might entail and being able to shoot at trains, tanks, whatever might be relevant at some point. That's why they made planes with any number of different weapons, including pure gun loadouts. It was for variety and future proofing, but the bombers were the reason for the cannons in the first place.
Come up with a time where the primary concern for winning the war involves blowing up a random panther in the Rhine. Britain built planes that were worse at escort, interception, and patrol so they could protect against bombers. They didn't need cannons on aircraft to fight the battle if the bulge. They do need cannons to protect factories to build the equipment to win the war.
You want the planes from the US to be worse at their job that actually wins the war.
1 year ago
Anonymous
You do realize the Germans stopped bombing them halfway into the war?
1 year ago
Anonymous
You'll have to finish a thought or something before replying to that becomes necessary. So far as the points you've made, the British cannons still aren't relevant except outside the bombers.
1 year ago
Anonymous
The Brits and Soviets decided to arm their new fighters with cannons long after the German bombing fleet was beaten. Your cope is just cope. The Germans didn't use 20mm but even 30mm to go after bombers. The .50 is just a limp dicked hunk of metal vs the 20mm actually bringing explosives to the party.
Guess what, one just makes a hole, one blows chunks out of the target with a much bigger chance of either hitting something vital, destroying structural integrity or perforating a fuel tank over the ability to self-seal.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Nope, sorry, you haven't expanded your point. As already said in the thread, you want cannons on the plane for no reason whereas anyone who actually put cannons on their planes did so for real reasons. They did it for specific roles. Soviet planes were attacking literally anything near their airbases. Interception, CAS, strafing enemy airbases (which were often close to each other), etc. You have to name a use case that wins the war, otherwise the guns are better.
You're also still trying to not talk about or ignore the fact that cannons weren't meant for enemy fighters.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>The Germans didn't use 20mm but even 30mm to go after bombers
Yeah and they lost the air war to American fighters firing 50 cals. How about that?
The cannon-armed Tempest and Typhoon were both completely dogshit aircraft by the way, the Spitfire was widely considered to be the better dogfighter and again, made the vast majority of its kills with .303 machine guns, as did the Hurricane which scored the vast majority of British air-to-air kills in the war. Much of the time they didn't even bother loading the canons when spitfires were in the air-to-air configuration against fighters.
>one blows chunks out of the target
If it hits. Riddle me this, what's more likely to hit, one canon round on one fixed trajectory or twelve .50 caliber bullets on six trajectories attuned to three different convergence points at different ranges from the attacking fighter? Which is more dead, a bomber that gets hit by one canon round or a fighter that gets hit by 4 fifty cal rounds? Trick question, they're both dead, only the 50 cals have a higher chance of actually hitting, and are easier to supply and maintain to boot. Logistics wins wars. War Thunder autism doesn't.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Why the frick are you moron comparing 4 times the amount of .50s if a Hispano was only twice as heavy as a M2 and had the same RoF?
It takes a moron to believe 2 13mm holes and a 20mm hole (if you aren't a moron you will know how much more area the 20mm covers) that fricking explodes afterwards are equal.
The worst thing is that each or you AmeriBlack folk just sucks the wiener of the .50 because it's American. No knowledge about weight, RoF, explosive effects. Just American= GOOD and Euro = SUCKS because that's the limit of AmeriBlack person critical thinking.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Yeah yeah, we get it, you're fixated on hits. Meanwhile anybody with a lick of sense knows that it's hits x (chance of disabling) that actually matters. Bullets tend not to do a lot of damage, just leaving small holes. Even a direct hit on a fuel tank does nothing (unless it's a jap plane) because of self sealing fuel tanks. Meanwhile those 4 fifty cal hits did nothing, while that one cannon hit tore a great big hole somewhere.
Why are you so mad dude? Cyberbullying isn't real just turn off the screen lmao. We won the war with our big .50cals and that's really all there is to say. Sorry you don't like it, guess you should have fought better.
1 year ago
Anonymous
Yeah yeah, we get it, you're fixated on hits. Meanwhile anybody with a lick of sense knows that it's hits x (chance of disabling) that actually matters. Bullets tend not to do a lot of damage, just leaving small holes. Even a direct hit on a fuel tank does nothing (unless it's a jap plane) because of self sealing fuel tanks. Meanwhile those 4 fifty cal hits did nothing, while that one cannon hit tore a great big hole somewhere.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Meanwhile those 4 fifty cal hits did nothing, while that one cannon hit tore a great big hole somewhere.
Yes you're right no plane has ever been downed by 50 cals, they just pass harmlessly though the plane like pistol bullets through a zeppelin, after all there's nothing breakable besides fuel tanks between one side of the fuselage and the other, just like how bullets can't kill people because they just leave small holes and blood clots right?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Are you seriously going to try and argue that 4 .50 hits are worth a 20mm hit?
Mate they tried to get the Hispano to work but it's not the first or last time the US had massive problems with Hispanos. Basically the ordnance board were Black folk and didn't want to run the 20mm to fine tolerances since it was cannon artillery. Everyone else wasn't moronic and got them to work.
Also, everyone else had working torpedoes while your subs were trying to punch holes into ships with non exploding torpedoes.
the Germans had issues with their torps almost as long as the US did?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Don't reply to morons talking about torpedoes in a P-40 thread.
1 year ago
Anonymous
The Germans had issues but unfricked them at reasonable speed.
The mutts went "lalala you must be using them wrongly" for long.
Also the Germans had the issues earlier. So the Mutts could have solved this while they were sitting on their ass and israeliteing money from anyone actually trying to stop the Nazis.
>because we didn't have to fight bombers
True, I didn't think about that
>that cannon accuracy
Holy frick I didn't know it was that hard to aim
Japanese fighters wouldn't even bother using their cannons against American fighters, which increased the armament disparity. An american plane would be carrying more weapons, with better accuracy, and more rounds of ammunition per weapon. Increasing armanent doesn't mean only increasing the mass of a single round.
50 cals are a simplified middle ground between the high-volume-low-firepower rifle bullet and the low-volume-high-firepower cannon shell
4x 50cals are shit though. it should be 6x at least as on the P-51, if not 8x
They had different targets to fight. US planes mostly fought fighters or rather fragile japanese bombers, so a high volume of fire to facilitate hits was preferable, and the .50 bullet was still easily able to deal with fighter sized targets or japanese twin engine bombers with non self sealing fuel tanks.
The British had to discover that the German bombers they faced were quite difficult to shoot down with the .30 cal guns they started the war with, so they shifted to a mix of .50 cal and 20 mm.
The Germans had to shoot down large, rugged and generally very well defended four engine bombers, a task requiring their fighters to sport enough punching power to knock down a bomber in one pass. Because repeatedly strafing the same bomber in a combat box formation of 100+ planes just isn't possible.
>the German bombers they faced were quite difficult to shoot down with the .30 cal guns
Utterly wrong
The Hurricane with 8x 0.303s was a premier purpose-designed bomber-killer and ended up with the most kills in the Battle of Britain consequently
>US had dozens of fricking cannon designs from 20mm to 40mm on aircraft and ships >duuurrrr the US couldn't figure out cannons but everyone else could
>durrr fighter cannons same as naval cannons
Notice how the moron who doesn't know what he's talking about uses the word cope still.
Hey dumbass, the Brits used cannons for other targets besides bombers after the bombers stopped flying, but not against fighters. They still used guns for dogfighting, not the cannons. The reason they manufactured planes with various mixtures of weapon loadouts was because they didn't want to guess what any next phase of the war might entail and being able to shoot at trains, tanks, whatever might be relevant at some point. That's why they made planes with any number of different weapons, including pure gun loadouts. It was for variety and future proofing, but the bombers were the reason for the cannons in the first place.
>but not against fighters
Not true
The Hispano was favoured for ground attack for obvious reasons, but every fighter pilot wanted cannons PROVIDED they didn't jam, because a single shell on target could do massive damage to a fighter. >the bombers were the reason for the cannons in the first place
Not true
If bombers had been the only targets of the war, MG Hurricanes would have raped them all day e'er day and nothing more need be said.
You don't know anything about dog fighting. The Thach weave alone proves you wrong. Shortening the time to put rounds on a centered target matters.
WTF does the Thach weave have anything to do with it? If anything, attempting a head-on attack favours the cannon-armed fighter especially in the ETO.
>The Germans didn't use 20mm but even 30mm to go after bombers
Yeah and they lost the air war to American fighters firing 50 cals. How about that?
The cannon-armed Tempest and Typhoon were both completely dogshit aircraft by the way, the Spitfire was widely considered to be the better dogfighter and again, made the vast majority of its kills with .303 machine guns, as did the Hurricane which scored the vast majority of British air-to-air kills in the war. Much of the time they didn't even bother loading the canons when spitfires were in the air-to-air configuration against fighters.
>one blows chunks out of the target
If it hits. Riddle me this, what's more likely to hit, one canon round on one fixed trajectory or twelve .50 caliber bullets on six trajectories attuned to three different convergence points at different ranges from the attacking fighter? Which is more dead, a bomber that gets hit by one canon round or a fighter that gets hit by 4 fifty cal rounds? Trick question, they're both dead, only the 50 cals have a higher chance of actually hitting, and are easier to supply and maintain to boot. Logistics wins wars. War Thunder autism doesn't.
>as did the Hurricane which scored the vast majority of British air-to-air kills in the
Battle of Britain, primarily against bombers.
Spitfires had the lion's share of fighter kills. However, they were .303-armed Spifires; cannon variants came later.
In interviews with pilots one thing that really tends to stand out is how well the aircraft handled rough maintenance and abuse. On paper the parameters might have seemed mediocre but I suspect once you start factoring in speed losses due to wear-and-tear the various P-40 variants may not have suffered as much compared to opposition that was technically better on paper.
>US had dozens of fricking cannon designs from 20mm to 40mm on aircraft and ships >duuurrrr the US couldn't figure out cannons but everyone else could
The Hispano 20mm that the USAAF, USN, and RAF all settled on was originally designed for a motorcannon mount in the fuselage, firing through the propeller hub in a relatively stable mounting. Getting it to work reliably without jams in a wing mount, where the entire structure is often flexing with aerodynamic forces, required some rework and redesign. The British came up with a solution of their own, but USAAF Ordnance board didn't think the British solution was worth pursuing for reasons that still aren't quite clear.
The entire autism over the .50 is just "American thing bad," as I suspected
The guy who designed the original Hurricane's 8-gun armament calculated that a 2-second burst would be enough to destroy any bomber. He "appropriated" an RAF bomber airframe to set up an experiment to prove his point. When caught, he was quickly brought on board the design team and they carried out the experiment, properly sanctioned this time. While loading the guns - at the time an unheard-of armament - the crew chief grumbled to him, "I'd like to know which fricker designed this", but he never let on who he was.
>the .50 cal is the most overrated piece of shit to be ever installed in an airplane
I always wondered why American aircraft were allergic to cannons.
British aircraft ended up using arrays of 20mills and sometimes 30 mills exclusively. Soviet Union and Germany kept trying to one-up each other for having the most cumbersome, massive borderline-light-tank-cannons installed on their planes. Japan used a lot of heavy turnfighter aircraft armed with cannons early on so it didn't matter
America…4x browning 50 cals should do the trick…???
>I know nothing about [topic] >Better post my midwit uninformed opinion about it
Higher volume of fire = higher hit probability. One reliable gun type = vastly easier maintenance and logistics. Enemy using primarily fighters and light bombers = you don't need a cannon to reliably bring them down.
Most nations that used fighters with two different ammo types in practice just chose one and stuck with it because of logistics and maintenance (Ex. RAF and .303s on the Spitfire). These are the things that you don't learn as adult manchildren in War Thunder. Logistics, reliability and ease of maintenance won the war, and the cheap "good enough" solution was the right one. Also the P-38 had a cannon and it conferred precisely zero advantages and was actually pretty shitty.
>Higher volume of fire = higher hit probability
This is the dumbest meme ever. The only thing that matters is how long it takes to produce a kill. You can equally say
Explosive shells = higher chance of lethality
>You can equally say >Explosive shells = higher chance of lethality
No you fricking can't you absolute drooling cretin. I'm not even going to waste time explaining why because it should be so fricking blatantly obvious. There's a reason that aircraft guns have literally always been tuned for higher rates of fire than their ground counterparts and why chainguns and rotary cannons with extreme fire output for a short given period of time are more commonly found on aircraft than other vehicles. You're not intellectually equipped to have this conversation.
Time on target to produce a kill is what matters. Doubling the rate of fire with half the chance of a kill is functionally the same thing.
>You can equally say >Explosive shells = higher chance of lethality
No you fricking can't you absolute drooling cretin. I'm not even going to waste time explaining why because it should be so fricking blatantly obvious. There's a reason that aircraft guns have literally always been tuned for higher rates of fire than their ground counterparts and why chainguns and rotary cannons with extreme fire output for a short given period of time are more commonly found on aircraft than other vehicles. You're not intellectually equipped to have this conversation.
That's why the .50 cal is the weapon of choice for airplane armament.
Oh wait it fricking isn't. Everyone stopped using .50s after WW2, only the Mutts continued with their cope guns. The navy stopped the moron train early and the air force later.
The entire autism over the .50 is just "American thing bad," as I suspected
1 year ago
Anonymous
non sequitur
No.
How about an actual argument lmao?
1 year ago
Anonymous
1 year ago
Anonymous
Saying non sequitur is an argument, and an especially valid one.
1 year ago
Anonymous
It's a completely valid argument and not a non-sequitur, as you full well know. What's your explanation for the switch to cannons? Why did the Sabre start off with the 50 cal and switched to cannons to universal approval?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Nope, you are just repeating circular logic and ignoring posts that deflated these points already.
Nobody has forgotten that you resorted to OoooOoooOooooh only amUS used that gun homosexualry, you have made zero points.
Ah yes, I was about to bring that up. How does the F-86 factor into your argument? After all its armament was shockingly antiquated, literally the exact same as the P-51. It's weird then, that against the purely cannon-armed and thus by your standards, much more modern, Mig-15, it scored a minimum of 10:1 K:D, up to 15:1 K:D by more recent accounting. How do you account for this?
As a follow-up question, because your premise is that more explosives is better than higher rate-of-fire for ensuring kill probability, how do you account for the F-89 scorpion and other planes which used large numbers of powerful, but slow-firing, unguided rockets as their primary armament, which never once scored any hits on enemy aircraft to this date? How do you account for the fact that virtually every modern fighter has focused on increasing the rate of fire of its gun armament rather than its explosive power?
Third question, how did the US air force become the most powerful air force ever to exist? They were using inferior .50 cal armament after all. How did they thrash the clearly superior cannon-armed Luftwaffe so badly and so easily? Shouldn't their cannons have prevented that?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Riddle me this dumbass, how do you account for the cannon armed F-86 "beating" the machine-gun armed F-86?
1 year ago
Anonymous
Skillfull deflection, unfortunately, also not an argument. Again, two relatively equal (in terms of flight characteristics) fighters were pitted against each other, one was cannon armed and the other machine-gun armed. The one with .50 cals won overwhelmingly. Why is that?
>F-86 "beating" the machine-gun armed F-86?
Because the Sabre-Dog was developed to intercept Soviet bombers? As most cannon-armed aircraft of the period were? The same reason why many of them were armed with massed unguided rockets?
1 year ago
Anonymous
What is this nonsense?
I suggest you read up on Project Gun-Val.
I'll summarize it for you: cannon-armed Sabres were such a rousing success against Mig-15s that despite reliability issues they completely mogged the 50 cal and they started replacing them.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Mig-15, it scored a minimum of 10:1 K:D, up to 15:1 K:D by more recent accounting. How do you account for this
Soviet pilots being shit see also Sea Fury and F4U being outnumbered by migs and still winning.
Lack of stopping power from.50 was a major complaint of Sabre pilots
1 year ago
Anonymous
1. You can have suboptimal armament and still be the better plane. Also the M3 was less shit than the M2 so you're comparing apples to oranges?
2. Is the ideal airplane armament now batteries of .22LR? Would have incredible rate of fire...
Since everyone who isn't a total drooling moron doesn't compare unguided rockets to actual A2A cannons, just a little explanation for you:
RoF is good because it means you fire more lead from same weight of gun.
The effect of the RoF is based on kinetic energy and explosive/inciendary payload.
Guess what, the 20mm as the bigger round has more kinetic energy and the explosive payload beats the big fat zero of the copegun.
So every single modern plane except some coping Americans, who still switched to 20mm and are using it even now, is armed with cannons not MGs cause the probability of hitting vitals with 2 small holes is much lower than one big hole and a boom. And the odds don't change if it's 20 small holes and 10 big holes and booms.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Guess what, the 20mm as the bigger round has more kinetic energy and the explosive payload beats the big fat zero of the copegun
Yeah nobody's arguing that dumb-dumb, obviously if you can get 20mm PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons, that's the best of both worlds. My point is that having a higher number of .50 cals vs a lower number of 20mm cannon in world war/cold war era fighter vs fighter combat was an acceptable trade-off and produced demonstrably superior results, which I have given multiple examples of, which you have been unable to refute. You do not seem to grasp the fundamental concept that different weapons are suited for different tasks. You also have not given sufficient evidence that a single explosive 20mm round will frick up a piston or early jet-engined fighter any better than multiple times that quantity of 50 caliber rounds, which again, have a higher chance of hitting at fighter engagement ranges.
>So every single modern plane except some coping Americans
Modern American planes are literally the standard of quality for the entire world, so if by "coping" you mean "leads the rest of the world by an entire fighter generation", or "has never lost an aerial war in its existence", or "has a bigger air national guard than most countries have proper air forces", you are correct.
1 year ago
Anonymous
The demonstrably superior results are everyone switching to 20mm or more, including your US airforce you suck their wiener so much?
Tell me why isn't the US airforce using 2 rotary .50s over one rotary 20mm using the same weight?
For some reason you coper think it's any different whether it's 2 .50 against one 20, 8 against 4 or 2 rotary against one. It isn't. 20mm mogs .50, plain and simple.
And that's against much faster targets than WW2 planes ever could be, disproving the copegungay argument that a .50 is better against fast targets.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>Tell me why isn't the US airforce using 2 rotary .50s over one rotary 20mm using the same weight?
Tell me why gunfights between aircraft aren't a thing in general anymore? You gonna move the goalposts even more or just admit that you made yourself look like a moron and are doing damage control?
1 year ago
Anonymous
So did the Americans remove guns from every jet?
No they didn't, they are still installing guns.
Which ones?
20mm. Keep coping you moron.
1 year ago
Anonymous
You will never own guns. You will never go to the range with your buddies and drink a few beers by a camp fire after. You don’t own a house, you probably don’t even own a truck.
.50 Cals were cool during WW2, they just worked. You will never be American, you can cope, seethe, mald, dilate or whatever but this will never change. You will always be obsessed with your betters.
1 year ago
Anonymous
>.50s were good against fighters because fighters are much smaller than bombers >then why do modern fighters use 20mm against other fighters?
idk anon, its a mystery.
I don't think he meant late P-51s as in "Korea late P-51s", just that P-51s came later and had the same armament as the Hawk, i.e. 6 M2s, for the entirety of the war.
It is dope. Never gets the respect it deserves imo. It and the wildcat on the navy side were fricking workhorses and carried the brunt of US air combat early on in the war. And they both managed to stay relevant and serve till the very end too.
Honestly, I just like the P-40 for it's design and esthetics. I know it wasn't the best, even during the early years of the war, but damn it looked cool with the right decals and paint. It screams 'Adventure'.
kek, that one guy making stupid points because he thinks replying back with nonesense = winning an argument.
You're making a fool out of yourself. Calm down.
Only a limp-dicked redditor homosexual would go into a thread like this just to shit talk a plane. We all know the P-40 wasn't the ultimate god machine, it was 19fricking41 when it entered service, and it was made by a country that didn't have neighbors right next to them that wanted them dead. Just because it doesn't have 60 gazillion Black personblaster cannons, can't turn on a dime, and doesn't accelerate to the speed of light instantly doesn't mean it wasn't fricking neat.
This is a fricking idiotic argument. The .50 Cals were great, they were more than capable of shooting down any enemy aircraft and also gave a substantial ammunition capacity.
They were literally also fine even postwar on the F86s, which still enjoyed a lobsided ratio against Soviet aircraft armed with cannons.
The US also used several aircraft that featured cannon armaments, so this whole debate is moronic as frick.
>cucked out of high altitude P-40s because the US government was moronic, didn't realize that every single aircraft company around would pay 5 newborns a piece for 2-stage supercharged merlins and restricted them to P-51s only
Why does nobody ever give the Japs credit for the Ki-84 Hayate? Given the enormous strain that the industry was under it's really quite impressive that they managed to build a fighter in significant numbers which was competitive or even better than late-war allied piston engines fighters, and performed well enough to be a consistently formidable threat to the B-29 raids. It had a much greater anti-bomber impact than, say, the handful of Me-262s that Germany farted out towards the end. Obviously, the performance of any individual Ki-84 was heavily dependent on material availability and fuel quality but it was a damn good design all the same.
I think it was their best fighter, if i remember they had a lot of trouble with the engines cutting out mid flight but that was thanks to being a rush job
Typhoon was dogshit and just slightly above the Me-210. Pilots despised it, its engine was unreliable, and it was badly designed to the point where more were lost from technical malfunctions than through combat for the first year of its service life, especially the tail which had a nasty habit of just falling right the frick off the plane.
Tempest was much, much improved and admittedly pretty rad looking, but still didn't really do anything the P-47 couldn't do better.
This thread has been a fun read. Is there any podcast/youtube channel on WW2 fighters you guys recommend? Everything I find tends to be History Channel level of knowledge
Met an old pilot who flew those. He lamented about how they were completely outdated a the outset of the war, but loved how they handled. The only time he wasn't too thrilled about flying was when anything with a better climb rate was around. Shared how the ground crew needed to keep wet burlap sacks, bedsheets, or any scrap fabrics on the canopy plastics...they warped, and discolored if left in the sun, or even in severe heat for a few hours.
For me, it's the Cobras
They are too aesthetic and overshadowed by other planes
I'm so sorry but your hipster warbird choices are incorrect. For once the boring normie conventional choice is also the right one, the P-51D was the best US-built fighter of the war and would kick the shit out of any of the others in a fair dogfight at any altitude given equal piloting skill. Also the H variant of the mustang was possibly the greatest piston-engined fighter ever built.
Verification not required.
>P51H
you mean the johnny-come-lately superprop that was still outnumbered by P51Ds in Korea?
The mustang wasn't the best dogfighter and had shit armament.
It significantly contributed to winning the air war by being decent, not the best, and being decent at extreme ranges for a single engined fighter. That and superior allied pilot training meant hordes of competent P-51s raping mostly incompetent axis fighters while the few elites could rack up high numbers of kills.
One on one in a dogfight say a Spit would win against it though.
It was a good dogfighter, at least as good as contemporary German piston fighters and six .50 cals is actually very good armament, enough to shred basically anything else in the sky within its range. It's true that it couldn't out-dogfight a Spitfire (not much could) but it had better energy retention and was faster at most altitudes and in dives, and besides, spitfires were basically purpose-built defensive interceptors while the Mustang could do almost any role decently from CAP to ground attack.
Yes, that's the one. Every day I curse God for not allowing the P-51H its time in the limelight, it would have been so fricking cool. 487mph in level flight.
>shit armament
Not this fricking meme again. .50 cal's were great for fighters vs fighters with their great ballistics and incendiary properties. They only struggled vs bombers, which in 1942+, what Axis nation actually had threatening long-range bombers capable of frequently hitting Allied airfields.
Regardless of stopping power in .50's vs 20mm's, the fact that the P-51 had 6 .50's and the P-47 had 8 .50's meant that any loss in high explosive power was made up for in the ability to walk your shots in and hit your target with a lot more incendiary bullets. Most German fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose, or a maximum of 3 20mm's in the late war Fw-190's. Hell, most British fighters only had 2 20mm's and a 4+ .308's, Russian fighters only had 1 20mm in the nose for the most part of the war (I swear to God if someone claims the Russian 37mm was somehow good in an anti-fighter role...), and the Japanese Zero only had 2 20mm's with insanely low ammo capacity. That was another boon for the .50 was that you had a TON more ammo to use rather than be limited to an average ammo load of 120~ 20mm's shells.
The point isn't that the armament suite of the American planes was weak. The point is that it could have been lighter and or better for the same weight:
Compare P-47 and Typhoon: for similar armament weight the Typhoon throws out the equivalent of 12 .50 cals at similar ballistic performance.
Compare P-51 to 109/190: the American brings 6 .50, the 109 at lower weight 5 .50 equivalents which are all centreline and therefore much more accurate, the 190 with 2*13/2*20 brings 8 .50 equivalents at same weight which again are much more accurate due to centreline.
If the Marines would use AK-47s in Iraq they'd still blow the iraqis out of the water, but still everyone would ask why didn't you use M4s like the army?
>Typhoon throws out the equivalent of 12 .50 cals at similar ballistic performance.
No
4 x 20mm hispano MKV = 6.4kgs weight of fire per sec. 8 50cals = 4.4kgs weight of fire. Both have very similiar muzzle velocity.
>Compare P-47 and Typhoon
One was widely successful with the highest survivability rate of the war, the other was SHIT.
>Compare P-51 to 109/190
It beat both planes in practice. Whether for reasons of training, doctrine, or otherwise, the fifties were good enough and much easier to supply logistically. Whether or not the qualitative comparison is fair to make, the quantitative effect was superior, no plane in your air force will ever run out of ammunition if they use the same gun that's mounted on every ground vehicle in your army.
I'm comparing armaments not planes. Even the fricking Germans bombed to rubble could load their planes, logistics aren't really relevant and even then: you'd rather want your plane burning a ton of fuel per trip with the best guns rather than weaker guns (meaning less kills per lost planes and burned tons of fuel)
Let's also not forget that the biggest copeBlack person here is comparing the M3 of the Sabre, which was 1.5 times as effective per weight than the M2 on the WW2 planes. Even the M3 got mogged by 20s, so the M2 gets blown out of the water.
Reference WW2 aircraft K/D ratios before posting again
How did cannon armed Japanese aircraft fare against inferior .50 caliber armed aircraft? Surely the cannons would allow for dramatically better performance right?
How did cannon armed Jap aircraft handle inferior .50 aircraft?
They did BTFO them, even though the Zero was armed with a really shit 20mm that shouldn't even be part of the conversation, it's MG/FF tier and those were replaced for a reason.
Once the Americans caught up and surpassed in performance and tactics and numbers the Japanese got torched, but the gun didn't really matter that much. Any armament suite was enough for that. Late war wildcats were dearmed from 6 to 4 .50s because weak armament was enough against those paper planes.
Yet still 2*20 would have been better and lighter.
>How did cannon armed Jap aircraft handle inferior .50 aircraft
Jap aircraft are a sidegrade really.
Americans seethe a lot about losing the early battles, but they always forget the pilot factor; they were a green air force going up against experienced pilots. A certain degree of blood had to be paid for the American pilots to learn proper aerial tactics. But they learned fast.
Truth is the Zero sacrificed protection for speed and could be defeated especially if lured into a dogfight, using manouevres like the Thach Weave for example, or Lufbery Circles.
>They only struggled vs bombers
They didn't, they struggled against armoured fighters
Bombers were too slow and could be riddled with enough MG fire to bring them down regardless of calibre
>They did BTFO them
A6Ms and Wildcats were evenly matched, but USN deflection shooting training may have been a factor.
>Late war wildcats were dearmed from 6 to 4 .50s
The early F4F-3s had 4 .50s and the added pair in the F4F-4 was disliked by pilots because the planes were heavier and had fewer rounds/ gun. Are you thinking of FM Wildcats?
>I'm comparing armaments not planes. >Even the fricking Germans bombed to rubble could load their planes, logistics aren't really relevant and even then
See it's this kind of small-minded thinking that loses wars. Logistics are literally always relevant, part of the reason the Luftwaffe got smoked so fricking hard by the western allies was because their logistics train was so shit and their priorities were moronic, for example, building V2s when they were falling behind the allies in basic things like making piston engines that could output +2000hp. Anyway I guess when 80% of your fighter force is destroyed then maybe finding ammo for the rest of them won't be such a problem but it doesn't change the fact that they'll be a bigger drain on strategic materials that could be used to make other things if they use cannons as opposed to HMGs. Now tell me all about how the Tiger was the best tank of the war while it gets gangbanged by ten Shermans produced for the same price.
>Which ones? 20mm. Keep coping you moron.
Literally the first line of the post before the one you responded to:
>obviously if you can get 20mm PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons, that's the best of both worlds. My point is that having a higher number of .50 cals vs a lower number of 20mm cannon in world war/cold war era fighter vs fighter combat was an acceptable trade-off and produced demonstrably superior results, which I have given multiple examples of, which you have been unable to refute.
Anyway you sound very emotional, much like a histrionic woman on her period. You haven't actually introduced any new points and seem to be frothing at the mouth, tripping over yourself to say the same disproven arguments in different combinations of words.
Maybe it's time to take a break from /k/? It's making you behave irrationally. Have you tried reddit? That may be more suited to someone of your labile emotional state and subnormal rhetorical skill
You're over-egging the logistical issue, the Germans had no problem manufacturing 20mm cannons and shells.
You're also overlooking the proven firepower of the 20mm even in fighter combat, which has been discussed by WW2 fighter aces - some were for, some were against.
Lastly, other anon was correct that 20mm became the postwar favoured weapon.
Your objection that
>PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons
is not valid, because 20mm was adopted long before modern rotary autocannon.
The Gloster Meteor carried four Hispano 20mm.
The deHavilland vampire carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Dassault Ouragan carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Saab Tunnan carried four Hispano 20mm.
The Sabre D and L, as noted, carried four Hispano 20mm.
The US also adopted the AN/M3 20mm and then Colt Mk12 which are derived from the Hispano 20mm, and used it on many aircraft from the Tigercat all the way to the F-8, the "Last of the Gunfighters".
You can't tell me that all these aircraft were only intended to fight bombers.
Jet combat is not WW2 fighter combat.
Yes, jet combat is actually faster, making WW2 fighters even more vulnerable to the 20mm Hispano.
>best dogfighter
BnZ > TnB
>at any altitude
Come on now, there's no need to be this hyperbolic.
P-47 IS the boring normie conventional choice
Objectively speaking, the P-51 was better, but it was also a product of the late war, which might as well be calling it Martian tech compared to weapons from the start. The P-40, on the other hand, was in the position of being there when it was needed and being good enough to get the job done, which is more than can be said of just about any other Allied fighter in the Pacific of 1942. The P-40 was the line holder, the P-51 was the flex, and I love them both.
The P-40 was a pre/early WWII aircraft. Its performance was soon surpassed. is right. It wasn't half bad for its time, though.
The Flying Tigers? Yup, they were dope. No doubt about it.
*ahem*
shill me on the Corsair, I know nothing about it
The a6m zero was made of japanesium spirit and cumsocks and folded over 1000 times
...
But the F4u was made of Marine cumsocks and folded 1000... and 1 times
STRONGEST PLANE IN THE PACIFIC
Remained in service much longer than Mustang. Poke a hole in a liquid cooled engine and it dies. Radials have had whole cylinders blown off and flown home.
That's why air-cooled engines went on most Navy aircraft because there aren't many divert fields in the Pacific.
Also slathered Norks with nape in Korea and served France etc in COIN.
>Poke a hole in a liquid cooled engine and it dies
planes had redundant, sometimes armored water tanks for exactly this reason
that thing sucked, the P40 is better in every way especially with the merlin upgrade it got in its later variants
>merlin upgrade
Allisons were fine; the issue was supercharging.
for me it's the p47
The tigertank.webm is honestly a /k/ classic
whats the story behind it anon?
thats a horse
There's a running joke that Allied troops claimed pretty much every observation of a German vehicle was a Tiger tank towards the end of the war
Mashallah happy the pilot gets beaten to death by affirmative action blacks in his retirement home
is that butthole shooting at a two seater horse car?
What do you think German logistics relied heavily on in 1944-45?
The P-40 had weak armament and no performance to compensate. The .50 cal is the most overrated piece of shit to be ever installed in an airplane, all the victories the Americans had were despite it lackluster performance.
do you really have to do this in every single warbird thread?
>the .50 cal is the most overrated piece of shit to be ever installed in an airplane
I always wondered why American aircraft were allergic to cannons.
British aircraft ended up using arrays of 20mills and sometimes 30 mills exclusively. Soviet Union and Germany kept trying to one-up each other for having the most cumbersome, massive borderline-light-tank-cannons installed on their planes. Japan used a lot of heavy turnfighter aircraft armed with cannons early on so it didn't matter
America…4x browning 50 cals should do the trick…???
because we didn't fight bombers
We had cannon armed fighters in WW2: The P61, the P38, P63, P400, P39. We just didn't bother because 50 cals are a pretty potent weapon against fighters, and cannons have a big downside.
>because we didn't have to fight bombers
True, I didn't think about that
>that cannon accuracy
Holy frick I didn't know it was that hard to aim
low velocity rounds with a shitload of HE filler are not a recipe for high hit probability
Yeah the use of 6-8 50cals makes a lot more sense when you consider both the typical target (small, fast, lightly- to un-armored) and the typical engagement with that target (brief, highly dynamic)
It really doesn't. The Hispano brought 50% more lead on target for the same weight of gun. Unless one single .50 bullet has a high kill probability, an idea obviously moronic, it is completely irrelevant if you hit a small or big target, if you hit with few or many bullets. What's relevant is if the amount of lead from a 20mm is deadlier than twice the amount of bullets for much less total lead and chemical energy.
Would you have at low accuracy one explosive 20mm hit or 2 .50?
Would you have 3 20mm or 6 .50?
Would you have 10 20mm or 20. 50?
Would you have 20 20mm (enough to kill a Fortress) or 40 .50?
All those muh fast firing arguments are just cope. Jets are faster than any 190 or Zero yet everyone uses 20mm.
>amount of lead
a 20mm shell wasn't ball, it had an explosive fill. it's a SHELL, not a bullet. it exploded and spread fragments and set flammable stuff on fire. it was much more deadly than being hit by a rifle cartridge. 0.50 BMG was of course bigger than a rifle cartridge, but it wasn't explosive.
Listing the P-38 is cheating since it had a wimpy armament compared with other twin engines fast bombers
>P-38: 4x .50 Browning and 1x 20mm Hispano
>Ju88G: 4x 20mm
>Mosquito: 4x 20mm Hispanos, 4x .50 Browning
There's a reason it never had the makings of a varsity night-fighter
>There's a reason it never had the makings of a varsity night-fighter
It was a varsity DAY fighter, dumbass.
Institutional inertia.
Navy find out MGs were really inadequate and expediate 20mm cannons for its fighters even before the end of WW2.
>Navy find out MGs were really inadequate and expediate 20mm cannons for its fighters even before the end of WW2.
This was mostly due to the kamikaze threat fwiw. Needed something big enough to blow those frickers out of the sky quickly.
They had different targets to fight. US planes mostly fought fighters or rather fragile japanese bombers, so a high volume of fire to facilitate hits was preferable, and the .50 bullet was still easily able to deal with fighter sized targets or japanese twin engine bombers with non self sealing fuel tanks.
The British had to discover that the German bombers they faced were quite difficult to shoot down with the .30 cal guns they started the war with, so they shifted to a mix of .50 cal and 20 mm.
The Germans had to shoot down large, rugged and generally very well defended four engine bombers, a task requiring their fighters to sport enough punching power to knock down a bomber in one pass. Because repeatedly strafing the same bomber in a combat box formation of 100+ planes just isn't possible.
Dumb cope, the Bongs stuck with cannons long after the point they dealt with bombers. And later everybody ditched machine guns for cannons.
Notice how the moron who doesn't know what he's talking about uses the word cope still.
Hey dumbass, the Brits used cannons for other targets besides bombers after the bombers stopped flying, but not against fighters. They still used guns for dogfighting, not the cannons. The reason they manufactured planes with various mixtures of weapon loadouts was because they didn't want to guess what any next phase of the war might entail and being able to shoot at trains, tanks, whatever might be relevant at some point. That's why they made planes with any number of different weapons, including pure gun loadouts. It was for variety and future proofing, but the bombers were the reason for the cannons in the first place.
And all this didn't apply to America because?
That's not how it works.
Come up with a time where the primary concern for winning the war involves blowing up a random panther in the Rhine. Britain built planes that were worse at escort, interception, and patrol so they could protect against bombers. They didn't need cannons on aircraft to fight the battle if the bulge. They do need cannons to protect factories to build the equipment to win the war.
You want the planes from the US to be worse at their job that actually wins the war.
You do realize the Germans stopped bombing them halfway into the war?
You'll have to finish a thought or something before replying to that becomes necessary. So far as the points you've made, the British cannons still aren't relevant except outside the bombers.
The Brits and Soviets decided to arm their new fighters with cannons long after the German bombing fleet was beaten. Your cope is just cope. The Germans didn't use 20mm but even 30mm to go after bombers. The .50 is just a limp dicked hunk of metal vs the 20mm actually bringing explosives to the party.
Guess what, one just makes a hole, one blows chunks out of the target with a much bigger chance of either hitting something vital, destroying structural integrity or perforating a fuel tank over the ability to self-seal.
Nope, sorry, you haven't expanded your point. As already said in the thread, you want cannons on the plane for no reason whereas anyone who actually put cannons on their planes did so for real reasons. They did it for specific roles. Soviet planes were attacking literally anything near their airbases. Interception, CAS, strafing enemy airbases (which were often close to each other), etc. You have to name a use case that wins the war, otherwise the guns are better.
You're also still trying to not talk about or ignore the fact that cannons weren't meant for enemy fighters.
>The Germans didn't use 20mm but even 30mm to go after bombers
Yeah and they lost the air war to American fighters firing 50 cals. How about that?
The cannon-armed Tempest and Typhoon were both completely dogshit aircraft by the way, the Spitfire was widely considered to be the better dogfighter and again, made the vast majority of its kills with .303 machine guns, as did the Hurricane which scored the vast majority of British air-to-air kills in the war. Much of the time they didn't even bother loading the canons when spitfires were in the air-to-air configuration against fighters.
>one blows chunks out of the target
If it hits. Riddle me this, what's more likely to hit, one canon round on one fixed trajectory or twelve .50 caliber bullets on six trajectories attuned to three different convergence points at different ranges from the attacking fighter? Which is more dead, a bomber that gets hit by one canon round or a fighter that gets hit by 4 fifty cal rounds? Trick question, they're both dead, only the 50 cals have a higher chance of actually hitting, and are easier to supply and maintain to boot. Logistics wins wars. War Thunder autism doesn't.
Why the frick are you moron comparing 4 times the amount of .50s if a Hispano was only twice as heavy as a M2 and had the same RoF?
It takes a moron to believe 2 13mm holes and a 20mm hole (if you aren't a moron you will know how much more area the 20mm covers) that fricking explodes afterwards are equal.
The worst thing is that each or you AmeriBlack folk just sucks the wiener of the .50 because it's American. No knowledge about weight, RoF, explosive effects. Just American= GOOD and Euro = SUCKS because that's the limit of AmeriBlack person critical thinking.
Why are you so mad dude? Cyberbullying isn't real just turn off the screen lmao. We won the war with our big .50cals and that's really all there is to say. Sorry you don't like it, guess you should have fought better.
Yeah yeah, we get it, you're fixated on hits. Meanwhile anybody with a lick of sense knows that it's hits x (chance of disabling) that actually matters. Bullets tend not to do a lot of damage, just leaving small holes. Even a direct hit on a fuel tank does nothing (unless it's a jap plane) because of self sealing fuel tanks. Meanwhile those 4 fifty cal hits did nothing, while that one cannon hit tore a great big hole somewhere.
>Meanwhile those 4 fifty cal hits did nothing, while that one cannon hit tore a great big hole somewhere.
Yes you're right no plane has ever been downed by 50 cals, they just pass harmlessly though the plane like pistol bullets through a zeppelin, after all there's nothing breakable besides fuel tanks between one side of the fuselage and the other, just like how bullets can't kill people because they just leave small holes and blood clots right?
Are you seriously going to try and argue that 4 .50 hits are worth a 20mm hit?
You moron, Brits went with 20mm on their Tempests
Soviets 20mm or more
Germans 20mm or more
The .50 cal was just cope and not much better than a .303.
Stupid comment, my point still stands and applies to your factoids as well.
They tried to get working cannons, failed, then we get the present situation where we cope by pretending 50 cals were good enough.
>US had dozens of fricking cannon designs from 20mm to 40mm on aircraft and ships
>duuurrrr the US couldn't figure out cannons but everyone else could
Mate they tried to get the Hispano to work but it's not the first or last time the US had massive problems with Hispanos. Basically the ordnance board were Black folk and didn't want to run the 20mm to fine tolerances since it was cannon artillery. Everyone else wasn't moronic and got them to work.
Also, everyone else had working torpedoes while your subs were trying to punch holes into ships with non exploding torpedoes.
the Germans had issues with their torps almost as long as the US did?
Don't reply to morons talking about torpedoes in a P-40 thread.
The Germans had issues but unfricked them at reasonable speed.
The mutts went "lalala you must be using them wrongly" for long.
Also the Germans had the issues earlier. So the Mutts could have solved this while they were sitting on their ass and israeliteing money from anyone actually trying to stop the Nazis.
Except that isn't cope.
Japanese fighters wouldn't even bother using their cannons against American fighters, which increased the armament disparity. An american plane would be carrying more weapons, with better accuracy, and more rounds of ammunition per weapon. Increasing armanent doesn't mean only increasing the mass of a single round.
Lackluster speed and manoeuvreability, sorry
50 cals are a simplified middle ground between the high-volume-low-firepower rifle bullet and the low-volume-high-firepower cannon shell
4x 50cals are shit though. it should be 6x at least as on the P-51, if not 8x
>the German bombers they faced were quite difficult to shoot down with the .30 cal guns
Utterly wrong
The Hurricane with 8x 0.303s was a premier purpose-designed bomber-killer and ended up with the most kills in the Battle of Britain consequently
>durrr fighter cannons same as naval cannons
>but not against fighters
Not true
The Hispano was favoured for ground attack for obvious reasons, but every fighter pilot wanted cannons PROVIDED they didn't jam, because a single shell on target could do massive damage to a fighter.
>the bombers were the reason for the cannons in the first place
Not true
If bombers had been the only targets of the war, MG Hurricanes would have raped them all day e'er day and nothing more need be said.
WTF does the Thach weave have anything to do with it? If anything, attempting a head-on attack favours the cannon-armed fighter especially in the ETO.
>as did the Hurricane which scored the vast majority of British air-to-air kills in the
Battle of Britain, primarily against bombers.
Spitfires had the lion's share of fighter kills. However, they were .303-armed Spifires; cannon variants came later.
>Lackluster speed and manoeuvreability, sorry
P-40 was fast and maneuverable at lower altitudes, dumbass.
In interviews with pilots one thing that really tends to stand out is how well the aircraft handled rough maintenance and abuse. On paper the parameters might have seemed mediocre but I suspect once you start factoring in speed losses due to wear-and-tear the various P-40 variants may not have suffered as much compared to opposition that was technically better on paper.
The Hispano 20mm that the USAAF, USN, and RAF all settled on was originally designed for a motorcannon mount in the fuselage, firing through the propeller hub in a relatively stable mounting. Getting it to work reliably without jams in a wing mount, where the entire structure is often flexing with aerodynamic forces, required some rework and redesign. The British came up with a solution of their own, but USAAF Ordnance board didn't think the British solution was worth pursuing for reasons that still aren't quite clear.
It's the warbird equivalent of 9mm vs. .45
>4x browning 50 cals should do the trick
for me it's 12x7.7s
The guy who designed the original Hurricane's 8-gun armament calculated that a 2-second burst would be enough to destroy any bomber. He "appropriated" an RAF bomber airframe to set up an experiment to prove his point. When caught, he was quickly brought on board the design team and they carried out the experiment, properly sanctioned this time. While loading the guns - at the time an unheard-of armament - the crew chief grumbled to him, "I'd like to know which fricker designed this", but he never let on who he was.
You are about three steps past complete idiot.
>I know nothing about [topic]
>Better post my midwit uninformed opinion about it
Higher volume of fire = higher hit probability. One reliable gun type = vastly easier maintenance and logistics. Enemy using primarily fighters and light bombers = you don't need a cannon to reliably bring them down.
Most nations that used fighters with two different ammo types in practice just chose one and stuck with it because of logistics and maintenance (Ex. RAF and .303s on the Spitfire). These are the things that you don't learn as adult manchildren in War Thunder. Logistics, reliability and ease of maintenance won the war, and the cheap "good enough" solution was the right one. Also the P-38 had a cannon and it conferred precisely zero advantages and was actually pretty shitty.
>Higher volume of fire = higher hit probability
This is the dumbest meme ever. The only thing that matters is how long it takes to produce a kill. You can equally say
Explosive shells = higher chance of lethality
You don't know anything about dog fighting. The Thach weave alone proves you wrong. Shortening the time to put rounds on a centered target matters.
Time on target to produce a kill is what matters. Doubling the rate of fire with half the chance of a kill is functionally the same thing.
No.
>You can equally say
>Explosive shells = higher chance of lethality
No you fricking can't you absolute drooling cretin. I'm not even going to waste time explaining why because it should be so fricking blatantly obvious. There's a reason that aircraft guns have literally always been tuned for higher rates of fire than their ground counterparts and why chainguns and rotary cannons with extreme fire output for a short given period of time are more commonly found on aircraft than other vehicles. You're not intellectually equipped to have this conversation.
That's why the .50 cal is the weapon of choice for airplane armament.
Oh wait it fricking isn't. Everyone stopped using .50s after WW2, only the Mutts continued with their cope guns. The navy stopped the moron train early and the air force later.
Why? Because a .50 sucks. QED
non sequitur
The entire autism over the .50 is just "American thing bad," as I suspected
How about an actual argument lmao?
Saying non sequitur is an argument, and an especially valid one.
It's a completely valid argument and not a non-sequitur, as you full well know. What's your explanation for the switch to cannons? Why did the Sabre start off with the 50 cal and switched to cannons to universal approval?
Nope, you are just repeating circular logic and ignoring posts that deflated these points already.
Nobody has forgotten that you resorted to OoooOoooOooooh only amUS used that gun homosexualry, you have made zero points.
>only the Mutts continued with their cope guns
Ah yes, I was about to bring that up. How does the F-86 factor into your argument? After all its armament was shockingly antiquated, literally the exact same as the P-51. It's weird then, that against the purely cannon-armed and thus by your standards, much more modern, Mig-15, it scored a minimum of 10:1 K:D, up to 15:1 K:D by more recent accounting. How do you account for this?
As a follow-up question, because your premise is that more explosives is better than higher rate-of-fire for ensuring kill probability, how do you account for the F-89 scorpion and other planes which used large numbers of powerful, but slow-firing, unguided rockets as their primary armament, which never once scored any hits on enemy aircraft to this date? How do you account for the fact that virtually every modern fighter has focused on increasing the rate of fire of its gun armament rather than its explosive power?
Third question, how did the US air force become the most powerful air force ever to exist? They were using inferior .50 cal armament after all. How did they thrash the clearly superior cannon-armed Luftwaffe so badly and so easily? Shouldn't their cannons have prevented that?
Riddle me this dumbass, how do you account for the cannon armed F-86 "beating" the machine-gun armed F-86?
Skillfull deflection, unfortunately, also not an argument. Again, two relatively equal (in terms of flight characteristics) fighters were pitted against each other, one was cannon armed and the other machine-gun armed. The one with .50 cals won overwhelmingly. Why is that?
>F-86 "beating" the machine-gun armed F-86?
Because the Sabre-Dog was developed to intercept Soviet bombers? As most cannon-armed aircraft of the period were? The same reason why many of them were armed with massed unguided rockets?
What is this nonsense?
I suggest you read up on Project Gun-Val.
I'll summarize it for you: cannon-armed Sabres were such a rousing success against Mig-15s that despite reliability issues they completely mogged the 50 cal and they started replacing them.
>Mig-15, it scored a minimum of 10:1 K:D, up to 15:1 K:D by more recent accounting. How do you account for this
Soviet pilots being shit see also Sea Fury and F4U being outnumbered by migs and still winning.
Lack of stopping power from.50 was a major complaint of Sabre pilots
1. You can have suboptimal armament and still be the better plane. Also the M3 was less shit than the M2 so you're comparing apples to oranges?
2. Is the ideal airplane armament now batteries of .22LR? Would have incredible rate of fire...
Since everyone who isn't a total drooling moron doesn't compare unguided rockets to actual A2A cannons, just a little explanation for you:
RoF is good because it means you fire more lead from same weight of gun.
The effect of the RoF is based on kinetic energy and explosive/inciendary payload.
Guess what, the 20mm as the bigger round has more kinetic energy and the explosive payload beats the big fat zero of the copegun.
So every single modern plane except some coping Americans, who still switched to 20mm and are using it even now, is armed with cannons not MGs cause the probability of hitting vitals with 2 small holes is much lower than one big hole and a boom. And the odds don't change if it's 20 small holes and 10 big holes and booms.
>Guess what, the 20mm as the bigger round has more kinetic energy and the explosive payload beats the big fat zero of the copegun
Yeah nobody's arguing that dumb-dumb, obviously if you can get 20mm PLUS greater rate of fire like in modern rotary autocannons, that's the best of both worlds. My point is that having a higher number of .50 cals vs a lower number of 20mm cannon in world war/cold war era fighter vs fighter combat was an acceptable trade-off and produced demonstrably superior results, which I have given multiple examples of, which you have been unable to refute. You do not seem to grasp the fundamental concept that different weapons are suited for different tasks. You also have not given sufficient evidence that a single explosive 20mm round will frick up a piston or early jet-engined fighter any better than multiple times that quantity of 50 caliber rounds, which again, have a higher chance of hitting at fighter engagement ranges.
>So every single modern plane except some coping Americans
Modern American planes are literally the standard of quality for the entire world, so if by "coping" you mean "leads the rest of the world by an entire fighter generation", or "has never lost an aerial war in its existence", or "has a bigger air national guard than most countries have proper air forces", you are correct.
The demonstrably superior results are everyone switching to 20mm or more, including your US airforce you suck their wiener so much?
Tell me why isn't the US airforce using 2 rotary .50s over one rotary 20mm using the same weight?
For some reason you coper think it's any different whether it's 2 .50 against one 20, 8 against 4 or 2 rotary against one. It isn't. 20mm mogs .50, plain and simple.
And that's against much faster targets than WW2 planes ever could be, disproving the copegungay argument that a .50 is better against fast targets.
>Tell me why isn't the US airforce using 2 rotary .50s over one rotary 20mm using the same weight?
Tell me why gunfights between aircraft aren't a thing in general anymore? You gonna move the goalposts even more or just admit that you made yourself look like a moron and are doing damage control?
So did the Americans remove guns from every jet?
No they didn't, they are still installing guns.
Which ones?
20mm. Keep coping you moron.
You will never own guns. You will never go to the range with your buddies and drink a few beers by a camp fire after. You don’t own a house, you probably don’t even own a truck.
.50 Cals were cool during WW2, they just worked. You will never be American, you can cope, seethe, mald, dilate or whatever but this will never change. You will always be obsessed with your betters.
>.50s were good against fighters because fighters are much smaller than bombers
>then why do modern fighters use 20mm against other fighters?
idk anon, its a mystery.
It had the same armament as the late P-51s which did just fine, it just had bad performance.
Sorry, but there is a big difference between an m2 browning, and an m3, they did not have the same armament
I don't think he meant late P-51s as in "Korea late P-51s", just that P-51s came later and had the same armament as the Hawk, i.e. 6 M2s, for the entirety of the war.
It is dope. Never gets the respect it deserves imo. It and the wildcat on the navy side were fricking workhorses and carried the brunt of US air combat early on in the war. And they both managed to stay relevant and serve till the very end too.
>out of my way peasants
I would post the Mk 24, but that would be cheating
Seafires were not good carrier planes.
What's the point of liking WW2 airplanes if they are all fated to crash at airshows anyway?
OP here,
Honestly, I just like the P-40 for it's design and esthetics. I know it wasn't the best, even during the early years of the war, but damn it looked cool with the right decals and paint. It screams 'Adventure'.
Why do all of the P-40 paintings show it with the radiator flaps wide open?
If they are flying low in some hot ass place, it makes sense.
kek, that one guy making stupid points because he thinks replying back with nonesense = winning an argument.
You're making a fool out of yourself. Calm down.
Nah. This is one hipster warplane that was actually truly shit.
Damn, all these b***hes are moaning and groaning over 50 cals
Only a limp-dicked redditor homosexual would go into a thread like this just to shit talk a plane. We all know the P-40 wasn't the ultimate god machine, it was 19fricking41 when it entered service, and it was made by a country that didn't have neighbors right next to them that wanted them dead. Just because it doesn't have 60 gazillion Black personblaster cannons, can't turn on a dime, and doesn't accelerate to the speed of light instantly doesn't mean it wasn't fricking neat.
This is a fricking idiotic argument. The .50 Cals were great, they were more than capable of shooting down any enemy aircraft and also gave a substantial ammunition capacity.
They were literally also fine even postwar on the F86s, which still enjoyed a lobsided ratio against Soviet aircraft armed with cannons.
The US also used several aircraft that featured cannon armaments, so this whole debate is moronic as frick.
can anyone tell me what the most successful anti-shipping aircraft on the German side of the war was? I think it's dive bombing stukas
Condor or Ju-88 most likely. Stuka had such sissy range it couldn't do much outside the Northern med
do you know if the ju88 did it's anti shipping as dive bombing or would this have been level bombing at high altitude?
Low level shallow dive bombing at least based on an account from a royal navy carrier pilot
>Low level shallow dive bombing
is that raf banter for skip bombing?
no
I THINK it's Stukas as well, because of Dunkirk and Crete mainly, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Focke Wulf Condor gets a surprise upset
americans liked 20mm hispanos enough to put them on their corsairs
to be honest the entire 'who made the best guns' debate is dumb as frick because it really did not affect who got shot down at all
testicle
bump
Some nice planes in this thread.
Would be a shame... if something were to happen to them.
>seems a tad smoky in here lemme open a winACK
>cucked out of high altitude P-40s because the US government was moronic, didn't realize that every single aircraft company around would pay 5 newborns a piece for 2-stage supercharged merlins and restricted them to P-51s only
Sorry I’m late to the thread, boys. I had to unfold my wings 🙂
Still my favorite, even if that's just because I grew up playing combat flight sim 2.
>dogshit manufacturing
>dogshit pilots
>best performing and looking fighter design of WW2
She deserved better
Why does nobody ever give the Japs credit for the Ki-84 Hayate? Given the enormous strain that the industry was under it's really quite impressive that they managed to build a fighter in significant numbers which was competitive or even better than late-war allied piston engines fighters, and performed well enough to be a consistently formidable threat to the B-29 raids. It had a much greater anti-bomber impact than, say, the handful of Me-262s that Germany farted out towards the end. Obviously, the performance of any individual Ki-84 was heavily dependent on material availability and fuel quality but it was a damn good design all the same.
I think it was their best fighter, if i remember they had a lot of trouble with the engines cutting out mid flight but that was thanks to being a rush job
its also very very pretty
>ka-CHUNK
>…
>ka-CHUNK
>…
>ka-CHUNK
daka daka daka
i want to go back to when War Thunder was about WW2 planes and not gay thermal vision 2023 tank battles
ye good ol days
when you could fly bombers without being shot down by a Magic II missile
also Typhoon/Tempest is forever my planefu
Patrician taste in aircraft, anon.
his daughter will marry a what
A nice gentleman 🙂
What's wrong with Nigel? He's polite, handsome, young man.
Typhoon was dogshit and just slightly above the Me-210. Pilots despised it, its engine was unreliable, and it was badly designed to the point where more were lost from technical malfunctions than through combat for the first year of its service life, especially the tail which had a nasty habit of just falling right the frick off the plane.
Tempest was much, much improved and admittedly pretty rad looking, but still didn't really do anything the P-47 couldn't do better.
We don't talk about the plane that came before the Hornisse.
This thread has been a fun read. Is there any podcast/youtube channel on WW2 fighters you guys recommend? Everything I find tends to be History Channel level of knowledge
Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles.
real plen hours
Smiles in Galland.
Met an old pilot who flew those. He lamented about how they were completely outdated a the outset of the war, but loved how they handled. The only time he wasn't too thrilled about flying was when anything with a better climb rate was around. Shared how the ground crew needed to keep wet burlap sacks, bedsheets, or any scrap fabrics on the canopy plastics...they warped, and discolored if left in the sun, or even in severe heat for a few hours.
what a photo
Anyone got source on this?
Probably from a movie production since it's a T6 Texan
closer air support
very close
i just think its really neat
>The P-40 War/Kittyhawk was fricking dope.
Twice as dope.