50 cal lethality .......

[Vermillion]

Yeah Tilt, I was able to obtain data on how much energy is contain per gram of TNT (any solid data on explosives is DAMN hard to get, understably so) and then was able to find how many grams of explosives per shell, and do the calculation that way. There were some assumptions in the calculations, but it made for a decent "rule of thumb" type of comparison.  I could do it much better now, if I ever got the energy to put all that work back into the project.

However, the debate comes down to... "how much of that energy is applied to the airframe" which is again an extremely complicated issue that can't be answered without very high end explosion simulation software (which people outside the industry typically do not have access too).

Again it was useful for comparing the potential destructiveness of cannon shells versus other cannon shells, but was essentially useless in a cannon vs MG comparison.  The explosive content of the cannon shell just over dominates the MG.  Just like the Kinetic energy only comparison made the cannons look bad in the same comparison.

[hazed-]

I think for the purposes of a 'game' which after all is the main reason we want to know the rough idea of lethality, it should suffice to work out what a small charge of high explosives would do to an aliminium/steel frame.I would be acceptable to calculate a kenetic energy and then Add a numerical amount damage of damage from a scale.

say 10 grams causes 20 damage
then 20 would cause 40 etc

you then add the amount for each type of shell. ie if hexogen is slightly more powerfull than normal tnt then add a tiny bit more.

if no info is available on the comparitive destructiveness of one type of HE over another then just use the weight of HE in each bullet as a guide and agree on how much damage is done per gram.

basically if there is no information available for explosives then surely it would be ok to just make a guesstimate rather than ignore the effects of HE?.

Id rather have a slightly flawed explosive round model than one which has no consideration for it at all personally.Im sure HTC must have added some
thing to the model ?

[Widewing]

Originally posted by 214thCavalier
Also shows how badly undergunned the early RAF planes ie hurri and spit were.

Eight .30  = 13.6

Two  .50  = 12.8

Four  .50  = 25.6

Six  .50  = 38.4

The fact that just 2 .50's are nearly the match of 8 .30's says it all.

Recently, during the Norway scenario in the CT, I used the SBD as a fighter, rather than the Hurricane I. Those two .50 cal. MGs proved considerably more effective than the eight .303 Brownings. Combined with the superior maneuverability of the SBD, it proved to be way too much for the 109E and 110C to handle in a turn fight. Instead of raining an endless barrage of .303, a few short bursts of .50 cal was sufficient to kill a 109.

So, in terms of Hurricane to SBD guns (both cowling mounted with the correspondingly tight concentration), the two .50 cal. guns were significantly more effective, especially at ranges in excess of 500 yards.

My regards,

Widewing

[Vermillion]

Hazed, in AH the explosive power of cannons shells is included.  Is it technically exactly correct? Probably not, but I think it works quite well for our purposes.

[Ring]

this is a 109e4's load out

Aircraft Weapon Ammunition Muzzle Projectile Energy at
    Type Velocity Mass MV
      (m/s) (grams) (joules)
GERMAN          
Messerschmitt BF 109E-4
MG 17
7.92mm S.m.K. 785 11.6 3,574 j
    7.92mm S.m.K.L. (tracer) 830mv 10.3g 3,548 j
  MG FF/M
20mm AP 585mv 115.0g 19,678j
    20mm HEI with 3.6g PETN 585mv 115.0g 40,774j
    20mm Minengeschoss with 20g PETN 718mv 92.0g 140,914 j



BTW PETN is alot more powerfull then TNT its VARY close to pure nitro..

[Wotan]

the mgff we have in ah arent Minengeschoss. Theres no way.

The e4 should have mgff/m the e3 had  mgff.

I dunno about other "mine" rounds, the 30mm seems lethal enough but the mgff on the e4 and 110 and a5 arent mgff/m.

[Vermillion]

BTW PETN is alot more powerfull then TNT its VARY close to pure nitro

Not true according to my sources.  PETN produces approximately 10% more energy per unit of mass than TNT.  And thats according to an engineer I know that works in the armament industry specializing in the manufacture and demanufacture of machine gun and light cannon shells.

[Shiva]

I think for the purposes of a 'game' which after all is the main reason we want to know the rough idea of lethality, it should suffice to work out what a small charge of high explosives would do to an aliminium/steel frame.I would be acceptable to calculate a kenetic energy and then Add a numerical amount damage of damage from a scale.

say 10 grams causes 20 damage
then 20 would cause 40 etc

Doubling the explosive weight doubles the amount of energy produced by the charge, but the blast effect goes up much more slowly, so you don't get double the explosive effect; IIRC, the blast effect goes up as the cube root of the explosive charge.

[HFMudd]

Hazed, in AH the explosive power of cannons shells is included. Is it technically exactly correct? Probably not, but I think it works quite well for our purposes.

I don't think it work well anymore and here is my reasoning:

From my experience in the game and bits of info HTC has posted from time to time is seems as if each round has a set amount of damage it does to an unarmored surface.  The amount is calculated from the rounds kinetic energy and explosive energy.  This works pretty well for fighters since they have very little armor to worry about but begins to break down quickly for other objects.

By way of example, let's examine the effects of an Ostwind burst on your newly perk purchased (perkchased?) Tiger Tank.  Against the armoured front hull the 37 HE does nothing because HTC has coded the game is such a way that HE has little effect on armor.  But what if the gun itself is hit?  The gun is not armored, it is a big honking chunk of high grade well sloped steel, but it is not armored as such.  This means that the HE is effective against the hitpoints of gun itself.  A few rounds of 37mm HE later and your 88 is out of comission.  Realistic?  I think not.

Another example is our ability to strafe a building to death with the 2xMG on a Val.  It takes a few passes, but it works.

Another example is CV damage.  In theory AH should allow me to put together a Hurri I mission in which I and a bunch of like minded goofballs strafe a CV to death with just the .303's.  (And yes, I know that the M. A.'s strafed a destoyer to death with .50's but I would argue that was a fluke in which a .50 round somehow found its way to something that went BOOM rather than the combined damage done by all the .50's.  See the difference?)

In short, once the game expanded beyond "fragile" fighters to including AFV's, IL-2's and Destroyers, the simple damage model of applying X amount of damage to Y hitpoints starts to show its weakness.

(Someone please correct me if I am incorrect here as I don't want to spew wrong information about how AH's damage model works.)

[hazed-]

Originally posted by HFMudd

I don't think it work well anymore and here is my reasoning:

From my experience in the game and bits of info HTC has posted from time to time is seems as if each round has a set amount of damage it does to an unarmored surface.  The amount is calculated from the rounds kinetic energy and explosive energy.  This works pretty well for fighters since they have very little armor to worry about but begins to break down quickly for other objects.

By way of example, let's examine the effects of an Ostwind burst on your newly perk purchased (perkchased?) Tiger Tank.  Against the armoured front hull the 37 HE does nothing because HTC has coded the game is such a way that HE has little effect on armor.  But what if the gun itself is hit?  The gun is not armored, it is a big honking chunk of high grade well sloped steel, but it is not armored as such.  This means that the HE is effective against the hitpoints of gun itself.  A few rounds of 37mm HE later and your 88 is out of comission.  Realistic?  I think not.

Another example is our ability to strafe a building to death with the 2xMG on a Val.  It takes a few passes, but it works.

Another example is CV damage.  In theory AH should allow me to put together a Hurri I mission in which I and a bunch of like minded goofballs strafe a CV to death with just the .303's.  (And yes, I know that the M. A.'s strafed a destoyer to death with .50's but I would argue that was a fluke in which a .50 round somehow found its way to something that went BOOM rather than the combined damage done by all the .50's.  See the difference?)

In short, once the game expanded beyond "fragile" fighters to including AFV's, IL-2's and Destroyers, the simple damage model of applying X amount of damage to Y hitpoints starts to show its weakness.

(Someone please correct me if I am incorrect here as I don't want to spew wrong information about how AH's damage model works.)

er I think you need to do some tests.

303s would indeed shoot a building but it would take literally thousands and thousands of rounds.
AH has a cumalative model which works ok for a GAME for destroying buildings but is hardly realistic i agree

If you go test offlinf with various guns you will find something like 3000 30 cals kills a hanger 800 or 900 20mm does the job too.

now if you think about it most non-hard targets like prefab hangers and fuel and ammo bunkers would indeed be destroyed by this sort of fire BUT a concrete hardened bunker or hanger would shrug off fire no matter how many shots hit it.

This is where the armour model on AH fails it seems to me.If you fire enough shots of small caliber like 50cals etc (ie 12.7mm) you will kill a vehicle even if it has armour which could not be penetrated by that gun. Instead of each bullet failing to penetrate and in effect all bouncing off AH seems to add the rounds up until a certain target number is reached then boom goes your tank.

if you ask me after reading various posts in the past concerning thhe penetrating power of the various guns vrs the thickness of armour they could actually get through we should be almost impregnble in the tiger when it arrives. The thickness of the armour is unbelievable!

Hull front                              100mm (3.94in) @ 24dgrees
Hull side (upper)                    80mm (3.15in)   @ 0 degrees
Hull side (lower)                     60mm (2.36in)   @ 0 degrees
Hull rear                                 80mm (3.15in)   @ 8 degrees
Hull top                                  25mm (0.98in)   @ 90 degrees
Hull bottom                            25mm (0.98in)   @ 90 degrees
Turret front                            100mm (3.94in) @ 8 degrees
Gun mantlet                           120mm (4.72in) @ 0 degrees
Turret sides                            80mm (3.15in)   @ 0 degrees
Turret rear                             80mm (3.15in)   @ 0 degrees
Turret top                              25mm (0.98in later 40-45mm (1.57-1.77in) @ 81-90 degrees

the weakest point is still 25mm which might not sound like much but its still considerable.

[HFMudd]

303s would indeed shoot a building but it would take literally thousands and thousands of rounds.

I have, but it was an imperfect test.  Shorty after the Val was introduced I and about five other pilots in Vals *strafed* a town flat in the CT.  Granted that in the CT the buildings may have been set to lower value than in the MA but the mg's still did the trick.  (At the time of my previous posting I had more or less forgotten it was done in the CT.  My bad.)

Instead of each bullet failing to penetrate and in effect all bouncing off AH seems to add the rounds up until a certain target number is reached then boom goes your tank.

On this we agree.

[Pongo]

Exaclty Hazed. Come up with a scenario where 50 cal mg fire can penetrate 25mm or face hardened armour...
It cannot.

It would be far more realistic to just make medium tanks invulnerable to 50 cal in AH then what we have. They were in effect invulnerable in ww2. Think of the code we would save...

as to the tiger. I wish they had implemented the later production tiger 1 so that it could have an anti aircraft Mg.

[whgates3]

Originally posted by Shiva

Doubling the explosive weight doubles the amount of energy produced by the charge, but the blast effect goes up much more slowly, so you don't get double the explosive effect; IIRC, the blast effect goes up as the cube root of the explosive charge.

i was typing up a simlar post when i realised that a cannon shell is exploding in a 3-D object (in the A/C, if explosion is after penetration), where double the explosive power would double the damage (which is to say the radius of equal explosion would increase by ~26%, the volume inside that radius is double the previous volume), or on the surface of an A/C (if exploding on contact), a 2-D surface, where doubling the explosive would increase the damage to the surface area by ~41.4%, but the explosion would almost definitely penetrate the thin skin of the A/C and in fact do double damage (i think)

also, the F4U-4b, which may have been in WWII (obvioulsy it is not in AH), used the M3 20mm cannon.  i dont know of any [other] planes that actually carried the M3 operationally in WWII. anyone know any planes that carried the M3 into WWII combat?

[hazed-]

punt jus to see if we are correct about this modeling.

does it indeed work this way? do the rounds get added together in effect making armour a sort of hit point type armour? the more its hit the weaker it gets? or are we wrong for assuming this is how it is?

It would certainly explain the seemingly superior tank killing ability of 50cals as its far easier to hit with them and each hit sprite is many rounds I think so it would make it quite easy to pile on the lead in this way.

using the mg151 20mm you have a slower rate of fire and less rounds per hit sprite and so if this modeling is right it would explain their seemingly poor performance vs armour.

maybe this is the whole problem behind the strange feeling that the LW guns are so much less effective. They are probably accurately done but the way the game interprets hits might throw off the feeling of effectiveness?

[hazed-]

punt jus to see if we are correct about this modeling.

does it indeed work this way? do the rounds get added together in effect making armour a sort of hit point type armour? the more its hit the weaker it gets? or are we wrong for assuming this is how it is?

It would certainly explain the seemingly superior tank killing ability of 50cals as its far easier to hit with them and each hit sprite is many rounds I think so it would make it quite easy to pile on the lead in this way.

using the mg151 20mm you have a slower rate of fire and less rounds per hit sprite and so if this modeling is right it would explain their seemingly poor performance vs armour.

maybe this is the whole problem behind the strange feeling that the LW guns are so much less effective. They are probably accurately done but the way the game interprets hits might throw off the feeling of effectiveness?