Yak-9T - incredible firepower (or maybe incredible tank's lack of armor?)

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by gaunt1

I dunno. That 140mm sounds unbelievable to me. If you check the link about modern ammunition, you can see that such performance was only possible with APFSDS munition (Bofors). Also, the much larger ZIS-2 AT gun was capable of penetrating 145mm armor @ 500m, with tungsten ammo.

Yes, it sounds "fishy" to me, too. But even if it were only 70mm, it should still be barely capable of penetrating the 30mm deck armour at 45°/300m.

Originally Posted by gaunt1

I read somewhere that the reason why the Gemans desperately tried to mount the PaK40 on aircraft was because the BK 3.7 was totally useless against IS-2 and ISU-152 tanks, both with 30mm top armor.

When attacking those tanks from the sides (nice big target, 90° makes shots very likely to acheive results) which would very likely work against T34s, the result would be disappointing. And even if attacked in a 45° dive from above, there would be the problem of ammo disintegrating/bouncing off and also ammo that gets through would lost a real lot of its energy and thus be less likley to do damage.

So a real world pilot firing 30 shots at IS-2, would achieve 6 hits, of these 3 disintegrate, 2 do no damage, and 1 kills an IS-2, while an IL-2 online pilot firing 30 shots at IS-2s gets 15 hits, and all of them kill their target.

Originally Posted by gaunt1

From russianammo.org:

From the same site:
"The AP shells were belt fed and could penetrate 40mm up to an angle of 45°;"
That would make the NS-37 capable of defeating the Tiger Is armor, but not the Tiger IIs armor, at least not regularly.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

My point was that some types of 20 mm ammo could hypothetically penetrate the top armor of a PzKw or even a Tiger if fired at very close range at just the right angle. But, I think it's quite unlikely and would require a very aggressive, very skilled on-line pilot.

Pz3/4, can be done -with 20mm Hispano. Only needs a high risk approach, 45°+ dive -with lots of training possibly doable on a regular basis.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

More likely, I think that the armor values for certain late war AFV are crocked, or IL2 overstates penetrating ability of 20mm guns vs. armor, or both.

Nah, I think they are fine. Try shooting up Panzer3/4 tanks with anything 20mm besides Hispanos, there is no fun in that -but maybe I'm not good enough as a pilot.