Is the Italian 12.7mm bad?

[MajinCena]

Umm, hello. I have been recently playing Italy and noticed all the Italian planes that have 12.7mm machinegun (RE-2005, MC 200, etc.) have weak damage against other planes while the comparing it to the godblessed All-American 12.7mm it pierces crap like piercing pencils on a piece of paper.

I would like to see community members' opinion on the Armament to see if my hunch is actually true or is a fallacy.

EDIT: fixed couple of grammar and spelling issues

[Illusionyary]

Yes, Breda SAFAT is absolutely garbage when compared to American 12.7s. Best way to use them is to get as close as possible (under 500m) and use air targets or tracer belts. You'll get a surprisingly amount of fires.

[halolo39]

not as bad years ago but they are quite weak compared to the 50cal and the russian berezin

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

It`s very slow velocity and damage is inconsistent as well.

[Dakota]

The italian 12.7 is a smaller and lower velocity round.

US 12.7 is 99mm long and goes at 890m/s, the Italian 12.7 is 81mm long and goes at 765m/s. If we consider the kinetic energy formula is 0.5*mass*(velocity*velocity) we can see this difference in speed is a massive loss of energy along with also having around 80% of the mass.

[Blitzkrieg Wulf]

Originally posted by ExpectedlyUnexpected:

I would like to see community members' opinion on the Armament to see if my hunch is actually true or is a fallacy.

The commonly found .50 caliber MG's used by US planes fire the .50 BMG, 12,7x99.
The commonly found Italian (And, Japanese) .50 Caliber MG's fire 12,7x81SR.

The case length alone should provide infos to suggest there is a power discrepancy between the two, even if the bullet diameter is the same. (A bit like 10mm Auto and .40 S&W).

Another one that might surprise you is the German MG131. Sure- it's a 13mm machine gun, but it's 13x64B. It was designed to more closely mimic the ballistic trajectory (~750m/s) of the MG151/20 (~700m/s) so that pilots did not have to try and hit with either their machine guns, or their cannons, they could then hit with both. The regular 7,92mm guns had a velocity of closer to 900m/s.


It gets a bit more involved that Italians/Japanese used HE in their ,50 caliber ammunition belts, and US (Primarily, there were experiments..) did not. This would not help in armor penetration, but should to some amount bridge the power gap between .50BMG and Japan/Italy .50 when used against lightly armored aircraft.


When looking at the "big picture", US .50 caliber MG's are very hard to beat, when taking into account kinetic power per second (Velocity, bullet weight, ROF), ammo count available on most planes, and how long you can "hose" an enemy down with them.

TL;DR, your "hunch" is more or less spot on.


Edit: And to answer your title question- "Yes and no".
- They're lower velocity, you're not going to have as many of them as US planes tend to have M2's. So, you're not going to be beating the snot out of anybody from one and a half kilometers away. I would say their "usable" range is at or less than 600 meters. Past that, it's a total crapshoot. Under 600 meters they tend to (in my experience) work pretty well. But again- still in a plane-to-plane application. Not against lightly armored ground units.

[Futuristic Hexagon]

Originally posted by ExpectedlyUnexpected:

Umm, hello. I have been recently playing Italy and noticed all the Italian planes that have 12.7mm machinegun (RE-2005, MC 200, etc.) have weak damage against other planes while the comparing it to the godblessed All-American 12.7mm it pierces crap like piercing pencils on a piece of paper.

I would like to see community members' opinion on the Armament to see if my hunch is actually true or is a fallacy.

EDIT: fixed couple of grammar and spelling issues

For Air RB, having flown these quite a bit and taken the time to understand their usage in A2A combat. They're definetly deadly, but not in the same way they are with US 50 cal.

For the Italian 12.7mm, use the Air belt with IAI belts. These sort of act like a small HE round and can do quite well. With that said, they are highly ineffective in distances greater than 500m. So your goal will be to not engage until you're within 400m, even better, 300m. At those distances, the Breda SAFATs will be pretty good at causing damage to other fighters, though with bombers it might take some careful work, but it's doable if you know how to approach the enemy, was able to take out an A-20G that way using a CR.42, and that was shortly before the Breda SAFATs got buffed and these were still in the German tree. I guess the best way to think about it is more of a really small cannon than an MG in that case.

With that said, the Swedish tree has their own take on the Italian planes in Tier 1 (J11, J20), with their own set of ammo for their planes that is a little different than the Italian ammo. These planes will not have the all holy IAI round that makes the Italian MG something serious to consider as an opponent, and you will notice you will be using far more rounds taking down an opponent than with the Italian belts.