Then switched to my French Hellcat, with a spaded plane but much lower quality crew. The guns reached overheat around 10 seconds of sustained firing, and didn't completely jam until about 20 seconds, at which point I'd expended half my ammo load. First my A-20G, with spaded plane and level 75 crew. That's per round! If you are firing 500 rounds in quick succession, it's highly likely you'll jam a gun regardless of crew skill.ДЇor the sake of science I did some really quick tests. On a maxed crew, with Ace qualification, you only get a 33% increase in the CHANCE to prevent a jam or an overheat. Your crew level certainly factors into the length of time you can fire the guns without jamming, but it's not a colossal difference. All an American player needs, is to get you in his sights for a couple seconds and he can hit you with 20-30 rounds (most American fighters have 6-8 guns) and each one hits like a ton of bricks and has a 1 in 5 chance of setting on fire. APВ rounds will rip through your lightly armored plane, wrecking control surfaces. They do significant damage whether they set you on fire or not. That's per bullet by the way.50's aren't small rounds. They have almost double the damage drop off of otherВ nations, and each incendiary round has something like a 20% chance to cause a fire.

The big difference between these guns, is simply the damage potential.50 cals are currently over performing drastically. 50 cals are just as likely to jam as other high rate of fire machine guns, like Russian ShKAS or Grerman MG 17's. These have reasonable fire rates for big cannons, but fire off any more than 2-3 shots in quick succession and your accuracy goes out the window and you'll be more likely to get a jam. For example, Russian 45mm's or Japanese 57mm. The higherВ the rate of fire a gun has in WT, the higher chance you'll jam it if you just hold the fire button down for extended periods (Say more than a 2 second burst) This also applies to the size of guns as well. Your first burst will be on target, but over time the shots will start to wander all over the place. In game, the longer you fire, the higher the chance of jam occurs. The longer you hold the trigger down, the more rounds you are spewing out at a high velocity, jostling your feed system and the bullets in it. Recoil is an issue with the machine guns just the same as it is with cannons, to a lesser degree. Heat buildup will cause problems and of course firing through all your ammo in one burst is never a good idea. Firing a 7 second burst with a large caliber cannon will wreak havoc on the feed system and the shells. These weapons cause extreme amounts of recoil, which will cause all kinds of mechanical issues. 50 caliber machine gun, those are freaking huge! Now imagine a scaled up version of that. Think about it this way, 37mm or 20mm cannons are not small.

From what I understand, historically, the Americans had issues getting the AN/M2 cannons to work properly and were prone to malfunctions and jamming.

Why do guns jam