UP3 has them.

Best german AT weapon, the AB500.

Not easy to deploy although, if too high it spreads too much, too low, it will not open and explode harmlessly on the ground. You could take the four tanks of a formation with one single drop, even KV's.

AB250 works too, but it covers a lesser area.

AB1000 is useless in game, as it is incendiary, and does really very low damage.

Originally, the AB's started to be useful, with a correction in UP. I haven't tried them in 4.11 yet. They are not as destructive as PTAB's, but not as useless as they were in the original version.

Second best, the StukaG. On the modded version, I just opted to modify the historically correct thickness of the KV1 of 40mm, to 35mm to maintain the rest of the game balance.

MK103 is very good against softer tanks, but a T34 is somewhat exaggeratedly tough against this canon. Basically as posted before, because of the simplified damage model of tanks.

I've been wanting the Panzerblitz for years :) I think they were equipped on the FW190F-9 model if I'm not mistaken?

I destroyed two of those with Mk103 gondollas in FW in one sortie.
But surely they aren't softies, I attacked them from rear (they were in column).

:( I play stock game 411.... modded stuff aren't my cup of tea any more.:-|

Not sure mate, but with them Fockes would be even more vile they they already are.:-P

I find the cannon-Stuka isn't so terribly hard to use. I like to set convergence at 1000m (So I don't have to get too close), dive in at 45 degrees (any lower, and I always tend to fly into the ground).

Although it's slow, it's also hard to spot at low level, so if you're sneaky, you can survive.

I recall on an a closed pit server some years ago that I was flying a Fw-190F at no more than 100 m AGL and I was even escorted by some spitfire after I dumped my bombs and blew up their artillery :shock::grin:

The AB's were mostly meant for ground troops and installations, I think. Every time you see a tank in war footage, there are at least a few dozen infantry sitting on it, and running behind it and to its flanks. Soldiers also had to eat and sleep on the go, so I imagine it would be possible to find soup lines or camps with tents (maybe not in the open, but hey, the Eastern front had a lot of steppe). Obviously, this isn't modeled in Il-2 (the closest thing is the "field HQ" target in DGEN which has staff cars, and radio trucks parked in a city or treeline).

Anyway, Il-2 does have frightened truck drivers, so maybe these models can be repainted to look like soldiers, and spawn as a group to follow around tanks and trucks, or have their own way-points etc. It's already possible to kill fleeing drivers, so this shouldn't affect "gore" considerations.

With 4.11 you can adjust the time that AB's will start to fragment. You can practice with time settings and altitude to get the best results.

I set frag time to 0 , this way it fragments really quickly:grin: which is useful as I like to approach very fast in shallow dive at low altitude as I find my hit ratio to be stellar in comparison to any other approach.

Nope.

AB's were just cases to drop safely a lot of different ordnance's.

The first being the butterfly bombs,(represented on AB250, a terror weapon dropped over britain) cluster of anti personnel SC types, Anti tank bomblets, (represented on AB500), incendiary (AB1000)

Before these AB cases were available, the pilots have the scary job of carrying a lot of bomblets with no time fuses, and already armed on their belly. (actually, this is the case of PTAB's)

Yes, you can destroy them from the rear, but actually in RL, they penetrated even the turret sides, although, the pilots don't realize it, so they tended to favor the bombs against this canon, but infantry reports stated that they were quite deadly on T34's turret, in the battle of Kharkov 1942.