This squares with my attempts at air gunnery in IL2 - and that's ignoring all the other factors that make real gunnery difficult.

Citing that book you mentioned, I think that these are the "money quotes," at least for U.S. bomber turrets equipped with 0.50 caliber MG.

"In reply to those who felt that firing should begin at a range of 1,200 yards, although the aircraft was not in a position to make an attack, he claimed that tests conducted at the University of New Mexico and reports from theaters of action indicated that the .50-caliber machine gun could not be fired accurately at a distance beyond 600 yards. It was also pointed out that reports and experiments indicated that computing sights then in use on B-17's and B-24's were not accurate under combat conditions. It was believed by some, however, that the General Electric Computing Sight used on the B-29 incorporated "all known principles and should give very accurate results."

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/...-4.html#page66

Also:

"during 1942 gunnery students had to became familiar with six different types of iron ring sights and four varieties of optical sights." The same authority has given the following excellent description of the relative speed system of sighting, which was the first scientific system:

The gunner was taught to use the following sequence of action in sightings: (1) recognize the enemy ship, (2) estimate the range with 600 yards as the critical distance for opening fire, (3) estimate the difference in speed between his ship and the enemy ship by holding the sight stationary for one second, (4) compute the lead according to a definite table which he had memorized, and (5) open fire. Under combat conditions there was usually no target in sight by the time the student had gone through this involved system of computing the lead."

"Another experiment was the use of tracer as an aid to sighting. This had been tried during World War I, but had been abandoned because it gave the gunner the impression he was hitting the target when he was not, and because flight speeds were then slow enough to allow the use of an alternative system of sighting. It was believed, however, that the increased flight speeds during the present war made its use practicable, provided it was used in conjunction with other sighting systems."

"Approximately one year after this time Headquarters AAF indicated to the Commanding General of the Fourth Air Force that not more than 10 per cent of the ammunition used by an aerial gunner would be loaded with tracer and that it should be fired during the final training phase. It was claimed that when gunners resorted to tracer they depended upon it entirely,and to the complete neglect of their gun sights. After students were proficient as a result of training, they might explore the possibilities and proper use of tracer."

"Tests at the Kingman Army Air Field in the fall of 1943 suggested in a practical way the defects in tracer firing. One of these tests involved the use of an AT-23 for towing a target at high speed and a B-17 for air-to-air firing against the target. The tam plane did all of the maneuvering. The experiment produced poor results, for "in every case the individual whose tracer appeared to be piercing the target and who might be considered to have high scores received no hits on the target, and in every ease the individuals whose tracer appeared not to pierce the target were in all cases the individuals who received hits on the target."

"It is claimed that tracer, if its illusion is controlled, has distinct advantages. It makes possible visual checking of harmonization of guns and sights, and indicates whether there is proper lead in deflection shooting. However, the student "must realize that he sees the light, not the bullet; and he must realize that light does not give the same effect of distance as a bullet. For example, a bullet half the size of another bullet is twice as far away. But a light half the size of another equal light, is not twice as far away; in fact, when it is twice as far away, it is only a quarter the size of the other." (Emphasis mine)

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/...AFHS-31-4.html


So, add to all the other woes of realistic gunnery the fact that tracers produce an optical illusion that makes the gunner think that he has proper lead on his target when he does not!

And, mind you, this is 1944. By then, the U.S. had been at war for about 2 years and they'd produced whole classes of gunners whose training was useless. (This squares with 8th Air Force doctrine of immediately retraining gunners who were direct from training schools in the States. I thought that this was just "advanced training," but it might be that the guys in the 8th Air Force actually had a clue that gunnery schools were teaching their students incorrect methods of engaging targets.)

One possible fix for TD is to make Rookie gunners basically useless and Average gunners only slightly useful. Only Veteran or Ace gunners should be anything like a threat.

Good empirical data here (reminiscences by veterans):

http://forum.armyairforces.com/Lared...43-m50398.aspx

Takeaway:

Gunners were mostly trained to deal with fighters attacking via "pursuit curves" (e.g., rear and rear beam attacks), which might account for the greater number of victories claimed by U.S. tailgunners and top gunners.

2% hits vs. a sleeve target towed was considered acceptable air-to-air gunnery standard.

Gunners were trained to shoot no more than 20 round bursts. Guns could be damaged by longer bursts, or "cook-off" could result in unwanted firing which might hit friendly aircraft.

Bullets could be deflected by aircraft slipstream (further reducing accuracy for anything but tail guns fired directly to the rear).

In solo flight, I attacked a formation of two flights of four rookie G4M each from dead 6, 10 times, in an F6F-3. I tried to maintain a position at their 6 at a distance between 500 and 700 m. I shot down 20, and got hit exactly 8 times, 3 times one flight, once in five flights, not at all in four flights. One of the hits was a 20mm hit, the rest came from the light machine guns. I always returned to base no problem.

To sum it up, the gunners were basically useless.
---
Got curious about how gunners will do when faced with proper tactics - so I engaged the same two flights in head on passes and shot down all eight of them without getting hit at all. Will probably not always work like that, but four kills for every hit received in return appears conservative.

I don't know what's "too good" about that abysmal performance.

But, on the other hand, you were hanging out at 500-700 meters rather than getting any closer.

While I don't know what the Japanese gunnery doctrine was, or what they considered the effective range for machine guns/20 mm cannons to be for aerial gunnery, consider that USAAF doctrine held that 0.50 caliber MG were basically useless beyond 600 yards (~550 m).

So, that actually means that the "rookie" AI might have been pretty good.

A slightly more realistic scenario to test gunnery skill would be to fly a typical "pursuit curve" coming in from 2-4 or 8-10 o'clock high initially, making a diving turn as the bomber flies straight and level to attack from 5-7 o'clock level or high, and then continuing the dive beneath the bomber to the other side. On the the exit, drop at least 300 meters below the bomber, gain speed to get ahead of it bomber, zoom climb to gain altitude and repeat the attack. That would test the AI gunners' ability to hit an attacker traveling in two three dimensions and at very different ranges.

But, to test your theory about effectiveness of rookie AI gunnery, I set up a QMB mission - Midway map, 5000 meters altitude, no advantage, no situation, 2 flights of 4 Rookie G4M1 vs. 1 Ace F6F-3. 10 different flights. Autopilot for the F6F.

In sortie, the Hellcat got lucky and/or used good tactics and got 5 Betties before he broke off the attack. That was the exception, however.

In the other 9 sorties, despite jinking around as he bored in from the stern (obviously, in IL2 AI fixed gunnery school, they don't teach pilots beam or head-on attacks, nor diving attacks, against bombers), he ate a significant amount of lead while shooting down a maximum of 1 Betty per mission.

In 2 sorties he took enough damage to the engine or fuel tanks that his engine stopped in the air. In one, he burst into flames. In the other 6 sorties, he suffered enough engine or wing damage and fuel leaks to the point where he couldn't keep up with the bomber formation or felt the need to RTB.

NOT a realistic outcome, to say the least, if only due to the amazingly Stoopid Hellcat tactics.

And, while the rookie Japanese gunners weren't exactly wielding Radar-Guided Blaster Cannons of Death like their Ace counterparts, their gunnery was quite effective even at ranges well beyond 150 meters.

I hate to say it, since TD has done so much to improve AI behavior, but at least in this case the gunners ARE still too accurate, and fighter tactics vs. bombers, even for Ace AI, would get you washed out of fighter training.

Just for fun, I did a variation on the scenario above.

QMB Midway map, 5000 meters, no advantage, no situation, 1 Ace G4M1 vs. 1 Ace F6F-3. Autopilot for the F6F, 10 sorties.

In EVERY sortie, the Hellcat did the same damned thing. 1) Fly past the Betty with about 300 meters of altitude and 1,000 meters of separation. 2) Split S about 1,500 meters behind the Betty. 3) Chase the Betty to within ~200 meters, SOMETIMES NOT EVEN SHOOTING!

If the Hellcat didn't shoot on its first pass, it then:

4) Climbed directly over the Betty to about 1,000 meters above. 5) Slowed down until it was about 1,500 meters behind the Betty. 6) Repeat steps 3 & 4 until Betty turns left (always left), watching the tracers fly past as you crawl into range. 7) Once the Betty finally turns, make a deflection shot at 20-45 degrees angle off.

Meanwhile, the Betty consistently opens fire just inside 1,200 meters (WAY beyond effective range), although it didn't start hitting consistently until 500 meters.

Not surprisingly, given its pathetic tactics, The Hellcat won this encounter just 50% of the time. 3 times, the Hellcat pilot was killed or his plane was set on fire. The other 2 times his engine was badly enough damaged that he RTB. In one case, the Hellcat got PK AND flamed in one shot from 300 meters while the Betty was in a 20 degree bank! There was obviously a serious muscle man hefting that 50 kilo cannon!

I think that the Ace gunnery is about right in accuracy in this situation, except for starting to fire way too soon and the lucky shot while the Betty was in a turn, but the fighter AI is just tragic.

Right, I guess 8 kills vs. 0 hits were too much of an argument to deal with, had to be avoided by starting some new "ace fighter AI is porked" red herring sideline. I take it the point now is that AI gunners mustn't hit anything even when faced with the most idiotic opposition. *facepalm* Nothing else to say, really.

Just out of curiosity - have you ever tried something bigger, like say 16 vs. 32 or something? Or is 1 vs. X the upper limit?

:roll:
Just for your knowledge, that was what actually they were FORCED to do...


Your perception of economics is funny, I may agree with part of it, but on the outcome, surelly not.

My reactions are a little different; at 500-700m, no human gunner behind a real machine gun or cannon could possibly have hit you on purpose from a moving aircraft. If you had been flying a real Hellcat against a real Betty formation and been hit at all from those ranges, you would have turned around immediately to inform your Task Force command that the Japanese have apparently developed some sort of automated fire control or aiming system that is accurate out to nearly a half mile, because more than one stray hit at those ranges would not be a coincidence.

The whole point of the ai is to mimic the capabilities and the historical behaviors of human beings in those aircraft, not to exceed them by several orders of magnitude. This is particularly true for the offliner who wants to re-create historical missions.

It is outrageous for the Rookie ai gunners to be able to hit a single Hellcat going the opposite direction from 780 meters while their aircraft is in a banking turn. It's just insulting when that hit results in the loss of rudder control in the bargain, which is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

If you want some sort of 'gameplay' difficulty (more Zombies!), then make the Veteran and Ace gunners your 'high difficulty' or online default, and make Rookies the single aircraft realism standard and 'Average' the 'formation multiplier' standard for offline historical players. And separate the pilots from the gunners, if you want to maintain some sort of bombing accuracy.

cheers

horseback

Funny, considering the several thousand rounds spent, I would say a hit once in a while is statistically prone to happen. After all, firing solutions don't get a lot easier than with a dead 6 approach.

Can you prove it is theoretically impossible to hit an aircraft from 500-700 m away? Otherwise, the chance for a hit is always there. That's just life.

Anyway, if I had killed twenty Betties within just 10 missions in 1 vs. 8 situations, for 8 hits into my aircraft in return, folks would probably want to know my secret, not the secret of some loser gunners. I'd certainly not run to my superiors and whine, after all, I'd be the highest ranking US bomber destroyer ace.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can only assume that you've never fired an automatic weapon of any kind, much less an actual machine gun at a target even 100m away. 'Once in a while' is not three times in one flight; I would guess that considerably less than a thousand rounds per plane was fired at you during that flight, and that you were rarely if ever actually in a truly 'steady state' range/angle/angle from any of those gun positions. Theory involves statistical probabilities; here the probabilities are not merely being violated--they are being gangraped.

If you are at a 'dead six' to any one of a formation of 4 Betties, there are at least 7 guns that can always be brought to bear on you at any time (the 4 tail gunners and the three top rear gunners of the aircraft you are not directly behind), there is one gun that can usually be brought to bear on you (the top rear gun of the aircraft you are most directly behind) and finally, there are maybe three guns that can sometimes be brought to bear on you (the three side guns of the flanking aircraft in the formation). At best, only one of those guns has an actual 'zero deflection' shot at you. The rest have to calculate some degree of deflection.

In my experience, the ai guns usually fire about three rounds every burst fired, and at ranges outside their 'guaranteed kill' ranges, fire random un-aimed bursts about 2/3rds of the time; the rest of the time, if you continue in precisely the same vector or curve you are going when the shots are fired, you are likely to be hit. Since it is nearly impossible for a human to 'fly' with that sort of consistency, you usually move a bit higher or lower or off to the side of where the burst is aimed, and as a function of distance from the point the shots are fired, the size of the miss is determined by how far you can move off-vector or curve between the time the burst is fired and when the rounds arrive at the targeted point.

Are you suggesting that you were the recipient of over 300 total bursts of ai fire from each aircraft in each mission? The 'chance' of a random hit is always there, but if you get hit more than once, it isn't chance.

In short, the closer you get and the less you react to or anticipate the gunners's fire (I don't recall seeing muzzle flashes 99% of the time, but I don't really look for it) the more likely you are to be hit and the difficulty of the angle and speed don't seem to me to be very great factors, even for 'Rookie' gunners once you come within about 200m. That is not quite a 'spray and pray' solution; once you enter their firing cones, regardless of speed or angle, you will be hit, period, very badly hit if more than one gun is involved.

That's not life. It's not even a reasonable imitation. From my own experiences, using high angle, high speed, high deflection attacks, I should hardly ever be hit at all. Instead, I get shredded more than half the time, and much less often take 'only a flesh wound.' I have also come to believe that what you are flying has more to do with your likelihood of taking a hit than how fast or at what angles you attack. I got hit a LOT more often at the same speeds and angles flying a P-39D than I did in an F6F, and I got hit a lot less in a P-40.

You don't even want to know what happens when you bring a Mustang within 700m of a Betty formation (and this is weird, because nobody can keep a Mustang absolutely straight and level in this game, but you can hear round after round banging into your nose and wings at an increasing tempo as you close to 500m or so).

Standing off at ranges like that wouldn't be all that different from dropping the rounds on the Betty from a great height like so many little bombs. Setting your convergences for ranges more than double the accepted effective range of your guns makes them useless at any realistic range for the real targets of American fighters--other fighters. Unlike the ai, you can't adjust your convergences in mid-flight.

It's an artificial comparison. Killing 20 Betties at those ranges is not quite as unrealistic, impractical and improbable as the phony accuracy levels of the ai gunners, but it's in the ballpark.

cheers

horseback

Gun convergence was set to 400 meters. Very typical for US fighters of the time. Quite possibly back then they knew a gun works beyond point blank range.

If you can manage a fifty meter radius around an F6F sized target, conservatively assuming linear distribution, one in 800 rounds will hit the F6F.
Statistically, 8 hits require 6400 rounds. Ten mission with eight enemy aircraft, every aircraft needs to fire exactly 80 rounds to achieve that outcome.
The ground tests from the worst mount gave a ten meter radius, the best mount gave a two meter radius at about that distance. That leaves room for somewhere between 40 and 48 meters of aiming error. That's like missing a disc 3 feet wide from 20 feet away.
Just as a ballpark.

As to the "regardless of speed or angle, you will be hit, period" - I shot down eight of them one flight without being hit at all, and I did it from close range. Period. It's called "proper tactics", and it works better than whining.

Actually, the USN/USMC standard was 1000 ft, which works out to a bit under 275 meters. Against smaller targets that maneuvered energetically, many successful American pilots opted for shorter convergences, particularly in Europe, where some guys felt that a three second burst at 150 yards was more efficient and accurate than several bursts at longer ranges. If you had an assigned aircraft in the Army Air Forces, you could usually have your convergence range set to your preference. Some groups in the ETO were known to have a 'group' setting at some specified range, usually under 200yds/180m.

In the USN/USMC during WWII, the vast majority of fighters' guns were sighted in at 1000 ft, period. BuAer was pretty strict about it. The main exception was for night fighters, which were generally boresighted at about 200 yards.

"Ground tests" means that the aircraft was parked, the target was not moving and that the gun was sighted in, strapped down at the handles and fired remotely.

Adding a human to fire the gun will increase the error significantly, and the error would vary from person to person, and day to day. A human element tears the statistical curve to shreds, but the error set with the gun strapped down will be an absolute minimum (and likely less than half the error of the best human result for an open mount gun on a pintle or scarff ring mount).

Applying those same accuracy standards to a moving platform firing at a target moving constantly and randomly relative to the firing platform is comparing apples to oranges.

When you compare the accuracy of a turret mount in a B-17 to a scarff ring mount in a G4M, that is comparing apples to watermelons. BIG watermelons, the kind that win prizes at the county fair. Clearly, you've never been in a ballpark any more than you've ever fired a real machine gun.

Unless you found a way to set a formation of 8 aircraft, you had two formations of 4 aircraft, generally separated by about 700-1000m apart, too far away to lend mutual support except in rare instances where you wandered in between them. So at any given time, the greatest probability is that you were being shot at by a maximum of 4 aircraft initially, and as you shot them down one at a time, that number decreased down to one before you went after the next formation of 4.

I tried your test a few times with an F6F-3 and a convergence of 500m, which allows me some accuracy beginning at 600 meters. Since you specified that you hung back at more than 500m, I consistently pulled away at 520 to 450 meters, and then made another approach. The Rookie Betties began firing intermittently when I got to 900m of them and their bursts increased in frequency as I got closer. I took as little evasive action as possible and kept my speed at approximately 190 kts, which allowed me to slowly approach and peck away. I took hits fairly regularly at 750 and closer, and lost my engine once, got a wing shredded twice, and on the third or fourth go-around actually got them all before I ran out of ammo. I took more than 8 hits by the second pass every time.

Repeating the mission four times in a P-51C, I took hits to the engine every time, once at a range of over 750 meters which resulted in a runaway prop. Smaller target, less stable at that speed, which means that I should have been harder to hit, but the opposite was true. I was hit more often on the nose or engine compartment, and suffered greater damage sooner.
Head on passes were rare in the PTO; they were not time effective--you only got one shot per pass, and after that one pass, the bombers were often into the task group's flak zone. I used the standard high deflection attacks that were standard USN doctrine at the outset of the war (and were spectacularly effective when applied). I begin with an altitude advantage of 1000m or more, steeply diving from at least a five o'clock position, and usually more like 3:30-4 o'clock, which generally puts me past my target's tail at speeds around 320 knots, or over 360 mph/580 kph, and puts my target between me and his wingmen.

I use my speed to zoom back up to a 3500 ft advantage, get back over them and to one side and lather-rinse-repeat... I still get hit often as I am in my dive or as I cross my target's tail which are both high deflection, tiny window shots for the top ring mount gunners and a nearly blind shot for the guys in the stingers as I blow through their cones of fire at 160 meters per second less than fifty meters away. The hard part should be avoiding his elevators.

The tactics are fine. They worked very well historically. But as long as the 'Rookie' ai gunners are more deadly than Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis in their prime all wrapped into one, the game is unrealistic and artificial the moment you introduce an aircraft with guns that are pointing in more than one direction.

cheers

horseback

That's NOT what I said.

I think that given the tactics used by the AI Hellcat in the 1 vs. 1 and 1 vs. 8 missions, the Japanese Ace gunnery is about right.

Rookie gunnery might be a bit too effective, however.

Gunnery might still be too effective at all levels when swinging a heavy gun - like a 20 mm cannon - while a plane is banking.

At least for Japanese gunners on the G4M1, they start shooting at extreme ranges - 1000 meters or greater.

I also previously said that hanging out at the limits of effective range for most air guns, even at 6 o'clock, and taking sniper shots is a good way to get lots of kills and minimal damage.

A better test of AI accuracy would be to take maneuvering shots from the rear quarter but within the effective range of the AI guns.

Yes.

Actually, there should be seven axes for crew skill:

Level Bombing
Dive Bombing
Torpedoes
Rockets/Ground Attack
Fixed Aerial Gunnery
Flexible Gunnery
Piloting

And, different crewmen should have different skill levels. For example, Ace tailgunner and Rookie ball gunner, or Average bombardier and Veteran pilot.

Alright, take 2% accuracy against a relatively non-maneuvering target as your baseline hit percentage overall. It's historically documented by several people on this forum.

Park your fighter at 4-5 o'clock or 7-8 o'clock off a bomber's beam at about 300-400 meters and fly in formation. Determine hit percentages from that. Anything much about 2% means that gunnery is too good.

Of course not; the guns used were hypothetically accurate out to several miles, and lucky hits could happen at any range. But, as Horseback and I have been arguing, there were many factors that made that level of accuracy statistically highly unlikely. And, if you fly enough missions offline, the stats start to add up and they're historically wrong.

That's not the point. You achieved your kills by hanging out at the extreme limits of effective range for any gun and used the superior stability of the Hellcat's guns to pick off some of the most flammable aircraft in the game. That's not a typical situation, nor is it realistic tactics, although it is a testament to some pretty impressive shooting on your part.

I'm more interested in what happens over dozens of missions where fighter pilots make more realistic attacks (pursuit curves, like I posted above) with their guns set at historic convergence distances (typically 300 meters for U.S. planes, although pairs of guns could be set to converge at different distances).

Due to a combination of inept AI bomber interception tactics and AI gunnery which is perhaps too good in some situations, I'm getting a situation where the gunnery accuracy by bombers is much better than it was historically. This makes it impossible for me to recreate very typical missions, such as late war German fighters intercepting U.S. heavy bombers.

I'm not whining about MY tactics. I can engage bombers and do pretty well.

Instead, I'm looking at AI performance overall. I want to be able to set up missions where bombers and fighters behave like they did historically, and where the results of AI combat roughly match expected historical results.

Objectively:

* Fighters, even Ace AI, don't use proper bomber interception tactics.

* Gunners, even Ace AI, start shooting far beyond effective range.

* We still don't have much data on just how good WW2 era flexible gunners were in the air against maneuvering targets. What data we do have suggests that 2% accuracy against a relatively easy target was the accepted standard for rookie gunners, 600 yards (~550 meters) was the accepted range at which a 0.50 caliber MG had any chance of hitting, and that different gun mounts had different levels of inherent accuracy (ignoring other factors).

Subjectively,

* AI Gunners might still be too effective, particularly for shots made while the aircraft is maneuvering, for larger guns, for manually-turned guns, and for shots made to anything other than the plane's 6 o'clock.

* Gunnery by human players might be unrealistically accurate because the game engine doesn't model things like airframe vibration, turbulence, slipstream effects on guns and bullets, physical requirements of slewing guns around, g-forces, illusory effects of tracer rounds, and so forth.

Good info.

On a related note, operational histories for the B-29 indicate that the long 20 mm cannon in the tail was removed from later models since it actually caused the tail of the plane to yaw when it was turned, due to slipstream effects. I have to wonder if there was something like that on the G4M, at least for certain models. In any case, it shows that even putting a "stinger" in the tail of a plane, where you'd expect that slipstream effects would be minimal wasn't always the case.

Hey, play nice! You don't know where he's coming from. :)

Additionally, the tail gun for the G4M1 only carried a limited number of rounds of ammunition and each drum of ammunition had to be manually changed (5 drums - one mounted, four stored, I forget if they were 20 or 50 rounds).

This is the "pursuit curve" I mentioned in an earlier post. And, it wasn't just used by the USN.

So, I guess effective range means that beyond 600 yards, the bullets would just fly off to elsewhere, instead of continuing on their paths. No point in firing a gun at targets further out. Gunners wouldn't fire at anything too far away, because of their implemented radar, they knew to a foot how far the target was away. And of course, they were immune to psychological things, so they'd happily get fired at from 601 yards, without returning fire. Automatic fire with a mounted gun sort can't manage to stay within 3 feet over 20 feet distance anyway and gun dispersion changes if a human touches a gun instead of a remote control. Horseback can't set up a mission where formations support each other, so no one can. Someone programming the game adds if clauses to the AI gunners that make them behave differently depending on the targeted aircraft. 2% is an established figure for gunner accuracy, covering all conditions, because someone on the internet mentioned the figure. Even though 16 veteran Hellcats can wipe out 16 standard G4M with little loss to themselves, the historical results aren't there because 1 Hellcat can't do the same.

Words mean things. “Effective Range” is a specific term. Effective range means that the weapon in question is not reliably accurate for a given purpose beyond that point; in the case of a .50 caliber M2 heavy machine gun, mounted in an aircraft wing or turret mount, about 600 yards or 5 and one-half soccer fields is its maximum effective range. Other accepted definitions:
-Absolute maximum effective range: This the "this round is not considered lethal after crossing this threshold" distance. Neither of the other two common "maximum range" values will be greater than this. Purportedly, NATO defines this as the point at which the projectile's kinetic energy dips below 85 joules (62.7 foot-pounds). This is typically claimed when recounting that the P90's effective range is 400 meters on unarmored targets, as classified by NATO. It's worth noting that while the P90 looks neater than the civilian PS90, the extra barrel length increases the muzzle velocity and thus the civilian model actually has a longer absolute max effective range.
-Maximum effective range on a point target: This is the maximum range at which an average shooter can hit a human-sized target 50% of the time. "Point target" is basically a euphemism for hitting a human torso sized area in this context. If this range were greater than the absolute maximum, the absolute maximum would be quoted (a non-lethal hit may be accurate, but it's not effective).
- Maximum effective range on an area target: This is the maximum range at which an average shooter can hit a vehicle-sized target 50% of the time. In other words, this is the maximum distance at which it would make sense to open fire on a group or vehicle, etc. If this range were greater than the absolute maximum, the absolute maximum would be quoted (a non-lethal hit may be accurate, but it's not effective).

As I recall, the game makes rounds ‘disappear’ after they’ve traveled 1000 meters, which means that while the ai gunners in the Betty can shoot at me when I get within 900 meters and have a chance of the bullets hitting my aircraft, I have to get a bit closer before my bullets will reach them before disappearing.
see the above response. AI gunners don’t fire until they know that the bullets might reach their targets; human gunners in small formations and limited ammo supplies had to wait until they had a reasonable chance of (a), hitting their target, and (b) dissuading the attacker (by how close the tracers came, or actually hitting them) from getting closer. The AI routines absolutely make full use of precise knowledge attacking aircraft’s range and directional vectors, but the real life human beings they are supposedly representing could not possibly have done so.
Here, we have to keep in mind a few things: first, that the gunner has a limited supply of bullets, second if he’s firing 7.7mm LMG rounds, the farther away his target, the less accurate he will be AND the less damage he will do, and third, how does he figure out how far away his intended target is. Big WWII fighters were generally smaller than modern fighters are today; an F-16 dwarfs a P-38 (and I’ve seen both in close proximity to each other), and a Hellcat doesn’t begin to compare to the size and bulk of an A-10. A Hellcat’s fuselage viewed head-on in flight is about the size of a large SUV rolled onto its side (with the wings added to the roof and belly). From six soccer pitches away that is a pretty small target for the unaided eye.

Here, you start with a false equivalency and go on to hysterics. First, the target is moving—constantly and in several random directions at once. Second, the platform the shooter is firing from is also moving, and that movement is also to a lesser degree random and unpredictable to the shooter. Third, you focus on objects 600 yards away somewhat differently than you do if you are focusing on something six and two thirds yards away. You simply don’t perceive these things in the same way, particularly if they are moving.

Gun dispersion absolutely does change when a human being is controlling the handles. Machine guns have this thing called recoil and vibration or gun shake; it is modeled for the wing guns of the fighters—lose even one gun on a wing and see what happens. Even if you have that tiny distant point zeroed in where that Hellcat is going to be when the first bullet gets there, the gunshake will knock your aim askew; you’ve undoubtedly seen videos of some poor sap firing a shotgun or high-powered rifle for the first time and being knocked off their feet by the recoil, so you can imagine what would happen when the same poor sap pulls the trigger on an equally powerful weapon and fires three or six rounds in a split second. Even with the body of the weapon tied to a hard mount, a large portion of that energy still has to go somewhere.

On the contrary, you didn’t specify that the mission you set up was not a QMB; some of us don’t monkey around with the FMB in depth, and QMBs are the quickest and easiest way to go. In any case, my own experiment using QMB and your general conditions got me hit significantly more often by fewer defending aircraft than you report that you were.

I don’t think that there are necessarily ‘if clauses’ specifically added; I think that there is a clear hierarchy. If the Mustang is classed as being more fragile than the Hellcat, then it must take more damage sooner, and therefore must be hit. My results seem to reflect that; the P-51C tends to vary in altitude and direction more than the Hellcat, even with constant power and prop pitch settings and it is a much smaller target by any measure, but it gets hit more often at the same (ridiculous) distances.

2% was quoted by one poster here from talks with a relative who actually trained as an aerial gunner during the WWII period. It is consistent with other known testimony. If you’re familiar with the actual process of shooting at a target sleeve from another aircraft with a flexible gun from 150-200 yards maximum distance, you would have to think that 2% is a ridiculously high baseline for targeting a maneuvering aircraft approaching rapidly and hitting it from approximately five soccer field lengths away.

Even so, it would be a vast improvement over the current model.

If the Player cannot obtain the same results of his AI wingmen when he is doing exactly the same thing, something is skewing the results. Which of these things is not like the other? Hierarchy.

cheers

horseback

Jtd, Horseback is asking you to fly near the enemy bomber, and play the drone by maneuvering at about 500m, and see how many hits they scored on your aircraft, per shot fired.

The game wont give you AI statistics, only players statistics, so it will be needed a second player to fly the bomber steadily, and let the AI do the shooting.

Still, 1000 fired rounds with a hit percentage of 2%, means that you will be hit by 20 rounds each time. And that is enough to be shot down, specially from 20mm guns. Worst with planes that got inline engines, one shot is enough to be seriously damaged.

I want a cookie with chocolate on it.

Or course not! Bullets beyond 600 yards would still have some chance of hitting something, but by that point the cone of dispersion is such that they have a very low chance of doing so.

You're right that there should be some randomness built into the point where gunners start to shoot, but one of the big lessons that gunners got (at least later war US gunners) was target ranging.

It was pretty easy to "guesstimate" a target's approximate range using the gun's sight, and shoot only when the target got into the correct range.

But range estimation was the least of the gunner's problems. The bigger problems were estimating speed (both of the gunner's plane and the target plane), estimating proper lead for deflection shots, estimating bullet drop (especially for shots above and below 0 degrees of angle) and coping with all the "random factors" which made guns less accurate.

So, I've got absolutely no problem if rookie gunners start shooting at 1,500 yards distance (a common rookie mistake was to start shooting way too soon), but their shots shouldn't be at all accurate until the enemy gets much closer.

On the other hand, ace US gunners should only start shooting within, say +/-10% of 600 yards (or 1,000 yards prior to late 1943) and should generally have better fire discipline (e.g., shorter bursts, less risk of hitting friendly planes).

Actually, this is one of the issues we're complaining about. Human gunners should be about as accurate as AI gunners, and human gunners (and possibly some AI gunners) are too accurate in the game.

Actually, it's pretty difficult to set up mutually supporting flights in the FMB, too.

I never suggested that 2% accuracy is the perfect percentage for gunner accuracy in all conditions.

I mentioned it as a historically documented (by a WW2 veteran gunner and by the son of a veteran based on his dad's service books) acceptable standard for rookie gunners shooting at target drogues in order to graduate from USAAF/RCAF flexible gunnery school.

That means that 2% is a "ballpark figure" for what rookie AI should be able to against a maneuvering target under more or less ideal conditions.

In any case, the 2% figure wasn't meant as a challenge, it was meant as a suggestion for a starting point for calibrating AI gunnery skill.

If you were to take that 2% figure, rework AI gunners flying from a plane flying straight and level in Clear weather, so that they got about 2% hits on average against fighters maneuvering in the plane's 4-8 o'clock arc within 600 yards, flying at about 200-250 mph (about the speed of most target towing planes), I'd be a very happy man.

And, if that 2% average included higher hit percentages for shots directly to 6 o'clock, and a lower percentage of hits as the target fighters got out to 600 (or 1,000) yards, I'd be ecstatic.

From there, it would be easy to calibrate accuracy upwards or downwards for skill, poor visibility, turbulence, etc.

Again, the test missions are only used as a way of generating statistics on AI air gunner performance (and AI fighter behavior) to compare against historical averages. They're not meant to refute actual historical statistical outliers. I can also accept outliers within the game, as long as on average the game mirrors historical performance.

Yeah, agreed, but the outliers have to be included in the cases that generate the average, which should mean that the mode goes down relative to the mean when the outliers get horrendously better than the mean. When that doesn't happen, you get a broken sim, as this one is in this aspect.

I believe that the fighters score a lot better than they ought to, and the bombers do too, the bomber gunners are more obviously wrong but both need fixing. A lot more hits ought to do insignificant damage on both sides, pilot kills at 500 metres ought to be a rare event, not one flight in twenty. A machine gun is effectively a very large bore slow acting shotgun, it's not like a rifle at all, even if it fires rifle calibre bullets, but the AI bomber gunners get results snipers would be proud of.

You can't handle a cookie with chocolate on it!

cheers

horseback

Right, a lot has been said about what should limit the AI gunners in bombers, but our gunnery is not limited by whatever real fighter pilots faced.

That's an entirely different can of worms.

But, you're right. The game doesn't take things like airframe vibration and turbulence (especially "wake turbulence" from heavy aircraft) into account for fixed gunnery.

Additionally, there is no way to boresight different pairs of guns so that they converge at different distances. It was not uncommon for fighters armed with multiple MG to have each pair of guns set at a different convergence point.

As a mud mover my armaments have been messed with enough over the past few years changing the game to a confusing unreliable experience, so lets leave the bombers alone please.

Flying to a target for an hour to have your weapons not detonate or fail to run in the water (toprs) is not amusing especially when they used to work perfectly well in the past.

The fighters still enjoy
no freezing
no overheating
no prop-wash
no vibrations
no g-force effect

Their cannons & Mg's are as accurate and effective with nothing to affect them, except the poor execution of the pilot,
probably the most unrealistic part of the game that's not been addressed yet.



:)





.

P-47 does.

+1

Also, the original game was designed with Sturmoviks as their main goal, freaky american planes with lots of wing guns were an aberration! :P

And il2 happen to get all the adjustments needed. All other planes, specially the american ones, (with the exception of their only world class product, the P39) are late commers, and must abide to the il2 needs! :rolleyes:

Now seriously, that coding is pretty old, and may imply a major overhaul. It is really something we don't need.

no freezing TRUE
no overheating TRUE
no prop-wash TRUE
no vibrations FALSE
no g-force effect TRUE

Vibrations may be a bit over dampened, but they are there. G-force effects were advertised by TD, but still not implemented.
About the freezing, I wish it will be firstly implemented on engines!

Were P-51 guns harmonized to different ranges? Or P-40 guns?

The game has mechanism to set 2 ranges per plane. Hard to imagine the howling if planes with 4 MG's had those split up. They're not uber together!

I want *sprinkles* on the chocolate on my cookie now.

Nobody's asking you to give up what you've got already.

As with any proposed change to armaments, I believe that there should be an option in the GUI to turn off elements which are "excessively realistic" or "not fun" for some people.

So, if TD were to actually implement realistic flexible or fixed gunnery, sticking to the current standard would be as simple as clicking on a difficulty setting.

As I said, there's a difficulty setting for that. Or, at least there should be.

Yep. You'll get no argument from me there. IL2 has some pretty realistic exterior ballistics models, but they still miss a lot of little elements which made realistic aerial gunnery such as tricky business.

Those of us who like those realistic fiddly bits find it annoying that they aren't properly modeled, especially since IL2 tries so hard for realism in other respects.

And, in fairness to online bomber and attack pilots, it would only be fair to implement realistic flexible and fixed gunnery at the same time, so both sides are equally disadvantaged.

The fixed guns on any plane could be set so that individual guns converge with the sight reticule at a certain range. Typically, however, pairs or sets of guns on opposite sides of the plane were set so that they converged, so that the recoil of the guns didn't throw the plane off course when maneuvering or aiming.

At least for the USAAF, it wasn't that uncommon to have one pair of wing-mounted MG set to converge at 300 yards, another pair at 350 and yet another pair at 400 yards to create a "beaten zone" where at least some of the bullets were likely to hit. I don't think that it was just the P-47. I believe that the P-51 and P-40 could have the same option.

The problem is that, in the game you've got just two convergence settings - "cannons" and "machine guns." Furthermore, some planes had the ability to shoot single guns, or just pairs of guns, rather than the current "guns or cannons" option.

So, for realistic fixed gunnery, you need to add the option of setting convergences for each pair of guns (or single gun), and the option of shooting just single guns or pairs of guns.

Neither option seems like it would be that much work, mostly just reworking key bindings and some messing with the GUI.

That is one of the things CloD got correct.

You can/could even choose the ammo belting for each gun.

Yea like unrealistically using de-wilde ammo in all guns where available.............

:)

Or filling the skys with E4s and Spit IIa.

CloD is dead. Time to move on.

I've seen historic records saying that the all the guns were harmonized to create a 1 yard wide circle at 'convergence' at some range with each gun aimed slightly off a central point.

I read about bullet scatter and so much of it is empty speculation that I just laugh. I've fired M-60's on bipod which is more scatter prone than the fixed guns on planes and got nowhere near the scatter often mentioned even out to 800 yards.

Planes do vibrate in a mostly parallel way, not twisting. Some bullets will get an up-down vector (you can figure out why sideways is more constrained) but that's inches per second where in 1 full second the bullet goes how far?
Imperfections in the bullet will cause less to more, they were not shooting modern match ammo. The tracers especially aren't even and still --- in less than a second they only get so far off the mark.

Look at the convergence geometry not as the out-of-scale diagrams used to emphasize the concept but as about 5 meters wide (for outer guns) at the wings versus 200 to 300 meters out to 'convergence' and figure out from how far to how far you get a 2 or 3 meter wide pattern of 'beaten zone'. Answer is about halfway to convergence to about the same distance beyond.

Convergence is about rise and drop and how much below the line of sight is as well. Spend time reviewing tracks made in gunnery practice and see how often the tracers go just above or below where you thought they were aimed. Know your range and when to shoot high or low.

I find closing speed affects aim. The faster I close the shorter the range effectively becomes. I like to shoot deflection, coming in not from six and that does make my closing speed higher. I trigger at 400 meters while aiming as if 350 meters to start my fire when I will be within 200 meters very soon. It lets me see where the first burst goes to get in one more before I have to avoid ramming.

If I am shooting horizontal I get more drop than shooting either up or down at more than a few degrees. Shots aimed in steep dive or climb, more than 10 degrees, will go high compared to the pipper but only by a fraction of the drop when horizontal. That changes with range.

A tail gunner firing at a following target has an easier task than a nose gunner. It's the side gunners who have the hardest job. That is just from moving geometry. With practice you can still get good but when the attrition gets high your average gunners won't be so experienced.

• The over accuracy of the ai gunners is primarily a concern for the off-liner; specifically the off-liner who mainly plays fighter scenarios. To me and those like me, the very idea that some poor schlub from the sticks of Bavaria, the rice fields of Honshu or the collective farms of western Russia dumped into a backless sling or seat and facing backwards while flying 200 kph or faster to shoot a light caliber machine gun mounted on a ball mount or ring at smaller, much faster attacking fighters could be accurate at ranges up to 750 meters is obscene, never mind historically false. We expect the default ai gunner routine to mimic or re-create the historic capabilities and limitations of the real human beings who flew those bombers and heavy fighters in WWII, not exceed them by squares and cubes.
• It is enormously frustrating to spend 30 or forty minutes trying to fly formation with an AI `escort’ routine that seems more concerned with either burning off your fuel or playing hide-and-seek behind your canopy frames than it is with keeping in close contact with the bombers we’re supposed to be protecting, finally catching a formation of Bf 110Gs down low and then getting your engine shot out by a Rookie rear gunner at an extreme angle at a range in excess of 400 meters while you’re diving on him at a steep angle and indicated speeds of over 500 kph. It’s unrealistic and grossly unreasonable, and it has nothing to do with `tactics’ or not knowing `how to fly’. A Mustang or Thunderbolt pilot attacking a zerstörer at those speeds and any angle was historically untouchable; the only thing between him and a victory was his guns’ reliability and his own shooting skill. Additionally, limiting all aircraft with rear gunners to `Rookie’ status means that both the heavy fighter and bomber aircraft are flown too poorly and ineffectively for the aircraft’s actual main weapons to be any use or danger in exchange for a minimal step towards realism.
• For the off-liner or online player who specializes or even dabbles in mud-moving in two-seater, medium or heavy bombers, the gunners are not nearly effective enough. From a practical standpoint I understand that imposing the real-life difficulty on the human gunner or the human pilot’s ai ‘crew’ would be suicidal, given the inability to impose the real-life discipline of formations and effective escort, even with other human players. For someone playing the bomber role, über gunners are an absolute necessity, and even then, the ai gunners protecting a human flown aircraft cannot enjoy the rail-smooth firing platform or even the basic levels of communication that a veteran real-life crew had, far less than the all ai “crew” that has the instant awareness and communication that so frustrating to the player who flies fighters.
• The players who campaign or do co-ops as ground-pounders naturally feel threatened by the very idea of limiting their already poor protection. I get that. Honest, I do. But nobody wants to take that away from the on-line or bomber campaign game. The off-line fighter players simply want a choice.
• We clearly now have the capability to give the off-line Player an option or tier of more historically realistic ai gunner routines for all-ai aircraft in off-line missions and campaigns. Therefore, we should:

1. Limit the `reality’ option to all-ai bombers, fighters and attack aircraft gunnery routines
2. Give turret style guns a 10 or 15% advantage over guns directed by human muscle power; the gunners in those were strapped in and had electrical or hydraulic aid in directing his guns
3. Make it strictly for QMBs and campaigns Off-Line as an option that must be selected before starting the QMB, Single Mission, or campaign. This means that I’ll have to re-start any existing campaigns to get this option; no mid-course changes.
4. Never apply it to Player-flown aircraft; in fact, make it impossible to apply it to a human-crewed aircraft or their formations, so that the mouse-gunners will have nothing to complain about or fear.

By the way Max, an M-60 has much less recoil and is lighter & far more user friendly than the older Browning MGs; that's what it was designed for and why it replaced the old-style .30 MGs in squad use and on Helos. No sprinkles for you.

cheers

horseback

Sometimes I think I'm playing a different game.
I've acquired quite some experience in shooting at allied heavys/medium bombers, and those are among the best armed/armored in this game IMHO.
I guess in about 40 missions I got shot out of the sky 8 times. Much? Yes.
But only two times when I got nailed (pilot dead) from below while turnig away and up (moving in all three planes of maneuvre) from the already dead bomber and from a landing B-17 about 400m below me on opposite course(thus the shooter had to lead a heck) that felt wrong. All the other times I got bored/greedy and decided to do a 6'o clock approach and forgot to break at 300m. So I'd say that my own poor choice of tactics fried my there.
Doing head-ons, side attacks, high attacks, even fast six o clock attacks with breaking of at ~250-300m regularly works for me.

Degrade the (rookie) gunners so they don't do the seemingly impossible shots that would be good, if it is not only pure luck but some kind of random deliberate ace gunnery. But do not degrade the gunners in general, they are fine IMHO.

And as a part-time mud-mover I can only say whenever you encounter an enemy fighter (AI) that you cannot outrun or outmaneuver and there is no clouds to hide in you are screwed. At least 19 out of 20 times.

The most interesting idea in your post IMHO is to be able to advise different levels of AI to different position, that would be useful. Could depict scenarios, where an all veteran crew got a member KIA and replaced by newbie, or splitting up an ace crew and mixing with regulars to get two useful crews.
Or for formations mission builders could use an ace bombardier/navigator/pilot for flight leader, and an all ace gunner crew for tail end, as surprise for anemy fighters.
And for offliners you could create enemy flights that have rookie skill at all gunner positions - but are pilot/bombardier able enough to bomb the broadside of a barn from three metres away.

I feel the same, with a few notable exceptions. Horseback keeps talking about the gunner on the 110, I agree that he definitely seems to be more effective than most other gunners. There are also gunners on a couple older, rarer Soviet planes that seem super-human. It's those light MGs with the high rate of fire on the smaller, nimbler bombers that give me the most grief, especially when they are twinned like in the 110. Safer tactics can be used against bigger, more stable bombers; and the heavier machine guns have slower rates of fire and don't trouble me as much.

I would think that the game has conditioned your view of what the air war was like rather than having your knowledge of the air war framing your view of the game.

Breaking off at 300m when you are attacking with a 200kph speed advantage and are just shooting the hell out of your target would be considered premature against anything less than a formation of 16+ American heavies in real life, regardless of the angle of your attack. Under those conditions, accurate return fire from your target should be next to impossible, and the angles imposed for gunners in flanking aircraft would make it a matter of very poor chance that they would hit you at all, much less hit you anywhere important, like the 'head-sized' magneto that comprises less than 5% of the area you can aim at inside the cowling of a P-47, Hellcat or Corsair, or the considerably smaller reflector sight in your cockpit (and how do they do that without breaking the bulletproof glass in front of it?).

That they do so even as often as one in 20 passes at 'virtual' distances that would strain the abilities of world class match rifle shots on real-world static (i.e., not moving) targets just slips right past you people.

Theoretically, it's possible that a human being behind the flexible guns of any bomber or attack plane flown in WWII could have made those shots--in exactly the same way that it is theoretically possible that angels will fly out of my backside when I break wind.

Comparing the capability of a stepped formation of almost fifty B-17s to the capabilities of a couple of vics of Betties or He-111s just takes it into the realms of fantasy. My own experiments with the B-17 convinces me that that aircraft's gunners are much less effective than most of the earlier war medium and light twins with rear gunners featured in this game. With the exception of the (extremely clumsy and unwieldy) 20mm stinger in the tail of the Betty, most of these aircraft are defended by socket or rail mounted light machine guns and consistently make pinpoint hits at angles which would be impossible for the gunners to look down their guns' sights at the (distant) targeted empty spot in the air which will be occupied by my aircraft a half second and several aircraft lengths later. At 'Rookie' levels.

Worse yet, if you approach within a given distance for a given 'ranking' of AI gunner, even at the extreme edges of his 'firing cone' you will be hit, regardless of your speed and angle

I long ago learned to 'demote' any aircraft mounting a rear or side facing gun to Rookie before flying a mission--LCD monitors aren't cheap and throwing your TrackIR visor at them can be expensive. And of course, let's not forget that they still can hit you while the aircraft they are in is spinning out of control --which was what happened to me for the umpteenth time while I was testing the other night.

There are those of us who don't fly LW vs the USAAF or RAF, and while I understand the tendency of some people to romanticize the German side in that contest, I just can't sympathize with the tendency to 'baseline' your campaign experiences with the comparatively nerfed gunners of the in-game US heavies against my complaints with the gunners on He-111s, Stukas, Bf 110s, Pe-2s, Sturmoviks and more recently, Vals and Betties. All of these aircraft have Rookie gunners superior to any Terminator model James Cameron ever made a dime from, even the hot little blonde one.

Take your 'red' Fw 190A up against a flight of Betties and see what happens. It will shock you.

Only eight out of forty missions sounds like heaven to me; I've had several individual campaign missions where one specific gunner gets me every damned time from every angle and distance imaginable, even after being demoted (do you think that they might be bitter about it?). I hit the 'Refly' button four or five times in a couple of hours and then I just have to walk away for a few days (or months).

There must be many hundreds like me who simply never come back.

cheers

horseback

Was it 4.07 that came with tracks showing how to attack bombers without getting shot?

Agreed, but I can accept the odd outlier. Unless you're moving faster than a gun can traverse, there should be a small chance of getting hit. It should be statistically very unlikely to happen, however.

I'd also like a system where gunner skill falls off as you add complications to the firing solution.

Rookie gunners should be reasonably effective at simple low-deflection shots against non-maneuvering planes within about 300-400 meters and should have about a 2% accuracy rate against planes flying at about 250 mph (~400 kph) and maneuvering relatively gently in one dimension (i.e., equivalent to what a target tug would do).

But, their accuracy should fall off severely due to their plane maneuvering, target planes traveling at much more than 300 mph (~500 kph) or with more than about 30 degrees of deflection in more then one dimension (i.e., a fighter performing a pursuit curve - diving and crossing over the gunner's plane). Each additional complication reduces chances to hit by some order of magnitude.

Better quality gunners have a slightly better chance of hitting the "baseline" targets and don't have quite the same penalties to skill to hit trickier targets.

Even so, any gunner's chance of hitting should go down to "almost impossible" against very fast-moving or erratically-moving targets.

Again, I'll accept the odd outlier, but statistically the AI is still too good in such cases. And, oddly, it seems to vary a lot by individual plane. Instead, gunnery should be made a bit more "generic." Unless you've got proof that a particular gun mount was much more stable and effective, pretty much every single ball-mounted rifle caliber MG gunner station should behave in the same way. Ditto for pintle or Scarff mounts with single or double rifle caliber MG, or single or double HMG.

Which means that there should be a player-controlled option for setting gunnery difficulty. For offliners playing at being a fighter pilot, there should be a GUI setting to "dumb down" AI gunnery. For offliners playing at being an attack or bomber pilot, there should be an option to keep it the way it is.
For onliners, there should be a server-controlled setting to keep gunnery the way it is or to introduce all the hassles that real gunners faced.

Other than that, I think that your suggestions are excellent.

Of course people will abuse any feature of a game. It doesn't change the fact that different belting options would be a cool addition to IL2.

And, since CloD is dead, it also means no good reason for an embargo against early war planes like the Spitfire MkI or Bf-109E-1, or maps of England.

Yep. A common problem for games that portray historical events. At least IL2 tries for realism.

Maybe. I still think that going straight in from 6 o'clock level is still asking for it, even from a rookie gunner. That should be the baseline accuracy and accuracy should go down fast from there.

I don't disagree, but flaky damage modeling is a different issue from excessively accurate gunners.

To put it another way, 1 in 20 works out to 5% accuracy, which was considered to be excellent even at close ranges.

Well, maybe more like 1 in a 100, or even 1 in a million, rather than impossible.

This goes to my argument that AI gunnery needs to be made more "generic." You can't claim that any particular plane is "uber" or "nerfed" if every plane in the game with a single rifle-caliber Scarff-mounted rear gun uses the same gunnery model.

It's also possibly something to do with earlier aircraft models being a bit cruder in damage modeling.

This is another good point, but gunners should have a slightly better chance to hit based on the amount of time that the target remains within their firing cone. Targets that veer in and out of the cone should be harder to hit, since the gunner must reacquire his target and track it prior to opening fire.

For folks who are interested in the nitty-gritty about how fighter guns were calibrated, at least for the USAAF

http://www.avia-it.com/act/profili_d...monization.pdf

No, with 6'clock attacks I meant really lazy attacks, with not enough speed difference. And the way I see it I'm an easy target even if I close with 200kph excess -only change is distance, and that's a shot an ace gunner from 200m away should be able to do most of the times, and a rookie should be able to judge by his tracers if he's shooting too high or low. And even if he's leading for 500m distance, and I'm only at 300m, then he will highly likely still hit -as that shot needs no lead in angle left/right and no lead in up/down motion.

Usually I play both sides of the medal, so I did the US/Brit side before, and I found the German/Italian bombers nowhere near the capability of a B-17.
The only real danger is the Do217, because they are so fast you are sometimes forced to attack from behind. And when flying planes with .50cals the He111 can be tough, though it is vulnerable to attacks from the front. Strangely enough, the most troublesome Axis bomber for me is the Ju87, because it is so small and usually evades and its gunner shoots below where IMHO he shouldnt even be able to see me. Upside is if using a very low 6 or side/front attacks next to any hit on that thing makes it burn.

Bettys, I've shot countless out of the sky using P-39 (awesome game moments: head on passes with 37mm that connect and blow that thing right out of the sky) or P-40s and F4F.
P-39 is easy, either stay behind and snipe them from a distance or use your superior speed and head-on tactics, high attacks from nearly directly above also work fine.
F4F/P-40 is more difficult, the speed advantage often is not enough to make an intercept possible using head-ons. High 6 attacks work okay, and high sides attacks too. High 6 attacks are better IMHO, its easier to hit the wing tanks, and thats the Bettys vice, its basically a big unprotected flying fuel tank. I would guesstimate that nine out of ten I got were due to fuel tank fire, except when flying the P39, and even then when 37mm ammo was out the .30 cals light them good.
Will do.

That reminds me of the game before 4.10, when gunners were godlike (and were able to survive 20mm hits). I can remember a BoB campaign, where Ju87 shot you out of the sky with 90% probablity when anywhere within 500m behind.
He-111 and a 6'o clock approach was certain doom, when they appeared, the only surviving member of my squad usually was me - head on tactics worked.
Bf110 had to be left alone, attacking them was suicide, they could turn so you nearly blacked out turning with them, and still the gunner fired with pinpoint accuracy.

That may be one of the reasons we do get strange results, the AI gunners acquire targets at any angle at about 5km, even if they can not see it. Without confirmation from anyone that can read the game code, I'd speculate that any gunner already has your speed and distance and heading estimated before you come into his FoV. If that's the case, that shouuld be changed.

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

The AI is the computer program that runs the sim. It doesn't have to "calculate" anything. It already "knows" evey parameter of your aircraft's performance, and it knows how you have set your gun convergence. It "knows" where you are at all times, it knows when you make a control input, and has a perfect solution for hitting you at all times.

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

I don't know how much of that goes into the AI calculations. What can be is not necessarily what is. But I can say that the AI is only predictive to a simple level and that a constantly changing path is beyond any AI in-game.

I find that in most cases, the AI gunners have more difficulty in shooting an attacking fighter if the speed difference is indeed great. Try, now, a Me-163B against B-17s, it's wonderful! They might score a lucky hit, though, but it's acceptable imho.
I understand that 9 cases out of 10, one won't have such a huge speed advantage, but then it's better to go against the escort fighters instead. Who's to say it's not important to shoot them down over hostile territory (to them)? Carrier ops are another matter, of course.

I don't think we should do that... at least it's ok to speak as if they are in fact beings. As technology advances, AIs become more and more "beings" with real emotions, ambitions and dreams. As such, they should have the same rights as human players do. For now, however, they don't even get to decide whether or not to play in the first place, so they should in fact have some advantages over Joe Regular Player.

What we say here and how we say it will set a precedent on how we treat artificial intelligence beings, and our words will echo untold centuries into the future.

Quash the robots now!!!!!


:cool:

What fantasy do you live in? Does it cost extra to send mail that far?

There is no such AI as you describe except in fantasy. There is nothing that can fake it well enough to pass a Turing test.

A Japanese robot got emotionally attached to a female tech and wouldn't let her out the room. Engineers had to shut the robot down so she could leave the room.

If that actually happened then someone put a label on a simulated behavior. Nice machine.

Now how about fooling an intelligent adult human in an extended phone conversation?

Too high or too low, maybe, but as for actually getting the distance right (and hence, factoring in bullet drop) maybe not. One of the things I've learned is that tracers actually create an optical illusion that can fool poorly trained gunners. As I understand it, tracers make a bullet seem like it's closer than it is.

This is possibly because it's one of the older planes in the game, which might have had less realistic gunnery arcs.

Yep. The only problem with high attacks from the rear quarter is the fact that you have to deal with 2 20mm cannons.

This changed a bit with 4.10. To some extent, it's realistic because gunners could talk with other crew, allowing them to "anticipate" targets moving into the arc of fire covered by their guns. But, IL2 still takes it too far and doesn't the need to physically track the target with your guns in order to "acquire" it.

The code needs to be reworked to make gunners delay for a fraction of a second before opening fire on a plane that just entered their cone of fire to simulate reaction times, and then accuracy needs to go down for initial shots against those planes.

Maybe it's a subset of "slowing the process down," but the AI can also introduce random errors and do other things that reduce the probability of an accurate targeting solution.

That is more or less correct in my opinion, but you don't have to mess with the AI at all. What you have to do is make any round fired not along the exact bore of the gun, but an random point in a circle around that boresight. This is called a circular area of probability, usually it's given as the radius that 50% of the shots fall within, but as a simplification in a sim one could plausibly use a circle within which 99% of the shots would naturally fall and make all of the shots occur at random points within that. Then the AI could be as accurate as they like, but they wouldn't be pulling off 100% headshot kills at 750 metres, because there would be a random element in there, which would counter their unnatural non-randomness and make the whole game a lot fairer overall. It wouldn't affect the scores of humans, because we're not accurate enough to get headshot kills by other than random chance anyway.

Or you could simply round off the aiming angle values (3D takes 2 angles) to say 0 decimal places for a rookie, 1 place for the next level, 2 for the next and so on. If the shot is close, even a rookie won't miss though the rookie may not hit the exact aiming point.

I passed that one on to Oleg well before 4.07, btw.

Your idea is not practicable.
Two situations, AI gunner, Rookie, correct firing solution is a)47.935° and b)47.000° . For a) and b) Rookie shoots to 47.0, and for b) he hits dead on. All of the times -whenever accidentally your plane gets to a firing soultion that is or is close to and higher than an integer number, a rookie will hit.

At 200m, 1/2 degree missed by 1.75m, about 5' 9".

Not far enough? The calculations are in radians anyway. 1 radian is a bit over 57 degrees so in the math even a rookie would get a couple-three places and be missing.

I mention doing it this way because it calculates quicker than figuring actual degree to miss by, requires less changes to the existing code and once in a while even a rookie gets lucky.

But what do I know? I only paid my rent and bills by writing/developing code for many years in many languages. I've done a good bit of shooting too, including with automatic weapons though not from a moving plane. They are still so much easier to hit targets with than single-shots it's funny, especially at ranges I wouldn't even try single-shots.

That algorithm can adjust for conditions too, like when the plane the gunner is in is turning, though IMO under some conditions it should be impossible to shoot and one the plane is going down the gunner should be bailing out, not sniping. masking a few bits in an IEEE floating point number takes only a few cycles, especially when the mask is in a pre-set variable.

What can I say? I learned to code on old, slow, 8-bit micros without FPU's and still make the programs seem fast. I do know what I'm writing about.

+1. This is exactly the mechanism needed. Various factors that Horseback, myself and others have mentioned just increase the size of the circle.

And this is a potentially quite good way of differentiating between skill levels, although I'm not sure that the difference between "Rookie," "Average," "Veteran," and "Ace" skill is actual orders of magnitude. Even so, it's an elegant solution.

I think I didn't quite get my point to the both of you, so I'll try again:
I think that simply rounding off the aiming angles will not give the desired results -it will make rookies as accurate as ace when the plane they are aiming at is near an angle that is integer or slightly above.

Say correct firing solution is 1.040rad, target distance is so that 0.01rad off is miss.
Rookie will shoot to 1rad, and miss. Average will shoot to 1rad, miss.
Ace and veteran to 1.04rad and hit.

Next time, target is at 1.000rad, thus rounding the solution will give a hit for all.

So the result is that rookies get accuracy spikes when the angle that represents the correct firing solution is close to an integer. And on the other hand, when I approach at 0.5 rad I can get as close as I want toward a rookie gunner and he can't touch me.

I'm not suggesting to round to 57 degrees. I'm suggesting to mask some low bits, rounding to a small error that means you will get hit ==less often than in-game Nowwwww at long range==.

I am NOT suggesting to replace the system we have Nowwww with something else.

From what you write, I don't think that you have much of a grasp on geometry let alone trig.

1/2 degree off at 200m misses by 1.75 meters. Do you think that you in a virtual moving plane can maintain that angle to the virtual gunner in the virtual moving target?

I count on bigger positional changes over seconds within the game.

No, it's not random. It's not IRL. Neither is uniform distribution of shots. But guess what methods require more or less CPU load and memory to implement?

You play with your ideas but IL2 is not a game of crawling up on fixed positions where you can know the possible fixed lines of fire a defense can make. Get close enough and the shot that would go between your eyes will hit you anyway.

Potentially valid points, but there are ways to overcome the problem. For example, modeling turbulence and propwash effects on an aircraft, or airframe or gun vibration will constantly introduce a bit of randomness into even an otherwise static firing solution.

Additionally, how often do you get a firing situation that never changes with respect to the target?

I think that MaxGunz's solution plus a simple random number generator would work fine for most situations.

I'd love to find more data on how WW2 flexible guns actually worked, however. It's almost inevitable that the USAAF and USN did a lot of work on gunner accuracy, and the RAF probably did some, too. Perhaps all those old technical reports are moldering is archives somewhere.

Could just use a number of bitmasks and cycle through them. Mask logic, like shift operations, eats far fewer cycles than integer or floating-point math.

Now I have to agree, given the mask cycle is long enough to generate near random results.

And it could resolve the rookie 1000times as accurate than ace. Just mask/shift the same decimal positions and use different max deviation limits, e.g. an ace mask allows for 0F as max deviation, while the newbie mask allows for say 4F max.

Something like that except that mask being an AND operation, the ACE masks would mask out of the last 8 bits; 0xFD, 0xFE, 0xFA, while the rookie might be 0xE8, 0xF0 kind of thing. These would be applied to the mantissa part of the FP value already being used for aim.

It's the kind of thing that has to be tried to find out what works.

A simple random roll could be used to adjust the aim, or dispersion.
rookie=1 100% roll
average=2 100% rolls divided by two
veteran=3 100% rolls divided by 3
ace=4 100% rolls divided by 4.

When you superpose rolls, you create a bell like curve of probability, with a higher probability in the center of the curve. Make this values the target ones, and you got a nicely adjusted AI, that still could miss.

More the rolls, higher the accuracy.

Still, I don't know how taxing it will be to generate s many random numbers while firing.

More math/operations, slower FPS.

True, but right now with 16 B17 flying and with gunners firing, my CPU 3 and 4 nucleus are below 20% usage. (it's an old phenom II X4 955)

Thanks for caring about the rest of us running single core CPU's at less than 3 GHz.

Hrrmpf! Time for an upgrade, don't you think?

I planted a dollar in the back yard (lottery ticket costs $2 so figure...) but the damned money bush hasn't even sprouted yet!

So unless you're deaf to sarcasm?

Wow! you really need some investment assistance! :P

Still, one core CPU's are really old by now.

Wow! You need your clues delivered by Fedex!

Part of what's so good about IL2 is that you can run it on older hardware.

In this world there are many who have other priorities than gaming! They may play IL2 but have other things that are more important to spend their money on. Imagine that! We don't all live in a Brady Bunch world!