For MudMovers: What kind of tanks cannot be destroyed with Mk103?
 

I've managed to destroy T-34/76s and T-34/85s with Mk103s, those are mediums, but am interested to see whether this weapon has capability to destroy larger tanks? KV-1s heavies or alike?

Thanks.:)

KV-1 or IS-2, while historically possible to destroy, aren't possible in 1946. The vehicle DM is far too crude for that and artificially boosting the Mk 101/103 was not a good solution.

Thanks...;)
I've just wondered what may be the most effective way to take out tanks in IL-2 flying on axis side?
Mk103 just may be the best option for JABO fighters if we know that we are dealing with smaller tanks and lighter armour... Bk 3,7cm is mounted on dedicated ground attack planes only such is Hs-129, Bf-110, such large cannons are not available for FW-190/Bf-109.
I'll experiemnt a bit with AB250 (those used to work better than AB500s for some reason:eek:) and AB23 (AB230?). Hopefully those bomblets can pack some punch and have probably better chance of hitting tank than conventional SC250/500 (let alone smaller).

Saying that, I just recalled that Soviets actually installed 4,5cm cannon in their Yaks (besides already enormous 3,7cm), that thing must take out just about any tank in game:shock:.

Historically no other aircraft but the Bf 110 and the Hs 129 carried Mk 101/Mk 103 gunpods and the former only for a very very short time. The Bk 3.7 on the Hs 129 was an aborted development, given up after only two test flights, and should not be used at all. The Mk 103 gunpods on the Fw 190 are also not historical and should not be used at all, either.

OK thanks. That leaves me with AB bomb type experimentations :) .
I've just read on UBI forum that AB500 has different load than AB250 & AB1000.
I.e. AB500 has anti-tank droplets while AB250 and AB1000 have droplets intended for soft targets... may explain why aiming with AB500 is somewhat harder (most likely there is fewer droplets loaded in AB500).:-|
Not sure about it tho.

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php...=1#post8137603

You could always sneak behind enemy lines, bayonet between teeth, and capture an IL2m or a yak3 ut. :)

Seriously though, aren't you forgetting about the cannon armed Stuka? Granted the thing is a bloody deathtrap and nearly impossible to hit anything with, but it served Rudel well.

BTW, I was online the other day flying a Yak ut and boy is that thing a monster! I was able to easily take out 4 or 5 tanks per mission, and would probably have done better had I not kept getting greedy and lawn darting.

Historically the Fw 190 fighter-bombers were sent against the soft-skinned soviet supply vehicles or their artillery positions and only very rarely used directly over the battlefield. This changed with the introduction of the Panzerblitz anti-tank rocket but that was quite late in the war.

I get about 8-10 tanks each sortie, with 12 shots.
That thing is a killer. 8-)

Hehe I'd fly Stuka all the way unfortunately many servers doesn't have it in the planeset for some weird reason.:mad:
Although I find it to have limited use, being in need tof an escort since of very low speed, same can be said about Henschel too... think Hs is even slower:-|.

I find FW to have best survivability/punch around...

Please tell me you guys have a plan to make it in game...:)
Wfr.Gr.21s (once you chew some time on aiming) are nice but I feel those panzerblitzs would be real salt on a wound for tanks.

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.

The pilots realized this fact very well. I can supply you with books about it.

Sources are always welcome! :)

Still, from what I can remember, the very few Hs129 with a 30mm installed on them, got an initially bad review. Almost to the point that if the Germans loose on Kharkov 42, not enabling the infantry to inspect enemy destroyed tanks, this weapon introduction could have been delayed.

I don't remember the source, I learned this while making a short Kharkov 1942 Hs129 campaign some 3 years back. If you could point me to better info, I will really appreciate it.

Still, my point was that it will penetrate the turret sides, while in game, it won't.

Ironically enough, it is possible to destroy a Tiger with .50 cals in IL2 1946 (and that was possible in older versions of the game too), so I guess it's possible to destroy pretty much anything with an Mk103. Might only have bit of trouble pulling up after that vertical dive and shooting from 50 meters! :D

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean - I've been using combat flaps and trimmed plane accordingly to get some negative AOA, so that the cannons actually point a tiny bit lower than the vector of flight instead of higher. You have to keep her fast tho.

It was not before autumn 1942 that the first real successes broke up the front of the pilot's considerable distrust in the weapon, the tactics and the intended mission itself. That, however, was limited to a single Staffel, 13.(Pz)/JG 51, operating in the central zone between Vyazma and Rzhev.

The rest of the Hs 129 units did not really convert to tank-busting until spring 1943. The Battle of Kursk was then the real kick-off for that role for the Hs 129.

Since AB bombs are just really empty containers and we already have an excellent upgrade on bombs fuzes and impact power (according to penetration on ground or above it) why about giving the player the option to choose what kind of ordnance is carried by the AB case?

They put inside the right stuff for the next target to attack, we already have the butterfly mini-bombs, the AT type and the incendiary so why dont have the option to choose from those 3 types as fill? There were some more types of little bombs but dont need to be all modelled right now (or ever, who needs anti-personal mines?) Just the 3 types of contain as a submenu or drop-down menu when you choose an AB type of bomb

+1

Ah ok, didn't know that, thanks.

How unsafe were the "loose" bomblets? Could they go off if the plane shook on a bad takeoff, or if flown in turbulence? Or were they vulnerable to enemy fire?

Another point worth considering in my humble opinion is that in reality an Mk 103 salvo could incapacitate a tank without destroying it (like in "piercing the armor, killing the crew and detonating its ammo load"). Optics, weapons, tracks etc. were all quite vulnerable to high calibre autocanon fire (and they still are nowadays!). Unfortunately it's 1 or 0 in IL-2 and you have to actually pierce the armor in order to knock the tank out or it stays fully capable no matter how much lead you throw at it.

Piercing the armor meant blow up the tank. Remember, they had no sophisticated fire suppression systems. Tungsten gets glowing hot when it penetrates(it's pyrophoric) teel - if it enters the crewcompartment: Bang.

The point is that in the real world you do not need to cook a tank to take it out of action you can disable it or force the crew to abandon it. Taking out a track, disabling the turret, knocking out the engine are all historically achievable without piercing the armor.

However, as pointed out at the start of the thread, the IL2 damage model for armor is very simplistic and in the game its either destroy the tank completely or nothing happens at all.

1)They actually go off
2)No idea about turbulence
3)They were, as they were already armed.

Truly! Pilots disliked them a lot!

On the other hand, tanks damage model is actually a box with a cylinder over it. Each side of the box have a single armor value, and the cylinder is always the frontal armor of the turret... Tanks turrets on il2 are VERY tough! ;)

Still, theoretically, in game accepts destroying tougher armor by hitting it repetitively an x number of times depending on gun caliber. There are no HP's here.

Truth being, is that IL2 has too many planes from a programmers point of view, and keeping balance in between all of them is a hell of a job.

Tested the AB's on 4.11

AB 250, really not for AT use
AB500, equal as in UP, works fine. (Not that UP is a reference, just that on 4.09 they were useless)
AB1000, also works as AT, this is also different from UP.

Tested the AB's on 4.11

AB 250, really not for AT use (funy effect!)
AB500, equal as in UP, works fine. (Not that UP is a reference, just that on 4.09 they were useless)
AB1000, also works as AT, this is also different from UP.

Thanx for testing...:)
I see some stuff are changed.

Just for the record, my test range was with KV1's

I set my stuka cannons to 400m, come in at about 20-30 degrees, just above the tank cannon elevation (it not very high in the game) on the sides or rear.
There's time for 2 shots, and the shells usually strike where the sights are targeted.. very little trajectory drop.

It nice to see 2 shells converge and POP goes the weasel

It'll be nice to have better explosions on ground stuff - nothing like a good bang!!

I don't know if it's possible, but maybe the tank could be "disabled" when the necessary explosives detonate near them (like simulating the track damaged from the blast), and have the pilot credited with a "disabled tank". That would make some bombs and medium caliber weapons more useful.

The difference between disabled and destroyed often get missed on these forums.

Tracks and engine compartments were vulnerable to aircraft weapons as light as 20 mm or in some cases 0.50 cal (there are numerous stories of Korean War T34's being temporarily disabled by 0.50 cal directed at the engine compartment) .

However the tank was often only disabled for a very short time (hours at most) so unless friendly infantry were about to force abandonment of the disabled tank there was no great advantage to disabling it.

http://www.degnans.com/markd/panzerblitz.bmp

http://www.degnans.com/markd/schreck.jpg

On your particular activity, Stuka with armor piercing ammo, explosions are really out of the question!

And since the damage model of ground objects are overly simplified, big explosions will be an allways or never implementation. Explosions tax this game a lot, so I'am not relly sure if I will welcome more hollywood efects in game.

Maybe an option could be added on the mission builder to select the vehicle as explosive or not.