Gunnery Settings for IL2-1946 and SOW
 

Machine gun and cannon fire power in IL2-1946.

Concerning bullet destruction\damage......

With cannon fire, usually one accurate shot can cause fire or cut a wing in half bringing down an enemy aircraft. This with gunnery difficulty settings set to difficult.

Machine gun fire, you can damn near empty your magazine on enemy aircraft to were there are all kinds of aircraft particles and debris flying through the air and the target keeps on flying.

For this reason, I pretty much only fly aircraft with cannon fire (is better for ground targets and dog fights).

So, my dumb question is: If the cannon was superior to the machine gun in WWII, why didn't they equip all aircraft with cannons? Who wants a machine gun over cannon fire?

Which makes me wonder how accurate the two are in the game? Should the machine gun be doing more damage and the cannon maybe a little less for SOW to be more accurate?

I think your statement is incorrect. It should be

"When I fire Machine guns, you can damn near empty your magazine on enemy aircraft to were there are all kinds of aircraft particles and debris flying through the air and the target keeps on flying."

There are some nice videos on youtube showing P51 ripping off tails with 1 second bursts and to be honest, it's not that difficult. It needs more practice, though, and you got to know when to engage your target and what to set the gun-convergence to. It also depends a lot on what distances you engage the target.

Best way to test it is in the quick-mission builder, setting up 4 friendlies with you and engaging them at given distances. In the replay you can switch to their external views and watch if your tracers are converging in front of the target, behind it or directly into it. If you found the correct value and learn how to judge distances using the crosshair-diameters, you can kill anything with just a short burst - except Tigers, of course. ;)

you do what feuerfalke said to do but change the setting in your conf file from [game]
Arcade=0 to Arcade=1 this leave arrows where you gun hit its target.

Have you noticed that in "Arcade" mode that sometimes you get information in the cartoon bubble like "gunner killed with head shot". I wonder if their is some way to access this kind of information without playing in arcade...or maybe their is some way to record this information? Applications like "Sturmo-log" don't record much information in "off-line" mode...

It seems that Arcade mode accesses the damage model in some way?

This is one of the best videos on the topic and it helped me a lot:

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnJeM3wjew

Wow, very useful clip! Thank you for link Feuerfalke!

Just a minor correction- this, naturally only applies to effeminate European calibres- such as .303, 7.92 mm, 13 mm etc.

With accuracy and Americanism, Tigers can be destroyed with strong, healthy .50 rounds.

Go to it.

You're welcome.

The Hurri is one of my favorite planes and this video helped me a lot to enjoy it even more. It really chews up even late-war planes, if you set your convergence right and watch for correct distances to open fire.

LOL

Another minor correction:

With accuracy and Americanis, a lot of bullets and good propaganda, Tigers can be destroyed with strong, healthy .50 rounds.

:grin:

Excellent video. Thanks Feuerfalke!

With regards to the use of machine guns, not all machine guns can do significant damage, but all of them can help you save a teammate of yours: I have set mine at 1.000m convergence and many times I use them to scare enemy planes who hunt a teammate of mine. Though I know that I'm quite far to actually damage the enemy in due time, on the other hand some distant mg bursts help scaring him and disengage from my teammate.

Darts information is very good, but I question how the gun sights are modeled in "IL2 1946"...

Here is a study I have started and posted over at the Ubi site.

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...2481093716/p/1

I would be curious if anyone has any thoughts on my studies.

[short story] The FW190 doesn't fill the UK gun sight at 100 meters. Check out the screen shots I took.

Yes, I remember that.

There was also an older thread claiming that objects are not correctly displayed in size in IL2. I remember a long debate and inconclusive arguments from both sides, after somebody flew along the side of a Battleship and measured the time with a constant speed, finding out that the ship was too small.

Maybe he was right?

My personnal experience with the MGs of the 110 G2.

Once I chased a P47 that I damaged with my 20 mm guns. But I ran out of cannon shells and he was still alive and running. His ailerons were cut though, and I could easily continue to fire at him form more or less 75 meters.

Well, I shot everything from dead six and got him with my last of the last bullets. (PK)

I typed <gunstats to know hoq much hits I scored on him.... 800 + rounds. And the plane was not even smoking..... If I wouldn't have get the pilot....

The P47 is really a Sherman tank with wings.

Actually, the debate was conclusive for the size of the planes, it was geometrically prooved that the wingspan size is correct in game.
For other kind of objects (buildings for example), it's not necessary the case.

@Rama

Cool. Thanks for the information.

@ Oktober

If you fire at any target from dead six with MGs, you do little damage. The angle of impact seems to have an effect on the bullets and from this angle the bullets come in to flat on the target, that they simply bounce off it, if it has the slightest armor. This is especially true for planes with nose-mounted guns, as the angle is even lower than from a wing-fired gun at short range and short convergence. You can see a similar effect with the 50s on a P38 against armored targets.

ha ha, true enough.

Thanks for the testing info and the training video, excellent.

When I have had free time in the past (over the years) I have spent it tweaking IL2 trying to get it to run perfectly, over clocking, experimenting with settings, nhancer etc. It has been like a hobby within the hobby just trying to see how good I could make IL2 run.

I finally have it running\looking pretty good, so it's time for me to start seriously learning how to fly (enjoy) the sim.

cool, i had totally forgotten about this

Are gun sights adjustable in IL2?

Thats what I'm talking about, Am going to go into virtual reality training and try and get better with MG's, but I still prefer aircraft that have cannon fire, I don't hold the trigger down, when dog fighting, I use it for single shots. To me, a single shot kill is very cool.

I love setting up dogfights with me in a KI-43 or a KI-27 and the AI in a P-40 or a F4F...if you get good enough to take out the pilot or the engine of a P-40 in a KI-43 you will feel dam good about your gunnery skills.

Yes, you can predefine convergence range wich is position where all of your guns are boresighted, but only before mission start, not while on mission.

If you set for cannons 200, thats the range where rounds arrive to your gunsights sightline. For such short distances, as cannon is slightly below sightline, round will be moving BELOW sightline until at that range.

You can have different range for machineguns than cannon or more precisely weapon 1 and 2, making them useful at different ranges, if you set extremely high range, so the rounds have to go for ballistic arc that exeeds sightline for reaching desired point, you have 2 points where bullets are on sightline, extremely useful with fuselage mounted guns, not that useful for wing mounted weapons where you'd better keep em on desired engagement range.

I really should read the IL2 manual.

wow, I must look like a real dumb ars, I just now found that the convergence adjustments are right there in the arming menu.

Looks like the default convergence range in the game arming section for all weapons is 500 meters, thats what I have been using all along not knowing it was there.

Now, the video that Feuerfalke provided makes perfect sense to me. This will help me big time.

Thanks people!

Well, the interface and navigation in IL2 sometimes is a bit odd, at least not very intuitive. That's also true for "Input" and "Controls" options, IMHO. I hope they don't try to save money and time on this for SoW... ;)

I don't know if many people have followed my findings, but the logical conclusion one could draw from my studies is that if you are going to "range" your targets with the gunsight you should find out how far away your pray is when the wingspan fills the "big circle". Historically the FW190 fills the big circle of the UK gunsight at 100 yards (thats about 94.5 meters), but in fact it fills the circle at 80 meters (about 87.5 yards)...so you should reset your gun convergence accordingly...

However...with the use of a handy Micro$oft Word program called "Sniper'sCorner_2" I have found that your guns should still all hit your target at 80 meters even if you have your convergence at 100 meters (but they will NOT be focused in one spot...they will be focused in two slightly separated points.)...so I leave it to you to figure out whats right for you.

For anyone who hasn't checked out "Sniper's Corner_2" it is well worth a look...you can find it here.

http://mission4today.com/index.php?n...p=show&kid=296