Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt
 

The 1943 versions of the P-47 and Stuka both fall apart really easily don't they?

When I shoot a P-47 while flying the FW190 the tail section seems to break off like it is made of paper mache quite often. All I have read for decades about the P-47 was it's legendary ability to take a beating, not to mention the bushels of photos of it flying back home full of holes and missing all sorts of parts.

Rudel surely did not have a 4.12 Stuka to complete his over 2000 sorties either. On one mission he landed after several hits from 37mm P-39 rounds on top of many 20mm hits. He took many hits with Stukas and made it back home despite. The 4.12 Stuka flames like an early Zero when it is hit by anything and loses parts just as easily, big important parts.

I am sure these two aircraft should not be in the same league as an IL2 Sturmovik, but by reading accounts of their historical ability to absorb damage in combat it looks to me like the 4.12 versions of them would not have been able to cut it or create any legends.

If anything in WWII was put together to take abuse it would be any designated ground attack aircraft and the American aircraft that were built with limitless resources out of much better materials than were available to anyone else in the world.

While flying the 4.12 FW190A I have not noticed it breaking apart so easily as the above aircraft. Not invulnerable but I have made many trips home and landings with it after taking multiple 20mm and fifty caliber hits from other fighters and AA installations.

Has anyone else flew these 1943 versions and compared the 4.12 Thunderbolt and Stuka to historical accounts of survivable damage?

I did not fly these aircraft in WWII so all I have to go on are actual combat accounts and 12 years of flying this sim.

Thanks....

Thats news that the Ju87 was built by Mitsubishi....

Cannot tell you if the Stuka DM is porked—oops, excuse me, I meant ‘off’. The ridiculous ai rear gunners have kept me from doing any serious damage to them for years. Still, given the sheer size of the beast, if it were even a bit fragile in real life, it couldn’t have been as effective in combat conditions for most of the war as it obviously was.

However, most Jug (and Corsair and Hellcat) fans would have to wonder where you’ve been all these years; the Il-2 Sturmovik ’46 version of the P-47D DM is obviously the creation of a truly dedicated bunch of debunkers. Debunkers are usually people who read or hear of something being described in superlatives, and without any further investigation or actual thought, say to themselves “Naaah, it couldn’t possibly have been that good” and proceed from there to undo the legend with all the resources at their disposal without the slightest twinge of conscience, because they just know better (and because they think that destroying a legend will make them superior).

Debunkers have done their worst to undo Western Civilization in many ways, from insisting that great men in previous eras must have been vile and unworthy because they didn’t subscribe to today’s fashions in politically correct behavior, that the Allied Powers in WWII were only in it for the money and markets, that the Beatles weren’t really geniuses (they just stole all their material from some obscure band they saw in Frankfurt in the early sixties), and that rock and roll will eventually die.

The debunkers have looked at the whole spectrum of WWII fighters, and decided that the certain aircraft couldn’t possibly have deviated so far from the norm. I think that this is certainly the case with the P-47; compared to the standard smaller and lighter European fighters, it (and the F4U and F6F) was big and heavy, with not only armor in the usual places, but the sheer number of layers of stuff in the fuselage made it hard to hit anything vital, and what you could hit was so over-engineered that you had to get a multitude of heavy hits to bring it down. But that would make it above average in this regard, and the debunkers can't have that.

And that’s just hitting it from the rear. The R-2800 was the finest radial engine of the Second World War; only the Merlin has a comparable reputation or powered as many dominant fighters. It was legendary for its ability to take hits from light MGs to 20mm cannon and still run away from the opposition and get its pilot home, often hundreds of miles away. It was the Golden BB shots that were memorable rather than the regular hits, but in this sim, every hit to the engine compartment of an R-2800 is a Golden BB.

The M-82 of the La-5/7 is easily the most rugged engine in the Il-2 inventory; it will take some hits and keep running fairly strongly, and the BMW in the FW 190As will keep going after a few strikes (even from a 12.7mm MG), but the R-2800 will stop on a dime almost every time it is hit with a spitball (and let’s be clear here; I maintain that 95% of the hits made to the engine compartment should not be possible for the rear gunners, AI or human, much less that 99.9% of those hits would have done anything like the damage they usually do). AI gunners are still making high deflection hits from 500m and more away, so the bullshit factor has always been very high in that regard (and oddly enough, the debunkers ignore the historical realities in this case).

Both of these engines were closely cowled, and their interiors were packed tightly with all sorts of tubing and wiring; any hit to these areas that penetrated the skin of the aircraft would probably have done some serious damage, whereas the R-2800 was not so closely packed and the bulk of the cylinders’ diameters were made up of cooling fins. I would also suggest that it was so big and made so well made that it was not nearly as susceptible to a couple of rounds bouncing around inside the cowl as these other examples. There are multiple records of R-2800s getting their aircraft back to base with two or three cylinders shot away, with tree limbs 10-15cm in diameter stuck in the engine compartment, or with large portions of one or more propeller blades shot away (unbalanced props would be catastrophic for most engines).

Every time this comes up, a debunker says something like “Well, you only hear about the aircraft that made it back; you never hear about the hundreds that didn’t come back, so there.”

Hah. P-47s and F6F Hellcats were the two safest fighters to fly in combat in WWII, and they were both powered by the mighty R-2800. An awful lot of them did come back, in much greater proportions than any other aircraft performing the same sorts of missions. And these were very widely used in all theaters, in greater numbers than most of the other ‘safe’ fighter/bomber types that are touted as ‘rugged’.

Look out debunkers. We've found you out.

cheers

horseback

Stukas being vulnerable at last? Gotta check this out. I haven't done any missions against these for a loooong time, because few patches ago they could absorb ridiculous amounts of bullets (especially .30 caliber), which made emulating early BoB scenarios quite a bit difficult. If they're less "panzer" now, I'm all for it!

Re: La-5/7 and Fw-190 - they are amongst the oldest models, dating back to the very first version of the game and their simplified DMs were never really completely upgraded, hence the engines and fuselages made of reinforced concrete ;). We just have to live with it and hope that TD will consider putting these on "to do" list (including aforementioned R-2800).

The Stuka has been in the sim for a very long time too.

The FW190 has been tweaked up and down over the years, I remember one patch saw it's wings flying off with one hit, then the next patch it was made stronger. I think with most of the aircraft they have found a good balance, you can hobble home with a few hits but when they start adding up your chances of staying in the air quickly go way down.

It just seemed to me that the 4.12 P-47 and Stuka were not as tough as the fW190A, and I have even had better luck while flying the 109 in taking hits than the 4.12 Stuka.


I had a mission set up where I was intercepting four Ace p-47 razorbacks and I was surprised at how easy it was to knock them out of the sky, often one pass, even an off angle one will take the plane or pilot out. I can see getting the occasional lucky hit, but it seemed every one of the P-47s I hit with the FW190 went down very easily. I don't remember reading about how their tail sections were weak or vulnerable like you can read about the IL2 or Bf109.

The Stuka I was flying was the D-5, the late one that is supposed to be more heavily armored than the early ones, but it seems it would light up like a torch with one hit from a fighter, and it fell apart very easily from one AA hit, which is not what you read about in combat accounts.

I have a lot of experience with engineering and mechanics, I know more about internal combustion engines than most people ever will, and I have a good feel for what machinery should do under abuse.

Once I got a look at a sort of blueprint for a FW190 and I am pretty sure I saw that it had a large diameter piece of pipe going through one wing, through the fuselage and into the other wing, and I though about how hard it would be to shoot one of those wings off, it would take a good hit on that metal pipe, hitting the rest of the wing might make it useless, but it would hang onto the fuselage. So when you see wings flying off model aircraft frequently which were specifically designed to be in combat carrying heavy loads while dive bombing etc. it makes you wonder if something needs tweaked a bit.

I don't know what the blueprint for the p47 or stuka looks like, but unless a hit is very lucky or well placed, I would think it would take more than one to break a wing off a dive bomber, or the tail off the massive P47 fuselage. And a late war dive bomber that is heavily armored should not light up in flames as often as a paper-bag early Japanese fighter with no armor and no sealing tanks.

So I don't want to complain, but just offer observations and comparisons between history texts and the modeled aircraft and betwen the modeled aircraft themselves where inconsistencies seem to show up.

Thanks.

We are talking about Ju-87, right? They are extremely vulnerable to small caliber rounds, if you hit the wing tanks. HurricaneIIb lights them like candles. Their only vice is their rear gunner, he can shoot quite far below.
I do not know if this is true, but for the Fw190 I can say, their damage models seem okay to me. If you park behind and pump .50 cal or smaller into them they absorb lots of damage - but they were considered tough IRL(and had armor plating that protected pilot and fuel tank from .50cal from directly behind).
Hit critical areas - engine, pilot, wingroots with concentrated bursts, or when possible shoot the fuel tank from behind with 20mm or larger, and they will go down. I've had Fw190 going down with single bursts, and I have had them absorb lots of ammo - but then mostly due to my less than stellar targeting. Sitting in an Fw190 I have been killed by single .50cal bullets (pilot or engine) -happens rarely, but does. And I have taken countless hits and still more or less flew away -also rare.

FW 190
x 4 MG 151. 20
X2 MG 131

If you have bad luck and get one burst of one seconds of fire from fw.
You will get 12 bullets x 4 = 48 hits of HE 20mm
And 15 x 2 = 30 hits of 13 mm - HE - AP ?

Maybe you can lost your tail section in a P47 for the amount of HE.

Many aircraft have fuel tanks in the wings but are ignored.., others have ammunition.
What I wonder is because some fuel tanks catch fire and others no.

TD is doing a good job... But always will be a endless Work.

Now TD is fixing many things.

I only can tell, THANKS!

Edited: some numbers

Actually, the only single shot kill to the R-2800 is hitting the ignition, on top of the hub in the P-47. No armour or backup system there in real life, a clear one shot kill.

Mitsubishi Stuka.

Kinda reminds me of the Nakajima 190:


http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...0japs2lk-2.jpg

Edited:

The reasons why an engine dies
It is mainly due to loss of water and oil or Fuel
Caused by .30 or 23mm its close to the same " virtually "
Fire stops if the fuel pump cut ... maybe..

I just remember online Play

I was behind 4 Ju 88 at 150 to 250 mts shooting at the six.. for one minute or more in a Hellcat.

I get full hits of 4 Ju 88 For one minute ! I only lose aleiron controls and maybe some engine power..

Maybe in 4.10 or 4.11..

How big is the 'ignition' on the R-2800? What percentage of area inside the cowl (viewed from head-on) does it represent? How often does the average two or three shot burst of 7mm into the cowl from a rear gunner kill the engine?

If the answer to the last question is is a greater number than the answers to the the first questions, something is very wrong. Hitting one of the ignition coils(?) on top of the crankcase from over 200m is a classic Golden BB, and should be vanishingly rare.

It is not vanishingly rare.

cheers

horseback

As most planes in the game, both the P-47 and the Fw-190 have complete internal collision boxes modelled. This is, individual models for each internal system with a rough shape and size.

This means that if the ignition system is shot out, is because a bullet indeed hit that small part of the engine.

Now, there's another group of planes, which includes the Stuka and the P-39/P-63, that do not have any internal collision boxes at all.
In these planes the damage to internal systems is determined procedurally every time a bullet hits the airframe.
For the Stuka there's around a 60% chance for a incendiary bullet shot to the wing root to set the wing tanks on fire.

I have once hit a P-47 with 80 20mm rounds (from a J2M) and it flew away. Other times a few hits from a 109 on the wing root will bring it down.
Even on planes with complete damage models there's some randomness thrown in to make things more interesting and realistic.
For example, back to the ignition system in the P-47, a bullet may not have enough force to knock out a magneto, but it may still sever some wiring and have the same effect.

In the case of the F6F, as a Ju88 and Betty pilot I can attest to the engine toughness to both MG and cannon fire.

I've had more "one shot" instant stops in the P 47 than any other plane in the sim. Second place goes to the glass jawed P 40.

You could probably bring the IL2 P 47 down easily with a side arm, if they were available in the sim.

Which tells me that the shot is impossibly accurate, or that the 'collision boxes' are on the especially generous side for the P-47's (and the Hellcat's and the Corsair's) engine compartment.

As for random numbers, only God can generate a truly random number; there is always a prejudice built into any system built by men, and it is pretty obvious here.

When I run down and across the rear of a Betty at a 45 degree angle after a high 7 o'clock diving gunnery pass, and the rear gunner takes out my engine 3 out of 5 times in a QMB (my speed was in excess of 370 kts every time), that is not random.

When I approach from a level 4 o'clock, and get my engine knocked out from 450 meters as often as once in five tries, that is not random.

It is wrong.

cheers

horseback

Let me put it this way, without these pseudo random numbers every single hit would knock out the engine, break controls, set fires, tear wings, etc, every single time

And no, the game doesn't call a special "letsporkthep47.rnd()" function, it uses de very same random number generator for the whole game. So by your logic the entire game is wrong ;)

Also look at the size of the R-2800 distributors in this picture, each is as big as an human head.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7.../R2800work.jpg

Now, I'm not claiming that the damage model is perfect as it is, and I don't fly the P-47 so I can only tell what I have seen when flying against it online.
I would expect the engine to be somewhat more fragile, given the complex instalation with the turbocharger on the belly and all the plumbing it needs. But still it shouldn't have more probability to seize than the F6F or F4U.

Personally I wouldn't guide by getting the engine killed on a single hit by AI, it always had that supernatural hability to do tremendous damage with few rounds.

I have the same problem with the Hs-129 and AAA, it would aim directly to the engines and knock them down on a single hit, rarely it hits other thing that the very precise spot that kills the engines.

There's nothing about the Stuka's service record which indicates that it was a particularly tough aircraft, other than the fact that it was stressed to handle dive bombing.

Remember, part of the Stuka's reputation rested on the fact that the Germans were able to achieve massive air superiority in 1939-41. Without fighter escort, the Stuka was quite vulnerable, as evidenced by its less than stellar performance during the Battle of Britain.

Dora model Stukas might have been tougher than Bertha models, but they were still based on a mid-1930s design with all its limitations.

To paraphrase a common saying, "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by poor modeling." (Other than that, I agree with you. Debunking is just a method of generating controversy, which drums up trade for documentary producers, writers and academics.)

Remember that both the Corsair and Hellcat are products of the deeply flawed Pacific Fighters expansion, and there might be legal reasons why 1c/TD can't fix them. The Pacific Theater and carrier ops were obviously areas that 1c had less experience with, fewer local resources to work with, and less personal incentive to recreate, and it shows.

As for the P-47, I think that 1c's original work was influenced heavily by contemporary Soviet assessments of the P-47C, which were influenced by the relative lack of need for a high-altitude, long-range escort and the Soviet preference for cannons rather than heavy machine guns as fighter aircraft armament. The Soviets didn't know what to make of it and wrote it off. I also have to wonder if Soviet assessments suffered from some of the same shock that British and U.S. 56 FG pilots suffered when transitioning from the Spitfire to the Jug. After all, Soviet fighter pilots were more familiar with small, nimble fighters like the I-16 and Yak series, so the P-47 must have seemed clumsy by comparison.

TD has gone to great lengths to fix things, so I don't want to fault them, but it's possible that there is more work to be done.

While I think that your points about the R-2800 (and, by extension many of the other late war U.S. radial engines modeled in the game) are valid, to play devil's advocate, part of the reputation of the late war U.S. fighters was made by the fact that after 1943, U.S. pilots usually had air superiority (at least locally) and were usually facing inferior opponents.

What I'd like is if just about every plane in the game were harder to break into pieces or set on fire, except those noted for their light construction and lack of self-sealing fuel tanks. I think that TD has got it about right for crew injury and kills, but it's a too easy to blow parts off or set planes on fire.

In particular, I think that it's unrealistic for any heavy or medium bomber to lose a wing, stabilizer or entire engine to MG fire, or anything other than sustained 20mm cannon fire, and extremely unrealistic for the fuselage to break up.

I particularly dislike the ease with which you can blow off entire wings of planes like the B-17 using just heavy machine guns or a few 20mm cannon hits. If you look at gun camera footage of actual heavy bomber kills, kills are mostly achieved by setting the plane on fire, while archival films of heavy bomber shoot-downs shows that major parts come off the plane only as a result of severe fires (which melt, burn and weaken aluminum), direct hits by heavy flak (i.e., a direct hit by a 75mm or greater explosive round) or G-stresses on the plane as it falls out of control (possibly due to pilot kills or destruction of control linkages).

Likewise, it's possibly unrealistic for the heavier single- and twin-engined planes in the game (e.g. IL-2, P-38, P-47, F4U, F6F) to lose wings, engines or entire control surfaces due to MG fire, or anything more than sustained 20mm cannon fire, much less break up. There's plenty of evidence showing that smaller planes like the Bf-109, FW-190 or various Japanese fighters can lose wings due to heavy MG or 20mm fire, however.

After all, it's the nature of explosive rounds to blow up on the aircraft's surface, blowing big holes in the plane's skin, while much of the blast is dissipated in the empty space within the fuselage or wing, while most AP rounds will punch a smallish hole in the skin and pass through the plane to the other side. Obviously, if there's something under the skin things are very different, but you see lots of pictures of planes with massive surface damage which are able to keep on flying - at least for a while.

And, even for critical parts, most parts of a military aircraft are designed to be redundant, so that one hit to a particular part doesn't kill the plane. Obviously, there are exceptions like cooling systems or crew, but just one hit to a wing root or engine mount isn't going to blow that part off.

I'd like to see slightly more complex damage modeling, where there is a minimum damage requirement to blow off certain parts of certain planes (as opposed to just setting them on fire or make them stop working). Not just "hit points" or a random chance of critical damage, but an actual threshold to do any significant damage at all.

As an ignorant rough estimate:

Heavy or medium bomber fuselage or wing - 75 mm explosive.
Heavy or medium bomber stabilizer or engine mount - 30 mm explosive.
Heavy or medium bomber control surface - 20 mm explosive.

Light twin-engined bomber or heavy attack, fighter or transport fuselage - 75 mm explosive.
Light twin-engined bomber or heavy attack, fighter or transport wing or engine mount - 30 mm explosive.
Light twin-engined bomber or heavy attack, fighter or transport stabilizer - 20 mm explosive.
Light twin-engined bomber or heavy attack, fighter or transport control surface - Heavy MG (e.g., .50 caliber or 12.7mm) HE, AP or ball.

Light attack, recce or fighter or transport fuselage or engine mount - 30 mm explosive.
Light attack, recce or fighter or transport wing or stabilizer - Heavy MG HE, AP or ball.
Light attack, recce or fighter or transport control surface - Light MG (e.g., 0.30 caliber or 7.62 mm) AP or ball.

Very light aircraft fuselage, wing or engine mount - 20 mm explosive or AP.
Very light aircraft stabilizer - Heavy MG HE, AP or ball.
Very light aircraft control surface - Light MG AP or ball.

This has been changed in 4.12. If anything, AI gunnery isn't good enough, at least for Ace or Veteran fighters.

That might speak not so much to the accuracy of the AAA, so much as flaws with the DM for the Hs-129. TD gave us a lovely rework of this plane, but they might still be retaining old, bad DM.

That was why they had two distributors, for redundancy. My argument is that the Corsair and Hellcat are both at least as fragile as the P-47 (and the Hellcat is probably the worst of the trio). You might also take another look at your picture: there's a lot more space between the cylinder heads and the metal of the cowling than we would see in a comparable picture of a Focke-Wulf or Lavotchkin. The damage model for the R-2800 is plainly wrong, and the DMs for the rest of the aircraft that use it are also clearly exaggerated in light of their combat records.

As I pointed out, just making a hit inside the cowling of a fighter approaching from any angle at any distance was extremely difficult; it happens far too often, and for certain aircraft, I suspect that it happens extra often, just as certain ai aircraft always seem to be crewed by clones of Little Stevie Wonder at the gunner's position (regardless of assigned skill level) and others always have the virtual offspring of Annie Oakley and Davy Crockett at their guns.

Do a little research and see how the fuel tanks and turbosupercharger in the Thunderbolt was installed and try to remember that American fighters in general were notoriously over-engineered and built to greater stress standards than the European norm (and most definitely the Japanese norm), and that the P-47 was considered even more so. There was a heavy belly 'keel' added early in the P-47C series in order to support a large drop tank and plumbing for it; it added a lot of protection for fuel tanks that were already buried pretty deeply inside the fuselage and had oodles of the leak-proofing that was standard on less protected tanks in other aircraft of the era. See the attached picture:http://www.aviation-history.com/repu...urbo-sys-3.jpg

That's just the turbosupercharger; it doesn't show the supporting frames or the basic structure that covered it. The majority of it was ducting and piping that was hard to hit, and wouldn't be easily or seriously punctured unless hit from the right angle (i.e., a low-probability high deflection shot). The critical components were comparatively small. It could take a licking and keep in ticking.

Carrier aircraft are designed to take the stresses of repeated carrier landings, which adds to the strength and density of the airframe, which makes them even tougher to destroy or damage.

All three of these aircraft were used extensively in close ground support and were universally acknowledged as the safest aircraft of the war for that task. Corsairs and Hellcats largely replaced the SB2C Helldiver in the divebombing role by the end of the war because the difference in accuracy was minimal and the aircraft were much more capable (and survivable) after they dropped their bombs at low level over some of the densest light flak in the world.

The FW-190's BMW and the La-5/-7 series are treated much better, as I have pointed out, and neither had a record remotely comparable, particularly when specifically assigned to ground support. The schlacht variants of the 190 were heavily rebuilt with extra armor and weapon installations; the P-47, F6F and F4U assigned to ground attack were no different from the models assigned to air combat. Hour for dedicated ground attack combat hour, all three of these American fighters were statistically safer to fly over heavily defended enemy positions.

But not in this game. The 'random numbers' that generate hits and determine damage are clearly wrong for these aircraft.

And of course, it is a given that the AI are accurate (and swivel their guns ridiculously fast) at any distance or skill setting, to the point of parody (seriously, not a lot of trained soldiers can hit a stationary target the size of a P-47's cowl opening from 400m away, much less pick off the distributors with a standard rifle, much less than that hit it with a machine gun with open sights from a moving platform). For the off-line player, that is by far the biggest hole in the sim, but there appears to be no effective way to limit their accuracy to realistic levels (that DT will admit to, but I'm still getting disabling strikes from Rookie Zeros at over 400m, and as for the Betties...:evil:).

In general, the aircraft crew ai are far too accurate at ridiculous ranges and angles, and are able to bring their guns to bear much too quickly. They consistently hit 'spots' more often than the aircraft in general. The AA on the ground also seems to be modeled as being equivalent to a battery than as an individual emplacement, and again, even the heavy guns readjust and aim at 'spots' with inhuman speed.

I've flown many Soviet and German campaigns in Il-2 Sturmovik and all its successors over the last eleven years; no German or Soviet aircraft is as susceptible to being hit or being seriously damaged by those hits as the US radial powered fighters, when you take into account their relative size and speeds. It is not a matter of tactics; you can use the QMB to assign yourself a FW 190 or La-5F/FN to attack the same formation of Betties or He-111s and take the same angles of approach and you will take fewer hits and less damage than you will with a P-47, F4U or F6F.

You will find that these aircraft are harder to keep trimmed, that their instrument displays are generally inaccurate, and even once you finally figure out how to fly them with comparable precision, you will still take more hits than with the German or Soviet radials and that those hits will do disproportionate levels of damage.

cheers

horseback

Virtually all aircraft piston engines have dual ignition systems. If one totally fails, the other will continue to run. You'd have to take out both mags or the entire ignition manifold (which also had extra thickness at the front of the ring) to destroy the ignition system in an R-2800. The mags were encased with some armor protection at the front, and also had some protection from the spinning propeller. Their small size also helped protect them. Many things will be hit and knocked out from the front before the ignition.

Though it's one of my top favorite aircraft of any era, I haven't touched Oleg's P-47 in years, due to it's unacceptably crappy cockpit, and it's "glass jaw" vulnerability. Now, I don't know if the latter issue was ever addressed in subsequent patches, but if the real-world P-47 was anywhere as near to being one-shot-killed from the front as it is in the game, then it would have earned an entirely different reputation than the one it enjoys now.

The game's F6F and F4U have the same engine but aren't nearly as brittle in the front quarter as the P-47.

Whatever the ignition component on top of the hub was, it's crucial for the engine and there's no backup system. I'm nowhere near my sources, so you'll have to look at the details yourself. One hit in the right spot, the component's dead, and the engine dies with it. You can also try in game and shoot the engine into other parts, you'll see it keeps working.

I agree with most of our points horseback, including trimming and innacurate instruments (this later issue is not only a problem of US planes).

Regardless of ammount of armor or redundancy, if you look at the ammount of space occupied with critical systems on the P-47 you cannot deny that the chance of damaging something to some extend is greater than in other planes. But of course redundancy will make critical hits harder to achieve.

I took a look at the collision boxes on the P-47, both distributors are modelled and are slightly smaller than in reality, there's two magnetos placed behind the engine, while in reality the R-2800 had only one placed between the two distributors (unless I missed something while looking at the schematic).
The intercooler is missing, but the turbine and belly plumbing is there. Oil coolers are merged into a single smaller unit. (Cockpit armour plates and other internal parts are also modelled btw)
All in all I think the collision boxes itself are generous in favour of the P-47. The probability of actually hitting something inside the plane might be smaller than in reality.
The problem, if there's actually one (not saying there isn't, it's just that I dont fly the P-47, and when flying a bomber surviving a Jug attack long enough to cause damage with the gunners -I man the guns- is almost impossible) might indeed have to do with too big a chance to receive damage when a internal part is hit.

Pursuivant:
I dont have mayor problems with the engines on the Hs-129 on air to air combat, be it a human pilot or AI gunner, it's AAA that is obsessed with my engines :)
But yes, either the damage on the Hs-129 engines is exagerated (the cowling bottom half was armored after all), or is downplayed on other planes with engines of the same family (G-50/MC-200, IAR-80/81)

Hi WOZ, do you happen to know the full list of these planes with the simplified damage model?

Someone here once posted an image of these damage boxes in a Zero, and the lack thereof in the P-39 (maybe it was you), but I couldn't track down the list of planes or the tool used to illustrate the damage boxes.

Thanks,

WokeUpDead

Long ago at the old UBI forum, Oleg did indeed say that single flak guns are modeled as a battery, to help with FPS issues in the sim.

I’m aware that many other aircraft have inaccurate or unreadable instrumentation, but there are several that are blessed with key instruments that are quite accurate (most of the Japanese fighters definitely fall into that category) in the game; this just makes it harder to tolerate. What you may not appreciate is how inconsistent the inaccuracies of the trimming and instrumentation of these aircraft are; in most other aircraft, the ‘error’ is almost always the same, whereas in the late war US fighters as a group, the instruments will not only lie to you, they will lie to you from different directions as the speed changes.
The amount of space occupied with critical systems is relatively farther into the fuselage than the diagram can convey; as I pointed out, there are a lot of support members and fuselage framing and skin that you have to get through before you can talk about puncturing the pipes and ducting—and the more critical the pipe or duct is, the more non-critical stuff is between it and the outer skin. Additionally, the ducting and pipes are not remotely comparable to the ducting in your building’s air conditioning system; it was pretty heavy-duty stuff that had to hold up under the extremes of altitude and high G maneuvers, not to mention the odd bullet or explosive round that found its way past the tail wheel and the rudder.

I remember being admonished on several occasions over the years that to penetrate a metal layer that not only thickness of the plate but angle of penetration is critical (usually after I pointed out that the vulnerability of certain aircraft from rear quarter attacks seemed awfully low). Penetrating multiple layers of metal at varying angles as would be necessary to damage the turbosupercharger system would be fairly difficult, even with multiple close range 20mm hits.

If you have to penetrate multiple layers from multiple angles, it gets a lot harder to do meaningful damage, and the whole of the underside of the Jug was reinforced by that ‘keel’ I mentioned earlier, as well as the structural members that held the fuel tanks in place.

I still think that the historical record shows both that making the kind of hits that are routinely made (or more accurately, credited) in the game and the amount of damage they are modeled as inflicting are excessive.While I rarely attempt to contradict the great Robert A. Heinlein, I would suggest to you that nothing says ‘basic human nature’ more than: “I’m going to stick this up your %#&%(&*^)*, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.” One or two misunderstandings is a coincidence; after that, if they continue to always work to your disadvantage you should assume that you’re getting jerked around, and start protecting your interests (learn this lesson before you get married, or your life will be a living hell).
Here, I generally agree. I argued on many occasions on the Ubi forums that the late war American fighters were too demanding of technical expertise at the ground crew level for the Soviets to keep them flying properly, and that the tactical doctrines they were built to were utterly alien to the VVS, which led to Oleg and Co taking the operational records, performance data and pilot descriptions with a five pound bag of salt (rather than the traditional grain). As products of the old Soviet system, I suspect that they believed to their bones that anything from America was heavily propagandized and needed to be taken down a peg. I know that they rejected official documentation on the P-38 in favor of ‘other’ sources, and certainly the Mustang’s treatment would indicate that they preferred to use data gathered from Chiang Kai-Shek's clapped-out, badly maintained Lend-Lease examples acquired from the People’s Republic of China after 1948.

One correction: the 56th FG came to England as the only fighter group in the 8th AF that had experience with the P-47, and they loved it. By contrast the 78th FG had originally been a P-38 outfit that got stripped of its aircraft and most of their experienced pilots for the North African invasion, and the 4th FG had originally been the RAF’s Eagle Squadrons flying Spit Vbs (and as the only source of experienced combat pilots, were stripped of a large portion of key leaders and their most promising pilots). The 78th and 4th FGs were not big fans of the Jug, and frankly sulked about it for most of their breaking in period.

The 56th adapted and made the most of the Jug, while the 4th couldn't move on to the P-51 fast enough; its senior officers were trying to get the P-51 or P-51A before word about the Merlin version reached them. The 78th eventually resigned themselves to the Jug, and were one of the last groups to convert to the Mustang.When we are talking about taking damage from ground fire, the reputations in question were made during 1944 and after, against some extremely potent AAA systems and ground troops (IJA) trained to shoot back rather than scatter and hide from aerial attacks. The 8th AF fighter groups prior to February of 1944 had barely achieved a standoff, but the ruggedness of the (much less capable) early P-47s was already established; Robert Johnson was far from the only guy to get his Thunderbolt shot to pieces over eastern France and still make it back across the Channel.

Corsairs and Hellcats got their combat starts in February and August of 1943, well before the Japanese had been beaten. The fact is that US Naval Aviators used the Corsair and Hellcat to break the IJN air arm’s back by spring of 1944; using the F4F or FM-2, it would have taken another six months (and hundreds more good men’s lives) at the least.

cheers

horseback

My view of the toughness of the planes being discussed is a bit different from many of the posters here, maybe because I fly mostly online where I rarely attack bombers and their AI gunners. I find the P-47's wings to be extremely tough, same goes for the F4U. They can take a lot of damage and still maintain lift and stability, unlike Yak or 190 wings. Their engines can be damaged lightly, but I rarely see one knocked out completely (though when it does happen it's on the P-47, not the F4U). PKs are rare, and tails falling off are even rarer.

Could my different impression be caused by the difference in environment and targets? AI gunners on bombers will usually be looking directly into your engine, even if you don't attack from six o'clock. Unlike AI fighers, human opponents will usually avoid the head-on and will maneuver onto your six, where they will have a good look at your wings when you make a slight turn. If they shoot directly from your six, they may damage your controls (I lose elevators and rudders often in the F4U and P-47), but your engine will be the furthest target for them.

Agree about the Stuka toughness, the LMGs on the Hurricane IIB really do a number on its wing tanks. It is an old, slow, big plane that I imagine was armored more from the bottom than the top though. Also, its lack of toughness is offset by that rear gunner and its ability to turn with a Spitfire.

Of course the ignition is crucial to engine operation. Obviously. If the entire ignition system (both mags and the manifold) is rendered inoperative, then of course the engine dies. That is also obvious. One doesn't need "sources' to figure that out. Furthermore, the ignition system is redundant in that there are two systems. That redundancy counts as backup. Not sure why you're talking about it not having a backup.

At any rate, the kind of incoming fire that ruins an entire ignition system will ruin other systems as well, and will pretty much render the aircraft impotent anyway.

You're using the game's damage model to shape your thoughts on how vulnerable specific real-world auxiliary engine systems are, while showing no real-word knowledge on the actual engineering of these systems.

You can't have a first-rate Air Force without a first-rate support system, and of the major nations involved in WW2, only Great Britain, the United States and Germany (prior to 1944) had the economic and technological infrastructure to really keep their planes in top condition. Even then, on many fronts it was a challenge for even the best maintenance men and supply chains (e.g., the U.S. and Great Britain in Burma, North Africa, the Pacific Islands).

By contrast, the Soviets, Italians, Japanese, Chinese and minor Axis powers were always struggling to keep their air forces up to scratch (the Chinese were notably bad at it). And, both during and after WW2, the Soviets made a virtue of necessity and emphasized simple, rugged, "soldier-proof" weapon such as the Il-2 and the AK-47.

This is one of the reasons why one of my top standing requests for the game is the ability for mission builders to downgrade aircraft performance. At the very least, there should be a way of downgrading aircraft performance to reflect lack of 100 Octane Avgas.

My bad. I was thinking of the reactions of the "Eagle Squadron" vets to the P-47, such as the men of the 4th.

Now, that's entirely different. By 1943, just about all the major combatants had gotten very good at AAA gunnery and AAA systems of the era were all roughly comparable (U.S. proximity fuses excepted). And, at least for Germany, the AAA gunners didn't lose that many guns or men and remained quite potent until the end of the war. So, if you're citing survivability against ground fire and you've got comparable statistics for other aircraft types (e.g., loss rate per ground attack sortie) then I withdraw my criticism.

Yep. I think that your point about the relative vulnerability of the R-2800 engine and my criticism that heavy fighters in IL-2 "break" too easily are compatible. I'd like to see notably tough aircraft like the IL-2, B-17, Wellington, P-47, F4U and F6F be pretty much invulnerable to anything except direct hits by flak, critical hits, pilot kills, fires and sustained fire by 20mm cannons or larger.

My understanding was that the "beginning of the end" for the IJN were the Battles of Midway and Guadacanal. I don't dispute that the the F6F and F4U sped the destruction of the IJN (and IJAAF in New Guinea), but arguably pilots flying the P-40, P-39/P-400 and F4F paved the way.

In particular, after Midway and Guadacanal, the Japanese supply chain was never as secure as it should have been, so Japanese planes and pilots never got the support they really needed. Japanese policy towards its pilots was also, quite frankly, brutal, which didn't help matters either. All that led to a loss of effectiveness.

But, then maybe that's too much revisionist history on my part. :)

What is indisputably is that by 1944, when the the F6F and F4U really sealed their reputations, the Japanese were desperate and there was just no comparison between pilot quality and technical support. But, I say that without meaning to detract from the reputation of either plane, or the men who flew them. I think that you're right that 1943 was the year that the tide really turned, and both the F6F and F4U helped to do do that.

This is a good point. And, it's not just AI gunners, it's just the nature of defensive gunnery that you'll mostly be aiming at the front of incoming fighters - either aiming directly at them as they attack you, or taking leading shots them as they pass.

??? I find that those massive rows of .303 machine guns on the Hurricane MkI, MkIIB and Spitfire I are some of the most useless weapons in the game, at least when it comes to attacking anything other than light fighters at close range.

Against anything but the lightest, most lightly armored aircraft, you basically need a PK, a critical hit or a fire to take down your foe. And, to have a hope of getting any of those things, you need to get close, aim carefully and shoot bursts of at least 3-5 seconds.

Of course, that's also historically accurate performance. There's a very good reason why the RAF switched to cannons.

At least for AI, I don't find that Stuka gunners are that tough, nor do Stukas really try to maneuver defensively, even when they're not in formation. They're pretty much sitting ducks unless they have escorts.

The Guadalcanal campaign didn't end until late spring/early summer of 1943, after the first several squadrons of Corsairs had deployed. Combined with Midway, the cream of the IJN's fighter force were eliminated, but Rabaul remained a menace in the Solomons into the following spring of 1944, due in part to the IJA's addition to the mix there. In addition, the IJN's carrier forces were still formidable; they gave the USN a pretty good thumping at Santa Cruz in '43, which led to our being a lot more cautious until the new carriers got in-theater in late summer '43.

The arrival of the new fast carriers equipped with the significantly superior Hellcat, coupled with the land-based Corsairs along the Solomon chain is what tipped the scales.

I'll give plenty of credit to the P-40 and P-38 (which entered combat in New Guinea in November of 1942), but the P-39 was a disaster in the Southwest Pacific. Poor support, bad documentation and poorly prepared pilots and maintenance personnel rushed to the theater doomed it and ruined its reputation, regardless of its capabilities on paper. It was almost strictly a ground support aircraft in the Pacific the moment a viable alternative became available.

The P-40 and the Wildcats gave the USN and USAAF parity at best, and the P-38s were never available in adequate numbers anywhere until the middle of1944. The F6F and the F4U (which had its own production issues early on) were the keys to the turn around.

cheers

horseback

'Looking into your engine' should be meaningless at ranges of more than 100m for the best aerial marksmen who ever lived; you're shooting from a platform moving in three dimensions at a target less than 2 meters square and also moving in three dimensions (not the same dimensions and directions as you are). In real terms, until the range was so short that relative motion was meaningless or your attacker was flying in close formation, hitting him was usually a matter of chance. At ranges over 100m, the average man can barely discern that there is a cowl, much less hit it under the conditions that would prevail in WWII.

Shooting accurately from a maneuvering aircraft, even a bomber in a gentle bank, was next to impossible. Ai gunnery from rear gunners and ground flak in this game has always been ridiculously accurate, probably more than modern automated systems today.

Unrealistic accuracy at unrealistic ranges + unrealistic DMs=unrealistic results.

cheers

horseback

Can you please try to understand what other posters are saying before making insulting assumptions about them? :confused:

I've wondered about how it's possible to kill the engine with one shot, went to a museum, looked at the components around the engine and found that there was one crucial component that had no backup. Books I acquired later confirm it. However, all this was many years ago and you'll have to forgive me that I do not remember the details from the top of my head. I don't understand why you prefer to insult me instead of looking into your sources to post the details yourself.

Fortunately, other posters are more constructive - The_WOZ has by now posted the details - thank you. Single magnetos, dual distribution. Hit the magnetos and the R-2800 is dead. One shot, rifle calibre. Magnetos gone, ignition dies, engine dies, the impossible made possible.

Aren't they? If I shoot B-17s, they rarely shed wings, and their tail section is pretty tough, too. Most of the B-17s going down have fires in the fuel tanks.
That is -historically seen- too many, BUT contrary to many historic pilots I know exactly what spots to hit, and I can hit with percentages that would make Marseille blush(and compared to others in this game I'm still a poor shot).
So basically I do not think the damage modeling in it self is the problem, we, and maybe the AI are. We hit too well. We know where to hit to make it hurt a lot (And I do think the AI did(or does) too, how else could they shoot the pilot with next to limitless accuracy in 4.09?).

Another thing that works against the Jug is its size - just set up a filght of Bettys (or any other well armed bomber) and park a Jug behind them - count the hits you recieve in 60 seconds -do it in a much smaller plane like the La5, and count again - you will recieve considerably less hits. And yes, if you do it a few times, you will get the engine shot dead in the Jug, but what did you expect? - the R-2800 is tough, but not immune- especially to 20mm fire.
Hmm, early to mid war I find them at least decent, and considering armament on the early P-40s, the Italian planes, Gladiators -they are enough to do the job -if employed correctly, vs. He111/SM79 head on, Ju88/87/52 - shoot wing tanks - burn nicely. Bf109/110/Mc202 -try hitting the engine, but I'm sure you know all that...

I never said, nor did I imply, that it was impossible.

And what part of "two mags" don't you understand? Take out one, the other still operates. They each have their own circuit. Either of the mags by themselves can still run the engine, albeit at reduced capability, but under normal conditions they both operate at the same time. That is the backup system you keep saying is not there. If you get a single shot that makes it past the propeller arc and still manages to take out both mags, then that shot would have had to be a rather large caliber one (direct hit from an 25mm or greater, etc.), and as I pointed out earlier, that kind of hit would hurt the aircraft anyway, no matter where it hit.

In other words, that "one shot rifle caliber" that you keep referring to that makes a direct hit on one of the mags will not disable the ignition system, because there is still another magneto running! You'd have to make a direct hit with a second shot at the second mag to disable the system. Get it now?

I wasn't insulting you, and I'm sorry if you took it that way, but frankly you were getting some details quite wrong.

The part with "two".

RE: Jug's (or Hellcat or Corsair's) size relative to an La-5 would be essentially irrelevant to the human eye until you get within shooting range, at which point it will seem closer than it actually is and distort your aim, particularly if it is not a level 'dead six' (distance being crucial to being able to gauge any deflection shot). Being larger should actually make your chances of being hit smaller at any appreciable distance or angle.

LW along Channel Front in early-mid '43 had a terrible time adjusting to targets the size of the B-17 and P-47 after two years of shooting at Spits and Blenheim sized bombers in daylight. Their reflexes told them to shoot much sooner at the bigger targets, and they had to learn all over again to recognize what they were shooting at and to adjust their aims accordingly.

Since AI know to the proverbial gnat's eyelash how far away you are and how fast you are moving, you're hosed. Literally.

Since AI gunners can spin a turret and point a 15kg or more cannon to just the right spot to shoot into your engine cowling or cockpit in less time than it takes for Chuck Norris to deliver a spinning sidekick to your ribs, you're hosed again, even if you're crossing his cone of fire at an extreme angle at high speed a split second after flailing his aircraft with a two or three second burst of 4 or 3 x .50" (which in real life should have the guy stunned and frozen at his guns, if not wondering what that warm wet feeling in his pants was).

Yeah, that's realistic.

Let's fix the AI gunners.

First, change the rules for AI aiming to a circle the diameter of the target wing span at any distance greater than 150m, and then to the fuselage area as the circled area as range and angle decreases. That's realistic. No more aiming at a moving point that is less than a fraction of a degree in width from 500m away (and hitting it-ever). Use your random number generator to scatter the shots evenly in that circle; hitting the middle should be a matter of chance--in fact, I could argue that a third of the shots should be outside the circle by a degree or two, depending upon actual range and relative speed. Machine guns and cannon shake in your hands.

Real-life gunners did not have precise awareness of how far away their targets were, how fast they were moving, what direction they were moving or how big they were; they aimed at an imaginary circle around the largest part of the target and guesstimated where it would be when their bullets reached that point. Given the vibration of the guns they served and the constant motion of the platform they were in, that was the best they could do, and they hardly ever guessed right. Bombers in WWII were dependent upon putting up as many rounds as possible to dissuade fighter attacks, which meant large tight formations to bring as many guns to bear as possible in the hope that somebody would guess right.

Second, assign a speed limit of X degrees per second of rotation for the gun installation type, with a hesitation and re-orientation period when the target is obscured by clouds, other aircraft or your own tail structure. There are mods already out there that slow the ai gunners down, and they work. I don't care if it will be applied to the mouse gunners or not; I find the whole defensive gun crew model of the sim to be oversimplified and unrealistic. Every time I tried it, I wanted to wash my hands afterwards. I'd rather play Call of Duty; at least those guns will simulate the effects of gunshake and pull.

Third, any time that the gunner's aircraft is not flying fairly straight and level, his accuracy should be dropped by at least 33% and decrease more in proportion with G-force/angle or being hit by enemy fire. My aircraft bounces and jerks when it is hit by heavy fire so AI Joe's airplane should too, and Joe should be trying to keep his seat or stay on his feet while that idiot in the front seat is flipping the aircraft around. In those situations, the gun becomes a handle or something to hide behind, not a weapon.

It gets a bit old when you're pounding the living daylights out of an Me-110 (specifically the wingroot/cockpit area) and hear a thump and see the HUD message "Machine Gun Disabled", "Fuel Leak" and/or hear the prop run away. If Hans in the back seat isn't in the process of being converted to hamburger, he ought to have the decency and good sense to be crapping his drawers instead of drawing a bead on a component of my aircraft a foot (30cm) wide and two hundred and fifty meters away and moving at a relative speed of 100kph to him.

DMs become a bit less important for the off-liner if certain parts of the AI are brought within human limits. Bestowing the effectiveness of eight or ten rear gunners on one aircraft is no longer necessary or justifiable; we can put a ton of aircraft and objects into a mission without limiting our FPS these days, so one rear gunner doesn't need to stand in for a wholes squadron's worth of the poor buggers.

cheers

horseback

I'm getting 0.5% accuracy from my veteran autopilot B-25J AI gunners and shot down every time by the attacking veteran A6M5b in an 8 vs. 8 encounter. What do you get?

If I'm flying the airplane, about what you get. You can't provide the absolutely level, perfectly trimmed firing platform that an ai pilot does, and your gunners have no idea or warning about what you will do next (which is sort of like a RL gunner would be).

An ai bomber is in reality a single unit with near global situational awareness that it exploits mercilessly; attacking Player has the left wing lined up at 300m, so the microsecond his finger presses the trigger, roll slightly right. Player has set up sufficient lead to hit the ai's fuselage while climbing, but it's concealed from him by his cowling at the moment he must fire, therefore change direction and at the precise moment he enters the rear gunner's cone of fire as the aircraft rolls, shoot out his engine or knock off his wing with a burst of LMG. No delays for communication either way, they ignore the necessity for bombers to stay in formation, and of course the gunners are accurate at all angles at distances up to 750m, or twice the Player's convergence, whichever is greater.

A human player can't do that; in all honesty, no real life bomber crew had or could have had that level of awareness or communicated between each other that quickly and accurately, even after years together.

And the gunners never had that kind of accuracy at any angle or range.

Your 'Veteran' ai gunners are not remotely as hamstrung as the historical human beings they are supposedly simulating; if the record is any indication, bomber gunners were spectacularly ineffective throughout the war. The 8th Bomber Command would have loved to have one bullet out of every two hundred fired actually hit a German fighter. I would expect that the LW 's losses to the bomber formations would have quadrupled at the very least.

cheers

horseback

I wasn't flying the plane, AI was.

How many bombers did the 8th AF, how many fighters did the Luftwaffe write off after Schweinfurt?

Lol

your complaining about ai gunnery not being realistic

tell me what part of your aircraft's guns are realistic your using to try shoot them down ?

No overheating no jamming no freezing etc etc etc.................

The ai gunnery is what it is, learn how to attack bombers with the games limitations.

I prefer the head on attack, or across the wings high speed pass using a technique with the gunsight to extreme left or right of the screen to make it impossible for me to attack from the rear quarters, leaving the sight in these positions stops you getting in behind the bombers forcing you to attack at an angle from the side, sounds strange but it works.

:)

I would have thought you knew that AI on AI is a whole different behavior pattern; put yourself in one of those A6Ms and you would have gotten shot to pieces attacking with and in the same way as your AI wingmen (probably while they got away without a scratch).

There were two major raids on Schweinfurt in 1943: August 17th and October 14th, both considered disasters for 8th Bomber Command. The raid in August cost 60 bombers (with 10 crewmen each) lost over the Continent with another 150 or so damaged and over 40 scrapped after returning and carrying several dead and wounded crewmen. German losses along the entire Western front for the entire day: 27 aircraft (against official claims of 148 by the bombers' gunners), and another 10-13 lost in a series of sharp encounters against the 56th FG and other P-47 groups using pressurized belly tanks for nearly the first time.

Some sources indicate that the actual German losses were even lower (17 was the lowest figure for the day I have read).

The October disaster is generally remembered as "Black Thursday"; another 60 bombers lost, 7 more scrapped upon return, plus another 142 ‘damaged’ for German losses of 38 fighters, seven of which can be credited to the only Allied FG to successfully make rendezvous, the 353rd.

Every history of the bombing campaigns of WWII makes it clear that even the fastest, highest flying heavy bombers could not defend themselves against single and twin engined fighters; even at the end of the war, US bomber formations caught without escorts took heavy casualties at the hands of relatively inexperienced German fighter formations, even 'lightly armed' ones.

As I recall, both raids experienced losses in the 10% plus range, which means that there were at least 500 bombers in the skies on those days, each mounting 10 .50" heavy machine guns manned by some supposedly very well trained gunners most of whom were American farmboys raised with rifle and shotgun to supplement the family diet; it's not like they didn't know how to shoot, or lead a moving target.

It's just unbelievably hard to hit a moving airplane from another moving airplane in any direction other than straight ahead or directly behind; vary the angle left, right, up or down and your firing solution becomes incredibly complicated.

cheers

horseback

Ignoring for the moment that the ai guns don't freeze, jam, etc, either or apparently get damaged by my guns, well, let's see: I'm 'flying' with a stick and rudder pedals (rather than a mouse), looking at a maximum 90 by approximately 45 degree field of vision (with one eye), I cannot 'feel' whether my aircraft is slipping or skidding about unless I look at my (inconveniently placed) Turn & Bank indicator, which isn't entirely reliable, and my guns aren't fully effective until I am within approximately 85 meters or so of my pre-set convergence range of 250m (giving me an effective firing range of between 165-335 m), my angle of attack tends to change suddenly as my aircraft reaches certain speeds and my firing platform will bounce and shake when it is 'hit' by enemy fire (well beyond any historically correct range if I am attacking less than 16 or more bombers).

Compared to aiming with a mouse while riding on rails, I'd say it's a bit more complicated gunnery model, wouldn't you? Against an ai with exact knowledge of my aircraft's distance and vector, plus all the computing power of a modern computer (mine, without my bloody permission!), unless I randomly change directions every two seconds or so, I'm screwed at least half the time if the bugger is rated 'Ace' or 'Veteran' as soon as I get within 500 meters.

When flying offline campaigns, using the tactics that were actually successful against individual, or even small groups of bombers or Me 110s or 210s is suicidal. It's a perversion of history, and it can be fixed, at least for the offline user.

Slow the gunner's rate of rotating their guns.

Limit their effective range to the historical levels of 150m maximum; you can increase an attacker's probability of being hit beyond that as a function of how many defending aircraft are in range.

Make the aiming point a circle the diameter of the greatest visible dimension from the angle viewed; that is how human beings aim something as imprecise as a machine gun at targets that far away and coming at them rapidly.

Factor in gunshake and aircraft motion. That, more than anything else, is what made hitting anything more than a couple of degrees wide so difficult with 'controllable' short bursts. Call of Duty can do it; DT should be able to as well.

And we are still left to deal with the improbable fragility of the R-2800 engine and the aircraft it powered.

cheers

horseback

Lol, revenge for all the years MicroProse nerfed to oblivion everything that was Soviet.

As for accuracy, I just did a set of about ten QMBs, my F6F-3 against 8 Rookie Betties. On at least five occasions, my aircraft was hit from ranges over 700 meters--and never at a six o'clock to them; it was most often while I was at a low 7 or 8 o'clock to them, twice resulting in fuel leaks, and once in loss of elevators (while my nose was pointed at the shooter:confused:). At 700 meters, you can hide a Hellcat behind the tip of your thumb held at arm's length.

Every pass was made on the outermost member of the formation, and generally from a high 7-8 or 4-5 o'clock angle from a minimum 700m advantage, at an minimum terminal speed of over 300kts/ 340mph/ 550kph, which usually ended in my passing behind & below his tailplane less than 30 meters away before barrel rolling out and up ahead and outside of the formation. I got hit every time, and by the fourth or fifth pass in about half the QMBs, had lost at least half my instruments. I believe that the Betty does about 300kph at most, so it wasn't like I was flying close formation with them. Attacking from those angles and speeds would have left a real Hellcat untouched against the finest gunners the IJN ever fielded; against Rookie ai, Swiss Cheese.

At least one firing pass in every QMB, I was able to make a high angle 60+ degrees pass from above and behind that made both wing roots catch fire; never once did I kill the mid-ships top gunner, although I got one of the pilots about half the time and both of them on one glorious occasion (it is always cool to complete a firing pass, look over your shoulder and see a string of 'chutes popping open behind your target).

I also targeted the tail gunner of one aircraft in every QMB that I survived to my third firing pass (usually a singleton, but never more than one wingman); tally was him, three engines splattered, two fuel leaks, three MGs disabled and one PK--I got him twice, once right as he nailed my engine. Again, these were passes made from off angle and usually high, although there were a couple of angled attacks from below after a dive to gain speed (these resulted in one of my kills--and one of his). In these, speed was also always above 300kts.

Let's keep in mind that at 5 o'clock to my target, he has to account for a 30 degree difference in level angle, plus whatever angle up or down I was relative to him; at 4 o'clock, we are up to a 60 degree angle, and the attacker shooting directly down the axis of flight should hold all the cards. In the extreme cases, the real life gunner would not have been physically able to look at his target over his sights (too low, too high, too far to one side).

I've been spending a lot of time in the Hellcat lately, so it's not a matter of not being able to exploit its capabilities, and I was conscientious about keeping my speed up and varying my angle of approach. On 6 of the QMBs, I had to take to my chute; only once did I not have engine damage or a drooping wing (there were several hits, but I got lucky). Rookie AI. Hits from ranges out to 780 meters, almost all requiring deflection in both angle and altitude.

Just like the real thing. /Sarcasm off./

cheers

horseback

So, even in the worst bomber vs. fighter encounters (from bomber perspective), it is about 2 bombers lost for every fighter lost. Why do you expect to take on 8 vs. 1 odds and end up killing everything without being harmed?

For what it's worth, I took up a P-47 vs. 4 veteran G4M and shot them all down, 5 times in a row, without ever having my engine killed. And since I was attacking from the rear quarter, I took several 20mm hits every time.

I'm thinking more of B-17 vs. Bf-109G. But, then, many marks of the Gustav were optimized for bomber killing and carried 20 mm or 30 mm cannons. So, I guess that I can't complain about realism if a B-17 attacked by an ace AI or good human player loses a wing due to 3-4 closely placed 30 mm shots in the wing root.

But, for something like Ki-84 (with 20mm cannons) vs. a B-29, it still seems unreasonable for stricken bombers to lose their wings.

I agree that fires in the fuel tanks is the way that I get most of my heavy bomber kills (other than the odd lucky shot to the cockpit with a head-on initial pass). With cannon fire, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. But, with HMG fire, it almost seems like they burn too easily.

Perhaps. Obviously, on-line players who have been flying every night for a decade have way more gunnery experience than any real WW2 pilot could have ever amassed. But, there are also a lot of average to crap occasional players - both on-line and off-line.

Historically, this made the P-47 easier to see and easier to shoot, so that's perfectly accurate. I can't complain there, even if I'm flying one.

Since I fall into the "average to crap" range, I have trouble hitting the sweet spots to take down bombers, especially when trying to get sufficient "concentration of fire" on a particular part. Even so, I find that Ju-87 and Ju-52 burn nicely. He-111 are a bit tougher. Ju-88 are very tough prey if you're hunting them using just .303 MG, but that is as it should be. After all, they were stressed for dive bombing!

I also wish that it was possible to set the convergence of different pairs of guns at slightly different ranges to get a broader "kill zone." It would help my accuracy not only with the early British fighters, but also the American fighters.

I can see why the Soviets and late-war Germans standardized on cannons - they're easier for an unskilled pilot to use!

Well, i'd say this is a good remark.

I think it is a good thing to give good skills to AI even if it is not "historical". After all what we do when playing the sim is not historical (we can train without danger, reach hit rates from 7% to 30%, we don't even feel the pain when we are injured lol etc) we cannot let AI only with historical skill, otherwise it would not be challenging at all and then it is the combat situation that will not be historical, for there will be no danger.

The realism isn't sometimes in history, but it is in trying to reproduce the danger of a war situation.

I agree with most of what has been said by Horseback, however, historcally, nothing flying was easy meat for a WW2 pilot (unless he was a great ace), and this must be represented in game, with AI skill improving with years (BTW that's why i'm not really happy with fighter AI ace aiming in 4.12, it was so much better in the previous patch).

Bomber defensive fire during WW2 were as described by Horseback, but still the majority of fighter pilots weren't ace and did not even have a single kill.
We cannot pretend we are in WW2 when we run IL2. A sim, has to make us feel the danger of a combat situation: IL2 does this well and still we have the confortable choice to decide whether we take the risk or not.

Compared to the real WW2 combats, what we have in IL2 is immensely easier.

Actually, it came out a bit higher than that; on two occasions, my sights were shot out on the first pass, rendering me ‘combat ineffective’, and given the damage I normally took in the first couple of passes, a RL Hellcat driver with a long flight back to his carrier would retire quickly after any noticeable damage, so it should have been scored Betties ten+, me about two and a half if we play RL rules.

Why do I expect to come away unharmed? Because it would be much more realistic. I’ve detailed the inherent difficulties a real gunner would experience myriad times, and pointed out how any reasonable amount of gunshake/vibration would limit accuracy at ranges over 150 m or so. I kept my speed up and my angles steep and complicated—meaning high or low and off axis—and I never maintained a straight course as long as I was within 500m of them. In an actual Hellcat, I would have been untouchable; the worst I could have expected was some scattered light caliber rounds in the rear fuselage.

That 20mm stinger was hard to move about and would have been really tough to aim at any off-angle, and leading a high speed target with any accuracy would have been next to impossible (think about it; that whole rear glasshouse had to be rotated to bring the gun to bear on any target not directly behind the aircraft; given Japanese production quality and maintenance standards of the time, I’d be surprised if more than half of them didn’t jam in combat).

In this game we have Ichiro Schwarzenegger at the rear gun, and he can spin that monster around at blinding speeds and maintain the precision of a neurosurgeon.

RL fighter vs small bomber formation encounters rarely went the bombers’ way—rarer, in fact than documented occasions of a P-47 flying through a grove of trees and returning to base. The individual bomber or a majority of the formation might survive, but they would be pretty badly chopped up and their survival would be more due to the fighter pilot’s poor marksmanship or lack of ammo/firepower than to any skills the bomber’s gunners would have possessed. In general, the fighters would get away scot-free unless one of them was stupid enough to fly alongside to wave or salute; even when the attacking fighter lacked the speed advantages of the later types and ‘crawled’ up to the bomber’s rear, the fighter pilot’s guns would be more accurate and effective well before the tail gunner could hit him 19 out of 20 attacks.

In Il-2 Sturmovik ’46 and its predecessors, that historical reality has been stood on its head; seriously, damaging hits from over 750 meters? From Rookie gunners?

And as for your results with a P-47, I will point out that the Jug has 1/3rd more firepower, is a good bit faster to gain speed and requires about a third less trim input to keep it stable and on target than a Hellcat in this game. You should get better results; the most I got in any single QMB was 6.

cheers

horseback

Actually, machine gun rounds starting fires is entirely reasonable; ball, much less armor piercing rounds striking aluminum actually melt their way through. Aluminum melts at around 1160° F, and I can say from experience that splashes or spalling of molten aluminum can start anything reasonably flammable to light up; hydraulic fluid, oil, aviation grade petrol, or thirty plus years ago, my co-worker’s denim jeans (and thank God he had been wearing heavy, high-topped work boots when that stuff splashed on his ankles or he might have lost a foot). Add any incendiary or tracer rounds to the mix and there can easily be flames.

I would argue that it takes much longer in the game than in real life for a fire in a wing tank or fuselage to become catastrophic; I’ve seen a great deal of gun camera film showing B-17s and B-24s, much less Betties (and Sallies and Zeros and Oscars etc) folding up in seconds once a fire gets started anywhere near a fuel tank. Any sort of fuel plus lots of oxygen (at 200kph, the fire is getting plenty of oxygen) creates a blowtorch effect.

Whoosh!

cheers

horseback

I agree with several points you make, but I’d go about increasing difficulty differently. The original explanation for the gunners' unGodly accuracy and range was 'scale'; there was a fairly small limit on how many aircraft you could put into a mission without overtaxing your computer and crashing to the desktop, so every aircraft and gunner had to 'stand for' four or five (or ten) other aircraft. That excuse is no longer valid.

Hitting other aircraft was more difficult in real life; turbulence, prop wash, wing flex, guns jamming, mechanical aborts or (shockingly often) the pilot forgetting to unsafe his guns. How about the need to change the bulbs in your gunsight in the middle of a dogfight? Finding the enemy was the greatest problem by far; unless he came to you in huge numbers and you were directed to him by Ground Control, chances of actually seeing and engaging enemy aircraft were exceedingly low. Even with radar direction, finding them in any kind of cloud cover was often a matter of luck; early systems couldn't give you accurate altitude information.

Making the enemy rare would lead to people leaving the game in droves, as would most of the other stuff I mentioned. We play for the combat ‘experience’, or what we imagine it to be; for the offline player, at least, using the actual tactics the aces used should almost always be successful. They are not.

If you are flying a USAAF fighter campaign in Europe, your primary natural prey is not single engine fighters, but the twin engine zerstörers, whose rear gunners were practically useless at their guns at those speeds and altitudes; their primary value was as an extra set of eyes. In this game, they are the most dangerous opponents you can encounter and the rear gunner’s twin 7.9mm guns are several orders of magnitude more dangerous than the two cannon in the nose. At any range or angle, it is usually safer to take on four Ace FW 190A-9s than it is to approach one Rookie Me-110G from the rear...

In that sort of situation, the frustration factor is huge. You know that you are doing everything exactly right, and you are still getting hammered. Ultimately, you put the game away and move on to something else, at least for a while. I would expect that the game loses at least ten offliners for every online player every year—and it is almost certainly the grotesque accuracy of the ai gunners that is the main cause. I’ve taken at least four ‘breaks’ of eight or ten months over the last 12 years, but I have come back. How many don’t return, ever?

The attraction of the online game is not re-creation of the actual air war but the competition; since the ai gunners are a relatively minor factor in that environment, the guys who want to fly bombers want the extra protection factor of the ai gunners' accuracy, since they will be found by the opposing fighters.

The off-liner looks for immersion; let's define that as a temporary escape into someplace else--we might as well call it a role playing game as much as a 'shooter'. In that context, you want things to work consistently according to the historic rules you know, and in those theaters where the enemy came to you, the individual good & aggressive pilots consistently scored heavily, even when they were flying technically inferior aircraft (see Finland, the Battle of Germany, the Battle of Britain, Malta and Guadalcanal for examples). Bombers and multipassenger aircraft were 'easy meat', most definitely including the 'heavy fighters', regardless of the number of defensive guns they carried, because of the limitations of human accuracy at any range or angle with hand fired automatic weapons and their lack of ability to maneuver or run away.

At the very least, the offliner should have a 'Full Real' option for the defensive gunners, to implement the changes I've suggested in whole or in part. Making the fighter to bomber contest disproportionately difficult is neither competitive nor realistic for a WWII fighter oriented simulation.

cheers

horseback

I hear you, but your reply, and most of your subsequent replies in this thread make good arguments about unrealistic accuracy of AI gunners, not about the unrealistic fragility of the American engines. If you try attacking the same bombers with the same tactics in a different planes, you might conclude the R-2800 is just as tough or tougher. That's certainly the impression I get.

I would rank the fragility of engines according to their aircraft roughly like this, from most delicate to toughest:

- Bf-109
- Ki-61
- P-40
- P-51
- Hurricane
- Tempest
- Italian liquid-cooled planes
- P-38
- Spitfire
- MiG
- P-47
- F4U
- Yak
- LaGG
- F4F
- FW-190
- La 5/7
- P-39
- Japanese radial-powered fighters

I can attest to the P 40 one shot insta-stop.

Part of my argument, probably obscured by the more obvious gunnery flaws, is that some aircraft are disproportionately hit even more than that their DMs are overstated/flawed. I've flown the 109 and 190 regularly since the first year the sim was sold, and while the 109 has an inline engine, I've never felt that it took a disproportionate number of engine losses, certainly nothing like the P-40. My immediate impression is that the 190 loses its engine or takes engine damage quite a bit more often than the 109. It also gets hit more often, even though it was a bit faster and capable of rapid change in direction and it needs considerably less firing time to obtain the destruction of its target. Once hit though, it usually gives you reduced power for a good while rather than packing it in immediately the way an R-2800 or the P-40's Allison often will.

Admittedly, by this point I have about 10-20 times as many 'hours' in the 109/190 over the P-40 in all their respective versions, but the P-40 hours are still pretty significant. I have less time in the Mustang than the P-40, but it seems far more likely to lose its prop pitch than other aircraft that have a DM that includes loss of PP (how about the Zero for a comparison? It's props were license built Hamilton Standard models, and I've never lost PP in the few combats I've tried in it, and that spinner is -or should be- like the Mustang's, a big target). I haven't flown the Ki-61, the Tempest or the Italians in any appreciable combat situations, so I cannot offer an opinion on them.

I tried one short campaign in the early Hurri, but it was enormously frustrating not least because the campaign was developed for an earlier patch of the game, and some things just weren't possible that had been before the notorious 4.0x patches. It did seem to me to be in much the same class as the P-40, as far as the glass jaw.

The Hellcat in my opinion is far more likely to get hit than either the P-47 or the Corsair; in ratio of hits to engine losses, they appear to me to be about even --much too much damage much too often. Similarly, the Mustang is far more likely to get hit than a Spitfire, although the Spit seems to lose control surfaces or take a PK more easily.

Of the five though, the Hellcat is easily the greatest bullet magnet; it's like that one kid in your group of friends who was always caught or recognized when all of you were doing something you shouldn't.

Yaks and LaGGs seem to me to be about right; I have more hours in them and P-39s than the P-40, and the constant concern in Soviet fighters was overheating; hits to the engine make it overheat or die fairly quickly; the engines were always very closely cowled, so any hit to the engine covers almost invariably led to hitting the engine (oddly enough, even though hits to the engine tend to take it out, it rarely damages the MGs mounted above it). :rolleyes:

This is also true of the 190, the Lavotchkins, the P-38, and the Ki-43, but not nearly so much in the case of the P-47, Hellcat, Mustang, Spitfire, Hurricane or P-40; these aircraft look remarkably abbreviated when the engine covers or cowls are removed for maintenance, even more so than the 109. I am also aware that the P-40 and the Mustang had some armor plating behind their spinners to protect the engine and pilot in a headon fire situation (which doesn't seem to be very effective in-game...)

The Soviets also don't seem to get hit as easily overall as some western types; they and the Airacobra seem to benefit from some sort of 'grace' that doesn't extend to the P-40, the Spit and later American types, which a few passes against a flight of He-111s (armed with multiple low-tech single 7.9mm popgun positions) would quickly illustrate.

The F4F is actually safer than the F6F against the Betty in my experience, despite being slower and less armored (and the early war examples of the F4F-3 lacked self-sealing tanks and pilot armor; first clashes in the Pacific featured boilerplate literally being hand installed on the hanger deck the night before a mission).

Fragility seems to me to be at least partly as much of a function of how likely you are to be hit; it would be interesting to do a comparison of attacking passes at bombers generally acknowledged as particularly dangerous in spite of being lightly armed, like the He-111 or the Betty. If you made multiple passes in each aircraft at roughly the same angles and speeds, you can observe which aircraft take disproportionate hits and or damage, and draw your own conclusions.

cheers

horseback

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I don't have the data to prove what you're saying, other than somewhat generic stats on bomber casualties due to flak and fighters. We can trade anecdotes all day, but I'd love to see actual statistics to help back us up.

If anything, it seems like bomber gunners (at least rookie to average gunners) have been "nerfed," in 4.12, if only by unrealistic bomber formations and doctrine. But that's only by comparison with the laser-like precision with which gunners prior to 4.12 could shoot you down. It was if were were a generic Imperial TIE fighter pilot and the gunners were Han Solo and Luke Skywalker!

But, gunners must have had some usefulness, otherwise bombers would have dispensed with them earlier.

I think that damage or kills due to heavy flak is about right - as long as you take into account the fact that each gun in the game can actually represents an entire battery. Low to medium altitude flak is downright lethal, but that might actually be realistic. Veteran ground attack pilots learned to come in fast and low, make one good pass and get the hell out.

I don't have a problem with gunners starting to shoot at 500 meters range, but that should mostly be "suppression fire" with very little chance of actually hitting. Shots at anything other than minimal deflection angles against a plane flying a relatively straight course should also have almost no chance of hitting. But, if you make an attack from 6 o'clock level against a heavy bomber, without approaching at a very high closing speed, you deserve every bullet that hits your plane.

Turning speeds for turrets seem to be about right. At least for the U.S. turrets, there's pretty good performance data, and actually possibly a few turrets that actually still work. In archival film, you can see that they turn pretty quickly - something like 120 degrees per second.

But, against that, something that isn't modeled in the game, at least for human gunners, are the effects of G forces, vibrations from the plane itself and wind buffeting of the turret and guns if the guns are angled into the plane's slipstream. All those things make bomber gunnery a bit too easy, at least for a human gunner. I don't know if the AI models those things, but it should.

They can be "fixed" but the problem is that you think that AI gunners are insanely accurate while I think that they suck big time. :-P


Test setup:
Planes : Ju88 and P47D
Distance: 200m
Test method:
Both planes are on the airfield, P47 engine running.
Player is in Ju88 rear gunner position.
P47 is behind Ju88 with front of the engine exposed to the gunner like in typical 6 o'clock attack.
Result:
Bullets Fired: 1200
Bullets Hit Air: 1047
P47 engine still running although at 90% and with some components damaged.
And as many times before FACTS>>>FEELINGS , P47 is one tough MOFO and for every FG guy's story about one ping kill there is a JG guy with the story about P47 soaking dozens of 30mm hits and flying away.

But, on the other hand, it's slightly easier to see the Jug at greater distances, and assuming you know what you're shooting at, there's more to hit.

Likewise, the Japanese initially had problems with getting the right range on Superfortresses. What would be nice is if the game modeled AI aircraft ID a bit better, so AI gunnery is downgraded against "unfamiliar" plane types of unusually large or small size. As it is, the AI immediately knows the right range at which to engage everything from a V-1 to a Gigant!

Even better would be if a critical failure with visual IFF meant that allied planes might accidentally attack you! That was a common problem for Mustang pilots, as well as Soviet fighter pilots operating near U.S. planes.

And, of course, certain planes would be easier to identify that others, for example the P-38 was specifically used on some occasions because its appearance was so distinctive.

This speaks to the difference between manually turned guns and turret guns. Turrets were generally more effective. By contrast, single guns hanging out in the slipstream were pretty useless. That's one of the reasons that the radio operator's dorsal 0.50 caliber MG on the B-17 was often removed.

Like you said, but also:

1) Reduce accuracy by some percentage for manually-turned guns vs. turrets to simulate vibration from the airplane and guns.

2) Reduce accuracy by some percentage if the angle of the gun is at more than something like 15-20 degrees from the the plane's fuselage, to simulate slipstream effects.

3) Reduce accuracy by some percentage as the plane's speed gets much above 150 mph, to reflect wind buffeting.

.

The game already models this. Other than that, your points about hesitation and reorientation are valid. Currently, one of the nice things about fighter AI in 4.12 is that they will pause for a moment before choosing another target, whether to check 6 or just to determine that they're actually pointing themselves at a bogie.

Yep. IL2 was designed as a tactical mud-moving sim, not a heavy bomber sim. It's just one of those things that the sim is never going to do well, and more's the pity, because I absolutely love my Western heavy bombers.

And, yes, CoD seems to get a lot of the details of running a heavy bomber right.

Intercoms, oxygen supplies, effects of wounds at high altitudes, loosening jammed bombs, intercom communications, switching fuel tanks or moving ammo around the plane, and maps that let you fly from London to Berlin and back, maybe not in CoD, but certainly not in IL2.

I'm currently using 4.7, but I agree with everything Horseback says about over accurate bomber gunners, it always has been ridiculous, at least since the original Forgotten Battles.

The problem is, the only information the program has, is the exactly correct position, speed and heading of our fighters. That's available, with no work, somewhere that can be got at easily (if it wasn't, we wouldn't be in a flight sim). Generating approximations for those data, particularly accurate approximations of the data a human in the relative position of the gunner in of a bomber would have had, would be hard.

There's probably the processor grunt to do it now, but there wasn't back when IL*2 was originally written, so the code presumably wasn't writen that way. To get to a position where it could be done would presumably require a wholesale re-write, such that you might as well write a completely new simulation.

On another angle, most big air battles resulted in very small loss ratios even for the losers, the day the Stukas withdrew from the BoB, their losses were something like 20%. In IL*2 we often get most or even all of the bombers, I agree that the fighter losses should be lower than they are, but the bomber losses ought to be lower too.

Yes it was me who posted that image on the SOV forum, I found about the missing internal damage models while investigating how to make new planes for IL-2. The tools are easy to find at the modding sites such as SAS.

I just did a quick search in a easier way now and here's a list of planes without proper internal damage models (or at least not used in the code):

C-47
Fi-156
Fw-189A2
G-11
IAR-80/81 series
Ju-52 series
Ju-87 series
Ju-88 Mistel
L2D
Li-2
MBR-2
P-39/P-400/P-63 series
Tu-2
U-2

The Stuka I was flying was the D5, the newest one, which flies like a real POS compared to the B Stuka, it is not going to turn with any Spits, and from the feel of it there must be a hell of a lot of more armor added to it's weight than the early Stuka.

Again, if anyone has not read Hans Ulrich Rudels amazing account of living through 2500 Stuka missions and WWII they are missing out. Yes he was probably a Nazi, but there are a lot of other things to get out of the book than any bias or propaganda that may be injected. He must have been hit by hundreds of rounds from AA and aircraft guns and cannons and there is no account of him having serious problems with flaming tanks. He never bailed once, crash landed a few times. He was riddled by La5 and P39 and Rata fire to name a few stories that come to memory.

If the best simulation IL2 can do right now with the P47 is to have it's tail fall off with X number of 20mm hits, then that is okay, it is just funny how you can set yourself up in the qmb behind a bunch of Friendly p47s and go down the row and get the same result on one after the other, almost like you are breaking the tails off of frozen lobsters.

Of course in real life the location and number of hits from an enemy aircraft would be so random it would take a supercomputer to model the different effects of each, I am sure no two kills in WWII looked exactly the same the way they can be reproduced in IL2.

It is a great sim and TD has never done anything but things beyond the call of duty.

Jumo

4.7 and 4.11+ are like day and night. Gunners received a complete rework with 4.11 (think it was, maybe even 4.10) and since then, they just suck. Sometimes they get lucky, but mostly they suck.

The engine on the P-39 is not tough at all - if you get shot from behind and slightly off-angle. Against ground fire and defensive fire it is very well protected.

And vs. gunner accuracy -currently playing vs. US/British, and on the first few missions I bothered to make head on or high off angle attacks vs. B25G/J -until I got lazy and tried to shoot a few from behind and it worked like a charm. Just go in there from 6'o clock below/high with lots of speed, shoot, and break at the latest at 200m.

Though VS. B-24 or B-17 this does not work. But using high or beam or head on attacks with good speed one nearly does not get hit. I have seen a flight of AI B-17s chopped up by AI Bf109G6s from behind with no losses once or twice, but most of the time the AI Bf109s lose one or two. And they more or less park behind the B-17s.

I like the way gunners are now, the still pose a limited threat - you can't get totally careless, but its not as fustrating as 4.09 and before where they shot out your pilot/engine with 50% reliabilty from 300m+ no matter what angle and speed you had -and even regularly killed you on head on passes.

If anything is done to lower their accuracy even more we will arrive at ridiculos scenarios where a single AI Bf109G will shoot down a whole flight of B-17s.

Historically, this is one of the things about the P-39 that made it particularly vulnerable to fighters attacking from behind. Not only the engine being where it is made it vulnerable to fighters, but the Prestone overflow tank and the oil tank were positioned directly behind the engine, making them extremely susceptible in air-to-air combat.

Yep. While I think that there's more to be done with gunner realism, things got a lot better in 4.11. My typical test is a QMB mission with 4 ace attackers going after a flight of 16 Average bombers. In those cases, it usually works out to 50% losses on both sides when late war German types go up against U.S. heavies. And that's with really dumb tactics on both sides. (i.e., Fighters never make high side or head on attacks. Bombers are always in loose echelon right formation with four planes per flight, and lose formation as they turn.)

Actually, what I said was that they suck big time because they are so accurate, so you're half right. While I agree that they are greatly improved over 4.10, they have a long way to go before the proportional advantages of fighters vs bombers approaches the historical standard.

Sorry, but you'll never convince me that an ai plane has exactly the same damage model as one piloted by the Player, or that a human gunner can be as accurate as an ai one. We're talking about a routine that permits high deflection hits at over 700 meters and shot-out engines at steep angles changing at high speeds with considerably less than 1047 rounds fired.

Fly formation 200m behind an He 111 or Betty (both of whose gunners are traditionally more accurate than those noobs in the Ju-88A) in that same P-47 and I bet your engine loss ratio goes up significantly, along your PKs, loss of gunsight, ailerons, fuel leaks(and how could any rounds possibly get past the engine and firewall to reach the fuel tanks?), rudder and Prop Pitch. Of course, that's just my feeling, but it's based on several hours of experience.

AI vs AI contests may ultimately obtain 'realistic' results, but in those cases, the AI fighter knows that he's been fired at and exactly where it will hit if his vector remains constant at the moment it is fired and he makes the slight move that either results in a clean miss or a meaningless hit, but the ai gunner routine knows that he knows and quickly fires a burst at the corrected vector, but the fighter ai routine knows that he will, so they decide not to do that and move on to the next move/countermove several thousand times per second.

Think of the Dread Pirate Roberts' confrontation with the Sicilian 'with death on the line' in The Princess Bride.

cheers

horseback

Test AI gunners

1. Offline QMB
2. Offline Campaign
3. Online Dogfight server
4. Online Coop

I know the difference, I wonder if you will notice it too.

:confused:

It is often a mistake to attribute logic to the human decision-making process. The gunners had more of a morale effect than a practical one; of course, both of the USAAF’s primary heavy bombers were designed at a time when bombers had a big technological and performance lead over fighters, and of course, no one had any idea that radar would become as effective as it did (even those who understood that radar was even possible). When the first B-17 entered the Army Air Corps, the P-26 was America’s primary fighter defense (and the P-35 & P-36 were just undergoing trials), and the Hurricane, Spitfire and Bf 109B were just entering service; the Japanese air arms were still fielding biplanes, as was the US Navy.

The basic idea was that by entering enemy airspace at high altitudes and comparatively high speeds, it would be impossible to locate them, much less intercept them with any meaningful force before their bombs were dropped and they were on their way back to base. The fighters of the period were barely capable of the performance of the big bombers at high altitudes; at those comparative speeds, the bombers’ gunners might have been almost as effective as their predecessors in the First World War, especially if only a few at a time could make an interception.

Without the invention of radar, they would have been right. Since the USAAF was run by the ‘bomber barons’, men like Claire Chennault, who not only flew fighters, but openly tried to develop a meaningful doctrine for fighter defense, were run out of the service by hook or by crook. That conviction held on long after the early rounds of World War II made it clear that it was obsolete. There were careers to be made and profits to be taken by the big aircraft companies like Boeing and Convair (who had just coincidentally, been displaced by more innovative companies in the fighter business). You could make a lot more profit (and provide many more jobs) with a single bomber than you could with three or four fighters.

Hubert Zemke’s memoir written with Roger Freeman mentions a conference in London in the early summer of 1943, where an unnamed senior bomber officer told Zemke that they didn’t need a fighter escort. I hope that SOB lived long enough to regret those words, but by mid-1943, the US had committed itself to those bombers and the idea that they needed all those guns and men to serve them, and that was the way it went for the next two years or so.

Senior military officers are politicians as much as they were ever anything else and it would not be politically wise to announce that they had been in error, so the obvious thing to do was to continue bloody-mindedly, and act as though they had simply underestimated how many big bombers would it take to bull their way into German airspace until the necessary long range fighters finally became available and then they pretended that that was what they had planned all along.


Agree with you here; however, in the case of flak/AAA, I would note that even the heavy guns seem to be able to shoot at you at relatively close range and with remarkable anticipation. I would like to see some sort of hesitation or delay built in when the first low-level attacks are made, because like a seasoned prostitute, they seem to know when you’re coming before you do.

As I recall, the turrets were generally spun by means of a foot or knee switch and they weren’t all that precise (but the speed was impressive, which would count for a lot in a newsreel). In any case, they were still dependent upon a human being’s estimations of angle and range. Their greatest contribution to accuracy was that the gunner was strapped in and could continue to shoot a multiple gun battery under maneuvering conditions, while the guy sitting on a bench or standing was just hanging on for dear life.

There is no reduction in accuracy for maneuvering aircraft that I have noticed. My tests against the Betties got me hit just as often (and from as far away) while the aircraft was in a steep turn as when they were flying straight and level (which was rarely the case if my cross-hairs were pointed in their immediate vicinity). As I’ve pointed out, the Bf 110 gunners (among others) are beyond ridiculous; put yourself in the in-game position yourself and you’ll see why. They have a tiny, tiny cone of fire, they are seated on a glorified (backless) lawn chair, and when the aircraft is flung about the way the AI pilots of these things routinely do when under attack, they will hit your engine or nosecone (and therefore your prop pitch control) with great regularity from angles that would seem impossible for a human gunner to achieve even with the silly-assed no-recoil mouse gunnery model.

I once suggested on the Ubi forums that anyone who thought that having an element of motion wouldn't affect their aim should try playing out a Sturmovik mission as a gunner on a laptop while riding in a moving car; no one took me up on it (or if they did, they were too embarrassed to share the results).

cheers

horseback

As I have repeatedly pointed out, my interest is strictly off-line, and I have asked for a 'reality option' specifically for offline campaigns and missions. I would even put up with 'realistic gunnery' limitations for the fighters in exchange for a realistic change to the ai gunnery model, as long as the proportional advantages enjoyed by the fighter were put in place.

I understand that the QMB ai are a bit tougher than the 'campaign' ai, but not by orders of magnitude; a breast fed baby's diaper doesn't stink as badly as one that is fed formula, but it still stinks.

As for online, not my area of interest.

cheers

horseback

Its of no interest to you online, but is for many of us that do fly that way the AI gunners are totally different.

All you need to do is change the AI bomber flights to rookie and see how you get on off line or change your attack method with normal settings.

If your complaint is for a selective part of the game to be changed you need to understand whats going on in the rest of it before requesting changes and making generalized statements.

As I already said the game has different ways to fly it, offline you can do what you like on your own, online you work differently, I just hosted a CooP mission on Hyperlobby attacking 32 Betty's with Corsairs
The only Ai gunner kills were pilots getting greedy and getting 100m off the six of the bombers, all Ai Betty's were shot down easily.
The loss of pilots was mainly due to debris coming off the bombers (wings rudders ailerons) hitting the pilots Corsairs because they were too close on the attack.
3 pilots were de-winged at the same range from the 20mm tail gunner again much to close sitting on the bombers six.
On TS we were all saying the same thing "this guys gonna die" because of the wrong attack method.

As this thread is now off topic, please see fit to start a new one relating to this particular discussion.

:)

Picture available now.

And another,

http://www.connecticutscorsair.com/O...R-2800-18W.jpg

Tail coming off is relict of the past when average player's PC were much weaker than what we have now and it is best viewed as crude visual representation of catastrophic damage. Paradoxically you will experience such damage most often on very tough planes, weaker ones will usually suffer some other types of damage sooner.



It does but I can do the same in coop mode with human controlled plane. Fact is that even 1000+ hits in the engine area is not a guarantee that you will destroy P-47 engine. In addition I can check exact damage of each bullet and if I really want to be anal about this I can generate hits at any part of the plane with whatever parameters I want.

You are very wrong about human gunners too, they are way better than AI, obviously you don't fly online much.

Is it surprising that cannon will do more damage than MG bullets?

:rolleyes: You are over-thinking it a bit and you are very wrong, not 100% wrong but close.

That might explain wings coming off B-17 or B-24 due to damage, too.

Is there any way to better model that catastrophic damage so that very tough planes don't lose parts in unrealistic ways?

Then you've got a decent way to calibrate AI gunner skill. Get a bunch of very skilled human gunners in coop, ask them how many hours they have flying online as gunners, then determine their hit percentage against a variety of targets and a variety of deflections.

Use the hit percentage by your very best and most experienced humans as your "Ace" quality gunner standard and adjust AI skill from there.

Whether or not it's historically realistic, synching AI gunner skill to top human skill has the following benefits: a) It means that nobody can bitch about the AI being "better than human", b) means that offline AI gunners will be good training for people who are practicing before they go online. By definition, if you can beat Ace AI, you can do pretty well against human gunners online.

Likewise, if TD feels like revisiting fighter gunnery accuracy (which went from "lasers o' death" prior to 4.11, to just about right in 4.11, to "nerfed" in 4.12) you could base Ace gunnery standards on hit percentages for the very best human players.

While your idea has its merits, I fear it would lead to gunners close to 4.09 standards. I do think gunnery in IL2 is easier than it was in real life, no vibrations, no force needed pulling the gun anywhere, extensive training possible without any risk, no recoil etc.
I still like the gunners the way they are now.

The laser sighted, 40mm, power assisted, zero-g, cannon operator in the back of the IL-2 appears to have strangely missed any "improvement". A de-winged IL-2 tumbling and spiralling towards the deck still has the "terminator" firing his weapon as he hits the water/ground. Any human would have been, lol, over the side somewhat earlier I feel. Perhaps this could be addressed?

Inertia dampers. You forgot to mention the inertia dampers. :)

There seems to be an ongoing campaign to conflate my comparison of the off-line ai gunners to the human beings that actually manned the guns of WWII bombers, attack aircraft and heavy fighters with the in-game mouse aimed guns.

Two entirely different things. Both criminally bogus of course, but two different things.

The in-game player's mouse gunner model is vastly simpler and less complicated than the operation and aiming of machine guns from a constantly bobbing and rolling gun platform like an actual moving aircraft of that era. You are on a rail smooth, predictable platform and you can easily control your guns; no engine vibration, no jammed or sticky rings or turrets, no gunshake or recoil making that three-to-six round burst scatter across a two or three degree range, and only an occasional (and buttery smooth) change in direction or angle of your platform to potentially spoil your aim.

This differs very little from the all-ai aircraft gunners offline model, except that they enjoy absolutely perfect awareness of their human target's range, speed and direction; they know precisely how fast they are going, they know how fast you are going and to the millimeter how far away you are and where you will be when they fire their guns at ranges well beyond the average player's convergence ranges. They can perfectly compensate for their 'aircraft' turning, banking and diving. And they consistently manage to hit critical components of target (Player) aircraft moving at high speeds from ridiculous angles in microsecond wide firing windows, and they still seem to victimize some aircraft types more consistently than others.

None of that compares remotely with the actual capabilities of the real-life gunners on WWII era aircraft. For the offline fighter campaigner the difference is critical. The 8th Air Force awarded the title of 'ace' to over 300 bomber crew gunners; I would be amazed if any two of them actually destroyed a combined total of five enemy aircraft in flight, and the late war US bomber defenses were the heaviest and most sophisticated of the war. Their gunners were arguably the most extensively trained of the war. If their efforts were so futile, what does that say about the gunners on the lightly armed, less stable types that everyone else fielded?

cheers

horseback

Testing done by the USAAF found that the bullet pattern from ground testing had the following results for 12 rounds to 600yds:

For the B-17:

ball turret > dia. 15' - 8.3mils
upper turret > dia. 21' - 11.7mils
chin turret > dia. 23' - 12.6 mils
waist(closed) dia. 26' - 14.3mils
side nose > dia. 34' - 18.7mils
tail turret > dia 45' - 25mils

For the B-24:

ball turret > dia. 15' - 8.3mils
upper turret > dia. 20' - 11.2mils
nose turret > dia. 23' - 12.9mils (Emerson)
nose turret > dia. 35' - 19.3mils (Motor Prod.)
waist(closed) dia. 23' - 12.9mils
waist(open) dia. 63' - 35.6mils
tail turret > dia 35' - 19.3mils

source: "Gunner" ISBN 1-55046-332-2

This should be easy enough to replicate in game.

At least when AI is at the controls, I find it difficult to aim accurately because the pilot will perform maneuvers without telling me that he's going to do so. Online, it's likely to be easier because the pilot can actually talk to the crew.

But, like you said, there are lots of things that gunnery doesn't currently model in IL2, which makes it easier to be a gunner, relatively speaking, than it was in real life.

So, I don't see your concerns (which are legitimate) and mine as being incompatible. IL2 online gunnery IS too easy for all the reasons we've mentioned before - plane vibration, turbulence, gun vibration, sticky scarf rings or turret rings, G-forces, physical labor and inertia of slewing the guns around (at least by hand) and, of course, slipstream effects.

I think that these effects would all be pretty easy to model just by incorporating a bit more randomness into the bullet dispersal pattern for gunners under various conditions and by building a bit of variable turn speed and randomness into the mouse movement model.

Things that increase bullet dispersal - each shot after the first in a burst, turbulence (synched to weather/wind, although it is possible to build turbulence into the game), G-forces, slipstream/wind buffeting - at least 10 degrees angle off from (plane's vector - 180 degrees), hand-turned guns.

Things that reduce turning speed of turret/Scarff ring/pintle-mounted guns - G-forces, slipstream/wind-buffeting - at least 10 degrees angle off from (plane's vector - 180 degrees), inertia (modeled as a bit of initial slowness in getting the guns to track if they're not already in motion in the directions you want to track, greater inertia for larger or multiple guns due to mass).

Plus, you automatically build a tiny bit of randomness into mouse tracking movement to represent stickiness and "Murphy's Law."

If TD were kind enough to include all those problems into the human-controlled gunnery model, after the shrieks of outrage fade to whimpers of grudging acceptance, THEN you calibrate maximum human skill to get maximum AI skill for gunners.

Of course, as with any option of this sort, there should be a button to turn it all off, so people who can't cope with the aiming problems that real gunners faced can still have their simplified gunnery model.

If TD wanted to be extra nice to us, they could model the effects of injury to gunners' limbs. A hit to the arm means that you have lots of trouble turning and shooting hand-turned, hand-triggered guns. A hit to the leg means that you can't turn foot-operated turrets in a particular direction. And, of course, bleeding means that gunners will eventually bleed out, getting weaker and less accurate until they fall unconscious or die.

This might be a bit too extreme. Some planes flying solo really did shoot down multiple enemy aircraft - or at least damage them seriously enough that they were "probables" and out of the action. So, aerial gunners weren't completely useless - especially the tail gunners who accounted for a majority of the 8th Air Force gunner aces. It's also worth mentioning that the USAAF kept tailgunners long after they ditched every other gunner position (last tailgunner kill was over Vietnam).

But, as you said, the USAAF (and every other Air Force) had problems with overclaiming kills. Often, when some hapless Bf-109 diving through a formation B-17 or B-24 coughed up smoke because pilot mishandled the fuel mixture, every gunner in the formation would claim it as a kill because they saw the 109 coughing up black smoke were sure that their gun was the one that "hit." With claims like that, even the most skeptical debriefing intelligence officer was likely to believe that the fighter was a "probable" even if the Luftwaffe plane wasn't scratched.

This is very good information, the sort of quantitative data that's hard to come by. Thank you for posting it. Since the numbers for the gun positions on the two different bombers were reasonably close, the data could possibly be used for similar weapons mounted on other U.S. bombers, like the B-25 or the A-20.

The data for the open waist positions is the most relevant to the majority of man-served guns; it was a pintle-type mount rather than one in a reinforced ball socket mount, similar to the majority of the rear gunners in the sim. Scharf ring and pintle mounts are much more subject to vibration and flex.

Note also that the data is for ground testing, which means that there is no relative motion to joggle the gunner's elbow or guesstimations about where the target was going to be when the bullets got there. Chances are good that the guns were sighted in and then clamped down and fired by a fixed remote to get those figures in order to eliminate human error.

cheers

horseback

Most of the stories we hear about a solo aircraft's gunners managing to destroy or damage attacking single engine fighters usually turns out to be apocryphal if we try to investigate; about 20 years ago, I was commissioned to build a 1/72nd scale B-24J with the markings of a Foggia based aircraft that was shot down in the sort of circumstances you describe for one of the surviving aircrewmen. I was invited to the presentation, and the honoree confessed to all present that the claims of four or five enemy fighters destroyed in their heroic last fight (over Turin, I think) were all bulls**t (his word, used as he pointed right at the Groups' former Public Information Officer), but he wasn't giving his Air Medal back.

As for the B-52's stinger, the 'gunner' operated a radar aimed gun remotely, with the help of a slightly more advanced stabilization system than that used on late-WWII era battleships's guns. It took shameless advantage of the limited range and acquisition cone of early Warsaw Pact heat guided missiles like the Atoll.

Almost any Allied fighter pilot in the theater for more than two days (i.e., long enough to visit the Officers' Club bar) could have told them that German fighters tended to belch black smoke whenever the throttle was shoved forward or back too quickly, and the Allies' commanders were well aware that the Luftwaffe wasn't taking even a tiny fraction of the losses the the gunners claimed to be inflicting. "Morale" was the only justification for awarding the overwhelming majority of gunners' claims for destroyed enemy aircraft, and they beat it to death.

cheers

horseback

Interesting. Do you have any further info to back up this claim? I'm not disputing you, I'm interested in actually figuring out what was actually going on, and I've always wondered just how good gunners actually were.

I have to wonder if it wasn't a huge amount of institutional inertia that led to bombers being heavily equipped with gunners. After all, there is a strong tendency to "fight the last war," and during WW I gunners really were a threat given the relatively short range, limited damage and poor accuracy of the frontally-fixed fighter machine guns. But, by WW 2, many WW I pilots were colonels and generals, so they might have figured that if one or two men armed with single .30 caliber MG were good, 7-8 men armed with multiple 0.30 or 0.50 (or even 20 mm) MG were even better, without realizing that higher airspeeds made gunnery much less effective.

Arguably, the best strategy for bombing during WW2 was the Mosquito - two man crew, decent bomb payload and a very fast aircraft to make interception difficult. You send them out knowing that fast fighters and flak are going to get some of them, but low manpower requirements and relatively inexpensive design means that you can absorb the losses and win via attrition.

Instead, it seems to me that most air forces made huge design sacrifices, as well as operational and human sacrifices, to load up their bombers with gunners who literally might not have been worth their weight.

Yep. But some of the later WW2 era bombers at least had tail warning radar, even if they didn't have radar-guided and stabilized guns. My point is that the "least useless" place to have a gun on a bomber is the tail, and tailgunners (or other gunners who faced to the rear) generally had the least
complicated firing solutions. I forget the exact numbers, but most of the gunner "aces" of the 8th AF were tailgunners, with top-turret gunners coming in next.


Yeah, but if you've got an entire squadron of gunners swearing to God that they saw big trails of black smoke, and a few guys claiming they saw fire (due to reflections, tracers, sun glare, or whatever), plus one or two guys saying that the plane was diving "out of control" then a credulous intel officer might let the claim stand.

Eyewitness accounts are pretty damned unreliable, especially in the heat of combat. But, until you realize that, you might believe "they were there, they saw it, who am I to dispute them."

It might be possible to find the actual technical report in the National Archives. That would settle a lot of questions about methods

In any case, TD now have actual factual data for the ABSOLUTE BEST accuracy possible using certain guns, which could be extrapolated for other types.

What would really be useful is if the USN or USAAF did studies on accuracy of pintle or Scarff-ring mounted rear-facing guns.

Or, even better, did any Air Forces keep records on relative gunner accuracy during training missions against aerial targets? Were there acceptable "Go/No Go" standards for aerial gunnery against target drogues in order to graduate from aerial gunner school? At least for the USAAF, it might be a bit easier to find that sort of data since Clark Gable was an air gunner (and, unusually, a commissioned officer). Stuff that might have otherwise been tossed at the end of the war might have been kept for sentimental reasons if it involved a movie star.

My Dad was a WAG in the RCAF and during training and his instructor wrote `excellent` in his log book for a 5% hit on the drogue, if that is any help Pursuivant.

Typical was 1-2%.

The Navy and Marines used more pintle/ring mounted guns on their dive & torpedo bombers than the Army used; the various float planes launched from the cruisers and battleships also had rear gun installations. I retain the impression that the pre-war trained Navy gunners had a pretty high standard for accuracy, much like the pre-war Naval Aviators (Dave McCampbell was a chain-smoking guy in his thirties when he rang up his score; you have to wonder what John Thach, one of the other acknowledged 'Top Guns' of the prewar era could have accomplished in a similar position).

As for my description of how the gun mounts were most likely tested, sighting the guns in and then clamping the gunner's end down gives you the dispersion inherent to the gun mount type; humans are terribly non standard as a rule (even from minute to minute), so you would want to limit their influence as much as possible.

MiloMorai's numbers sound about right for shooting drogues flying in formation with your aircraft; 5% for a steady state target unlikely to shoot back.

cheers

horseback

That's why I was asking about them. If you could get decent stats for inherent accuracy of rear-mounted pintle/ring-mounted guns from the USN, then it would be very easy to extrapolate it to similar gun mounts used by other air forces. All the mounting technology was roughly comparable (although gun performance differed a bit) and the human element was probably pretty much the same worldwide.

Not much beyond the few times I've tried to look up the reports of aircraft like "Pistol Packing Mama's" last fight, and been able to find nothing to actually confirm beyond reports that usually came from people in no position to see what happened.
I've made exactly the same general argument myself on more than one occasion.

I think that the momentum was in place by 1930 or so, with Douhet's 'the bomber will always get through' dogma, coupled with the way that big multiengine aircraft were outperforming the single engine fighters of the same period. I'm sure that the Powers That Were assumed that the fighters would never become as fast, long ranged and heavily armed as they eventually did (or if they did, they assumed that they themselves would be safely retired by then). In the cash poor Depression era US Army Air Corps, big bombers offered a lot of bang for the taxpayers' buck (and they looked quite impressive).

A lot of the men who were generals in 1942 made their marks in the early-mid 1930s as advocates of this strategy before the development of radar made locating the bomber formations a lot less chancy, and fighter aircraft became not only as fast and high flying as the big bombers, but much more so. These generals and the big aircraft companies that built the big bombers had already made a major investment in the concept before the war though, and probably really did believe that the Germans and the RAF simply hadn't used big enough formations of aircraft capable of flying as high and fast as the B-17 or B-24, with enough well trained men at heavy machine guns to swat away the few fighters able to get to altitude in time to intercept.

By the time reality had set in, it was late 1943, and the war machine had poured billions into bomber production, trained aircrew and propaganda, not to mention lost thousands of lives. You could quietly reassign the less senior responsible parties to training commands and early retirement (after the war) but you couldn't tell the world, the taxpayers (a large subset of which had become Gold Star Mothers due to your miscalculations), the 'crusading' politicians and especially the enemy that you had been terribly wrong.

Rosie the Riveter would find you and kick your *%&$$!!! and that would be the least of your problems.

Better to re-purpose the bombers and let the new long range fighters destroy the Luftwaffe (and its pilots) in the air after using the bombers to get them to come up and fight; once the fighters finally established air supremacy, you could finally use the bombers to destroy the enemy's industry, starting with fuel and lubricants, and gradually reducing the surface of his territory to a moonscape for the sake of bragging rights and a shot at a role in creating a separate Air Force and maybe even take over the aviation arms of those arrogant bastages in the Navy and Marine Corps, all while saying that was how you had planned it all along.

As RoseAnne Rosannadanna used to say "It could happen."

cheers

horseback

Hmm, what about the dual gun mounts and convergence? This would need clarification to not over/under estimate their accuracy.

And I wouldn't know what I had decided in around 1938. Then fighters were becoming faster than bombers, yes, but their range was still limited (thats why the Zero was so incredibly successful first IMHO -noone thought any fighter could have that range), and their payload was not stellar either. So you could guess right about the fighters potential and leave the bombers be. But the risk that bombers could be still capable enough was too great to not have them. And once you had them, you needed to use them...

Speaking of big and impressive Depression Era bombers, in a magic world where we could have everything we wanted from a combat flight sim, I'd love to see the XB-19 modeled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_XB-19

Underpowered and slow, but decent payload, excellent range for the era and, of course, lots of guns.

Of course, this is a very American (and USAAF) point of view. The USN, Luftwaffe, VVS, RAF, Reggia Aeronautica, IJN and IJAAF all made different decisions regarding "the next war" in the 1930s.

In all cases, however, their decisions for medium or heavy bombers included adding a number of dedicated gunners, often in positions where the gun had a very limited fields of view and arcs of fire. And, one of the things that IL2 has taught me is just how freaking useless a flexible gun with limited arc of fire and field of view is.

But, as you point out, the thing that really blindsided the military strategists of the 1930s (when the major combatants were designing the air forces that would be used during WW2) was the invention of radar. The argument that "the bomber will always get through" falls short if you have a device that can detect the bombers as they take off and form up!

It even messes up decisions about where to place guns. Most bomber designs assumed that fighters would fall into a stern chase and would be attacking from below as they rose to intercept. So, lots of guns were placed to guard the plane's belly and rear.

But, with radar, fighters could position themselves ahead and above the bomber formation, so at least some of the U.S. heavy bombers had to be hastily redesigned with heavier guns to the front of the plane.

Germans admited that gunners were there to improve the moral of the crew, not for achieving any brilliant results. They were there to bring the idea that they were not just flying pigeons.

The difference with B17's were the closed box formation. For the fighter groups, it was like attacking a ground position with heavy AA fire, without armored aircraft. The way they found to combat this situation, was to break the box formation to pick less riscky targets. The under wing mortars, were used to this purpose, (badly represented in game, because bomber crews got excelent morals allways!) they were fired in the general direction of the bomber formations to generate confusion and panic, but getting a direct hit was just a special bonus, and not an expected result.

I think that was the case for a lot of gunners who also had other jobs, like the flight engineer, navigator and bombardier on the U.S. heavy bombers. Being able to shoot back rather than just sit there and take it was probably a morale boost.

Additionally, all those gunners served as extra eyes, not just to look out for fighters or flak, but also for station-keeping in formation.

Actually, all the U.S. heavy bombers.

Even so, the U.S. practice of heavily armed bombers flying in close formation didn't work so well unless they had fighter escort. U.S. attempts at unescorted missions deep into Europe were disastrous and forced a temporary halt to U.S. bombing raids while the generals figured out a different strategy.

The British learned this lesson earlier and told the Americans, but the Americans wouldn't listen. Without extremely long-ranged fighters like the P-47, P-51 and P-38 to escort their bombers, the British had to revert to night bombing.

Yep. Of course, German squadron tactics in the game don't follow Luftwaffe doctrine at all. There's no attempt whatsoever to "break the box" and then detail a flight or section to deal with the cripples.

Likewise, U.S. heavies don't try to maintain formation (like several cripples banding together to form a slower formation), nor do U.S. fighters attempt to protect cripples as opposed to the rest of the formation.

The American bombing never stopped, they just didn't bomb anything that was outside escort range.

Technically correct; there were, however, 'pauses' during the periods in summer of 1943 and later, when losses made big formation missions difficult for a few weeks. The winter of '43-'44 was also pretty bad, weather-wise, which also created week-long gaps in large-scale operations. Bombing over France had a limited effect on the German war effort; in fact it could be argued that the Germans did a poor job of integrating the industries and economies of their conquered territories and folding them into their own.

The tempo of operations slowed markedly after Second Schweinfurt in early October '43, due to weather, bringing new fighter and bomber units up to speed and the changes in command at 8th AF, and didn't pick back up until Big Week, which began in mid February of 1944.

Another note on an earlier post; the B-24 was a lot harder to keep in close formation than the B-17, and Liberator groups suffered accordingly. Its superior range, speed and payload made it a valuable patrol bomber and more useful in the Pacific, but it was not well thought of in the ETO, and there were fewer B-24s in the 8th AF's order of battle as a result. Fortresses required a lot less attention and physical effort to keep close formation at all altitudes than most heavy bombers of the era, which allowed a greater degree of mutual support (meaning that more gunners could fire their guns in the general direction of an attacker).

cheers

horseback

When the PZL P-11c was introduced to the original IL-2 game, it came with a write-up that had some interesting info about how the plane's wing mounted guns were designed to fire beyond the range of bombers' guns. You can read the whole document here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...ient=firefox-a

Here is the most relevant part, highlights are mine:

The gun pairs have separate triggers since they can never be fired usefully at the same time. The wing guns may be fired by pressing the second trigger. There is no "all guns together" mode.

No one publishes documents concerning their war fighting doctrine at the time and classified documents tend to be destroyed when countries are overrun. With hindsight it is not too hard to work out the doctrine though. During WW1 it had become clear that the effective range of single hand manipulated rear guns was very low. Certainly less than 100 meters. The Poles were clearly trying to evolve stand off tactics for use by their fighters against the large formations of Soviet bombers which they were built to destroy. In the thirties most of these had mobile defensive mounts which were hardly superior to those of WW1. The best probably had an effective range of no more than 200 meters. The elevated wing guns in the P-11c could be used for stand off attacks from the rear arc from a range of perhaps 300 meters. Ideally engaging from very slightly below and at the same speed.

The P-11c wing guns had no convergence but at 300 meters their cones of dispersion were large and had merged anyway. The idea was to create a shotgun effect. The sight is ignored when firing the wing guns. Tracer is used to spray the intended straight and level formation target from safe stand off range. Any Soviet fighters which could not be avoided by using the superior speed of the gull winged monoplanes would be engaged at close quarters with nose guns only.

If this does not sound like a winning strategy imagine what the real pilots thought. They wanted four gun fighters with all guns harmonized. They never got them. The wing mounts although outboard of the shoulder were an integral part of the shoulder construction of the unusual gull wing design and apparently could not be altered. Only about sixty of the 175 P-11cs delivered to the Polish Air Force ever had the wing guns fitted. The rest just had the nose guns. Stories that this was because there was a shortage of guns lasting for years were just a cover up for a halfhearted implementation of the doctrine.

A decade later the Luftwaffe barely made stand off attacks work with much greater firepower and high quality reflector sights. The doctrine was correct of course, and two decade after the P-11c entered service guided missiles finally made stand off fighter attacks against bombers a practical reality. The P-11c pioneered the concept though and so this release models the four gun fighters with all their strengths and weaknesses. Just remember to obtain a firing solution for the nose guns using the sight and a firing solution for the wing guns using tracer only. Never fire both at the same time.

The Poles were smart enough to expect the Soviets to use the same tactics. Even in 1936 all the mobile mounts in the P-23B Karas were semi rigid with hydraulic power assistance to train the mounts. This significantly increased their effective range compared to most other mobile manually trained mounts of the day.

That "classical" aproach to the bombers self protecting capacity is not that fair at all. If germans tried to take down american bombers as any other single flying aircraft, they will probably got serious losses. Even if they look dumb on holywood films, they played smart with their resources, and instead of making extremely daring attacks on bombers, by single engined fighters, they picked them with heavy two engined fighters and with long range devices. Those bombers forced to fall back, were then to be finished by single engined fighters.

So, the doctrine wasn`t that wrong, it just generated new tactics, and new weapons that made this doctrine obsolete. Actually US bombers faired fairly well at he begining. Germans just happened to readjust faster than expected. When escorts started coming with the bomber formations, single engined fighters were not as goood as the bi-motors on the bomber killing task, but will have some chance against escorts, where bi-motors would have none.

Combat sorties flown in the ETO, http://www.usaaf.net/digest/t119.htm

1943
Jun - 2,107 - 1,268 (airborne - effective)
Jul - 2,829 - 1,743
Aug - 2,265 - 1,850
Sep - 3,259 - 2,457
Oct - 2,831 - 2,117
Nov - 4,157 - 2,581
Dec - 5,973 - 4,937

1944
Jan - 6,367 - 5,027
Feb - 9,884 - 7,512

As can be seen there was a dip in Oct '43 but there was a steady increase in the number of sorties flown.

That might have been more due to bad targeting decisions by the USAAF. Especially during early 1943, the U.S. was under a lot of pressure by the Brits to do something about the u-boats which were a mortal threat to Great Britain's existence. So, the U.S. wasted a lot of effort on bomb-proof u-boat pens at Brest and Lorient. Later, they took a lot of casualties for not a whole lot of effect bombing u-boat production centers at Kiel. It wasn't until the middle of 1944, when the USAAF figured out that POL assets were the perfect target, that the U.S. bombing offensive had any real strategic impact other than just destroying a lot of buildings.

As to the ability of the Nazis to integrate conquered economies into their own, blame it on very short time frame (just a couple of years), deliberate sabotage and heel-dragging by the conquered peoples, and, of course, the savage Nazi ideology which justified slave labor and genocide. The latter element was a particularly big factor in Poland and the Ukraine.

This was the period I was thinking of in my previous post.

Additionally, it's ceiling wasn't as good and the B-24 didn't have quite the same reputation for ruggedness that the B-17 did. Luftwaffe pilots knew these things and choose their targets accordingly. B-17 crews sardonically remarked that the best escort they could have was a squadron of B-24s as low squadron. (Low and rear squadrons in group formations suffered disproportionately in any case.)

Basically correct. And, the Luftwaffe commanders weren't stupid, just overmatched. (As an aside, it's interesting to read Adolf Galland's memoir from the 1960s, originally written for a German audience, where he claims that he was trying to get all the planes and pilots he could get to defend Germany. Of course, that strategy would have completely deprived the German army of air support, especially on the Russian Front.)

But, the German strategy of heavy fighters was countered by long-ranged U.S. single-engined fighters which could easily defeat twin-engined fighters loaded with aerial mortars, bombs or cannon gondolas.

And, once the Americans were able to get drop-tank equipped P-47 and P-51 over German in sufficient numbers, the end was inevitable. Arguably, the most important invention in the American bomber offensive was the humble waxed-paper 110-gallon drop tank!

It all goes to show that ultimately, WW2 wasn't about individual heroism or vision, it boiled down to bloody attrition and economics. Big economy + large population (e.g., the U.S. and the British Commonwealth) meant that you came through the war in pretty good shape (overall - the UK itself got hurt quite badly). Big population but smaller economy (e.g., China or Russia) means that your country survived, but a shocking number of your people didn't. Middling population and/or economy (e.g., Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Poland) meant that your country was defeated.

Good info, but most of those sorties between October and January reflect the enormous increase of groups (both Bomb and Fighter) added to the 8th AF that became possible once the U-Boat threat had been beaten in the summer of 1943; a lot of acclimatization to radio and ground control procedures, plus re-familiarization with their aircraft after at least a month of travel (or for some fighter groups, familiarization with entirely new fighter types), and constant drill on the latest formations, tactics and the requirement for precise timing and navigation to coordinate rendezvous with escorts. Most of these groups would do their initial 3-5 missions over relatively 'safe' targets, not too close to German airspace, and well within range of their escorts.

cheers

horseback

A potentially useful source of information and insight into USAAF flexible gunnery training:

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/...index.html#TOC

ARMY AIR FORCES HISTORICAL STUDIES No. 31

FLEXIBLE GUNNERY TRAINING IN THE AAF

I've read about the first 25 pages or so, and it should give a pretty good account of training problems and methods for the Army Air Forces' efforts during the war.

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horseback

This ignores the fact that the Luftwaffe had already demonstrated that they had heavily armed, long range heavy fighters like the Bf 110 and the Ju-88C, and had demonstrated that they were particularly useful against bombers, long before anyone came up with underwing rocket canisters. In fact, we could consider the American P-38 the ultimate WWII expression of the twin engine, high speed bomber destroyer concept (it was originally built to USAAF requirements for an interceptor rather than for a fighter), and the American bomber generals were certainly well aware of the Lightning’s capabilities, and the basic military principal that if you can do it, chances are very good that the enemy can do it too.
I would agree that the high altitude massed formation heavy daylight bomber doctrine would have worked very well against Bf 109E-1s over a Germany without an early warning radar system, but those days were long past by the time the 8th Air Force even arrived in England in 1942.

The US bombers fared well at the beginning because the JGs had never fired at such big targets before, and because they if anything over-respected the defensive fire from the gunners. It didn’t take them long to figure out how to estimate the range or re-set their convergences and recognize that for all the tracers flying past their ears that they were rarely hit before they could do serious damage and veered away. Even so, they recognized that being hit was a serious thing and when they were hit, they returned to base (unlike certain ai routines I could mention). If anything, the early confusion and hesitancy by the German fighters served to sucker the bomber groups into overconfidence and the early fiascoes over Germany before they had adequate numbers according to their own doctrines, much less adequate fighter escorts.

By that time, the Germans had said to themselves, “Hey, we have all these zerstörers and trained aircrew for them; they may not be very useful against enemy fighters, but they will be deadly to viermots. Let’s kick some Yankee air pirate ass.”

The reality was that long after the bomber generals’ doctrine was nullified, the bloody-minded commitment to ever bigger formations continued for reasons of ‘face’; if you look at what happened every time an unescorted US heavy bomber formation was detected and attacked by single engine fighters, the casualty figures were heavily in favor of the fighters, period. Luftwaffe Over Germany authors Caldwell & Muller reported several instances late in 1944 where bomber formations would miss their rendezvous with their escorts and were caught by even ‘light’ fighter formations of Bf 109Gs without gun pods and were decimated while the fighters got away with much fewer losses—and this was with the supposedly less capable ‘new growth’ generation of LW fighter pilots.

In any case, being hit by defensive fire is more a matter of the numbers of guns being fired in your direction than it is any one (or five) gunner's accuracy or skill. The closer you get, the more gunner skill enters into the equation, but individual accuracy did not become a factor unless the range was very short (as in under 150m) and the speed difference and angles were minimal.

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horseback