Are proper trainbusting effects possible?
 

Is it possible for IL2 to model the massive steam explosions that you see on gun camera footage when a steam locomotive is strafed?

For example:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNpM0P7kpAU

While this effect is mostly eye candy, tactically it is valuable because it allows you to determine whether you've destroyed the locomotive at a far greater range than is currently possible. Very handy if you're attempting to strafe a flak train!

Secondly, is it possible for moving steam locomotives to have a larger smoke plume?

Good example here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xph2ervgP2k

This is tactically important since it allows trains to be detected at far greater ranges than is currently possible.

Finally, IL2's scoring system should differentiate between locomotives and other rolling stock, since locomotives were more expensive to build than most other train cars, and since destroying a locomotive stopped the train, which had further disruptive effects on enemy supply lines and troop movements.

You know, lots of this things were done so as to no generate lag on online playing, so that trains start being drawn a bit too near so as to minimize overtaxing the internet traffic.

Oleg will always answer, this is a flight sim, not a tank sim.
As good as he was on his ideas, he never grasped this concept of building the whole game as a full combat simulator. And also thata good combat flight simulator needed a reasonable behavior from ground targets.

Fair enough, but there has been a reworking of smoke & fire effects to maximize realism while reducing CPU load. Could the same thing be applied to ground targets?

The reason I asked as to whether it is possible for IL2 to improve the train effects is because currently the number of smoke & flame effects available in the game is quite limited.

A new effect would have to be added to get the "boiler explosion" effect. (But, as a bonus it could also be used to simulate a burst boiler effect on steam-powered ships and boats.)

The big plume of black smoke produced by a coal-fired steam engine could easily use the current "engine damage" smoke texture, if it doesn't already. That's already optimized for frame rates.


I agree with Oleg's general philosophy, but even in a game where ground vehicles and ships are targets, you have to model their behavior accurately enough aircraft can hunt them in a realistic fashion.

Due to the smoke and steam they produced, steam locomotives were visible from miles away. At night, they could be detected at a distance when the firebox was opened, or more rarely, if the coal produced embers which flew out of the chimney.

That, plus the fact that they were limited to railroad tracks, made it easy for pilots to hunt them when they were on the move.

And Oleg would say here: this is not a Navy sim ;)

It would be intreresting to have such effect, indeed. But how often it could be triggered? Direct boiler damage is rare accident in real life. And there are not many ships in (stock) game which can be classified as steamships.

For ships, the burst boiler effect should be much rarer, and should only appear as a "critical hit" when a bomb, rocket or 20 mm+ cannon shell hits the engine room.

Gun camera and skip bombing films will occasionally show this effect (a huge, sudden cloud of white steam), but not with the same regularity as with destroyed locomotives.

Keep in mind that almost all large ships of the WW2 era were "steamships" in that they didn't use internal combustion engines for motive power. They burned bunker fuel which was used to to fire steam boilers, which in turn provided power to steam turbines. That meant that they still had boilers which could be burst as a result of damage.

I would actually love transports to be selectable to have explosive cargo.

Oilers to come on fire.

Warships in particular, some weak spot that if hited will blow out the whole ship, like the Hood.

The other things that I would expect from ships should not be posted here.

This would be really easy to do, even for a mod. All you need to do is set the "fatal damage" effects for a particular unit to some size of bomb blast and rename the unit to create a new unit.

Say 500 lb. bomb for a truck, 1,000 lb. for a train car, or 10,000 lb. for a merchant ship.

For explosive blasts or large smoky fires within a building, it would be simpler to just create an arbitrary unit - like a simple box - with minimal "hit points", no "panzer rating" (i.e., armor) and a similar fatal damage effect as described above. Mission builders could place the box within the building using the FMB, to create the effects of an ammo explosion or fuel fire.

IL2 lacks the damage effects to properly simulate the really massive black smoke and huge fires that accompany an oil tank or oil tanker fire. They would need to be created, and they'd likely have a really devastating effect on frame rates.


The circumstances that caused the HMS Hood to blow up were extremely unusual. Suffice it to say that the Bismarck's crew got about as lucky a hit as its possible to get - a very heavy shell that hit exactly the right spot, at exactly right angle, with sufficient force to penetrate right into the Hood's main magazine and then explode.

What would be slightly more realistic is giving aircraft carriers the possibility of being much more vulnerable to damage than they currently are, representing the possibility that they're refueling or "bombing up" aircraft below decks, (e.g., IJN Akagi, USS Franklin), with far more impressive flame effects.

Agree on critical hit by a bomb. Not sure about a rocket, even AP. 20mm shells - certainly not, unless ship's hull and deck is pure wood or this is very small vessel as tug boat, for example.
It would be interesting to speculate how often this effect should be triggered, taking into account size of a bolier. Probably just few percent of all hits in some "box" representing the engine room.

Regarding WW2 ships - true, steam turbines for most, diesel engines for some, reciprocal steam engines for very few. Almost all were equipped with boilers, just of different types and applications.

A big rocket basically has the same punch as a small bomb or an artillery shell - certainly enough power to potentially cause a boiler explosion.

That's what I was thinking of. If you look at gun camera films, you can sometimes see 20mm and .50 caliber AP rounds damaging small ships like frigates, destroyer escorts, tugs, and coastal freighters. They didn't call destroyers "tin cans" for nothing!

I'd say "rarely" - perhaps no more than 10% of the time. That is, assuming that IL2 ever revises the ship damage model to actually take hit locations into account. It could also be triggered as a fatal damage effect when a ship sinks.