Are tail-gunners bullet-proof?
 

Recently I've been watching, on external view, three AI Bf 109s engage a lone Il-2. After several passes they made a sieve out of their victim but the Sturmovik's tail-gunner, sitting waist-high and totally unprotected, kept firing at them. Which made me think - are tail gunners immortal? The guy should have been ripped to pieces.

Gunners aren't bullet proof. You can kill them, but it's quite difficult. When you've killed a gunner you will notice thet he won't bail out when the pilot does.
I don't really care about the gunners, I shoot at the weak parts of a plane and then get out of there ;)

Killing tail gunners shouldn't be difficult at all. It wasn't in real life. Perhaps this feature needs some tweaking in the future? The gunner's slumped body would immediately tell the attacker that this threat was neutralized.

If any part of the aircraft's skin is between the bullet and the gunner they cannot be hurt. So kind of, yes. :)

I remember earlier versions of the game showed the slumped bodies of dead gunners and pilots. I don't know why, but it was removed by a patch. When attacking bombers it is frustrating that you can't see if the gunners are still alive, therefore I hope DT can re-introduce this feature.

There was also a bloodtexture forthe early Heinkels.
That was a nice feature, but thedead pilot animation is helpfull.I hate to wait if Iget shot or not .. achance of 50%.. thats not fun

And the gunners onthe il2 where slaughtert

It's still possible to have dead pilots and gunners slumped over, at least for the planes from the original IL2. You just need to configure it in the conf.ini file. In some cases, there's also a blood effect visible from outside the plane.

I don't know why this feature wasn't continued for later releases, since it is realistic and it does tell you if a particular crewman is out of action on a plane you're attacking. It certainly wouldn't change the ESRB rating.

And I agree that it should be fairly easy to kill gunners if they're in an exposed and unarmored location. Many fighter pilots specifically talk about aiming to kill the rear gunner or tail gunner before moving in for the kill. The life expectancy of Sturmovik gunners, who weren't protected like the pilot, was depressingly short.

While I look forward to all the improvements to AI in the new release, it remains to be seen if gunners are still very hard to kill, and if they keep on shooting after their dead.

Of course I don't expect DT to model mutilated bodies of rear gunners with guts splashed all over the aircraft but a little more realism would be nice. Rear gunners were a serious threat - but only until they were shot dead, and that happened pretty fast, usually on the first firing pass.

Are you sure? I have just tested the the highgore=1 setting in the unmodded version of 4.101 in a Hurricane vs He-111 H2 mission. No slumped gunners or pilots could be seen although I must have killed a number of crew members that didn't bailed out when the planes went down.

As far as I know the feature was completely removed some time ago.

It happens pretty fast in the sim as well, as long as you hit them.

Try setting arcade=1 in conf.ini, that will show where and if you're actually hitting the enemy.

LE: the HighGore=1 setting results in gunner slumped over only in a couple of planes.