Gunnery Settings for IL2-1946 and SOW
 

Machine gun and cannon fire power in IL2-1946.

Concerning bullet destruction\damage......

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

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

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

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

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

I think your statement is incorrect. It should be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to it.

You're welcome.

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

LOL

Another minor correction:

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

:grin:

Excellent video. Thanks Feuerfalke!

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