Quote:
Originally Posted by IceFire
The age old tracers debate 
So long as they are useful to me as a simulator pilot I'm not going to complain too much. I hope everyone remembers that tracers look like lasers because we all saw StarWars at some point or another and StarWars is based on World War II air combat videos. Real laser beams travel at the speed of light in a continuous stream rather than defined pulses like a tracer (but unlike StarWars).
The pictures themselves look great. I think it's sometimes silly to complain about the visuals of an explosion until it's seen in motion. Often the various frames of an animation have an overall effect that cannot be seen from a single frame. |
This. The pictures look excellent once again and I especially love the battle damage with the torn cloth. Awesome detail.
On tracers....didn't different countries use different tracers? I've never seen it modeled in a game that I can remember (did not play IL2 so can't comment there), but gun camera footage from German planes tends to show "smoke trails" on the tracers.
Here is a cool quote from 5ad.org:
"It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th found with a tracer round to aid in aiming. That was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target, 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet, the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. That was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down."
I'm not sure how one would lead another aircraft without tracers though, I know I couldn't lol.
Pie in the sky here, but one thing that would be a great addition in the sim is the option to load out and sight your guns to your own preference. I know some pilots wanted all of their bullets to pass through a single point at a given distance while others wanted a spread. Others used a combination. They also ran combinations of tracer, AP, and incendiary ronuds.
Anyway, GREAT photos, can't wait!
Splitter