[nodlew]

Peter,

I didn't mean that there were never situations where the target would get covered by the nose of your plane--depending on the orientation of your fighter vs. the location and vector of your target. There are certainly many possible firing solutions where it might be. In the case of a slow-maneuvering, slower-flying bomber with a large surface area, perhaps some of those solutions might be the ideal shot. Given the design of the gun sight, and given its necessary position above and behind the elongated engine of the plane (more pronounced on some planes than others), this would, physically, just plain have to be the case.

However, most of the WWII era gunnery manuals I have read, including "Bag the Hun!" (British, by the way) describe employing the gunsight reticule to estimate distance and proper lead of the target, and this is not possible unless one can maneuver one's own aircraft in such a way that the target remains visible in the sight relative to the reticule. The problems doing this in the past that I referred to were the result of a number of game deficiencies--the most egregious of them being that the sights were crudely modeled (too cramped, wrong size, no way to compensate for range by lofting your shells, etc.), making their employment unrealistically difficult. Another culprit is bad flight models of AI aircraft, or the player aircraft, causing planes to maneuver and fight in unnatural ways (not being able to employ rudder effectively in a turn for example), resulting in one never seeming to have a good sight picture of the target.

As Il-2 improved over the years, this problem was mitigated, and as my own skill increased, obviously I learned to compensate, pick my shots, and hit the enemy planes.

My point is that the way the AI behaves and the way my plane responds in Cliffs of Dover along with the realistic gunsights and ballistics of the shells has finally completely resolved this issue from my perspective. I am able, from any workable angle, to point my gunsight ahead of the enemy plane, work the ailerons and rudder to achieve my desired lead, fire my shots and usually witness the effect or lack thereof on the target.

And it is my assertion that this is a giant leap forward in the simulation of aerial combat of the WWII era.

Thank you for your time.



Another that I just thought of--AI aircraft, even if the flight models of the planes are correct to the nth degree, are free from the physical and psychological limitations (habits, proclivities) of human beings. AI aircraft have always behaved as if, beyond the programmed limitations of energy maneuver for the planes and avoiding collisions with the ground, they really couldn't care less if they are oriented "properly" to the Earth or not. In a dogfight, they are always turning as tightly as the code will allow them to get on your six, which means that every dog fight is the same Luftberry circle, with your and your opponent's planes standing on their wingtips, turning at the edge of blacking out, until one can fire on the other. In this orientation, the target will ALWAYS be beneath the nose of your plane, since to keep on him you must be in the same maneuver plane as he is, and in a tight turn, the shells will drop off very dramatically, or rather, instantly. I do not detect this behavior in CoD, and I am very pleased to be able to say so.

Here, again, I have written ten pounds of verbiage and taken extreme grammatical pains to be clear in order to make myself understood, when really, anyone who was making any effort to understand me in the first place would have taken my meaning from the earlier pithy remark. It's a good thing I really like listening to myself talk...er, type.