Cannot tell you if the Stuka DM is porked—oops, excuse me, I meant ‘off’. The ridiculous ai rear gunners have kept me from doing any serious damage to them for years. Still, given the sheer size of the beast, if it were even a bit fragile in real life, it couldn’t have been as effective in combat conditions for most of the war as it obviously was.
However, most Jug (and Corsair and Hellcat) fans would have to wonder where you’ve been all these years; the Il-2 Sturmovik ’46 version of the P-47D DM is obviously the creation of a truly dedicated bunch of debunkers. Debunkers are usually people who read or hear of something being described in superlatives, and without any further investigation or actual thought, say to themselves “Naaah, it couldn’t possibly have been that good” and proceed from there to undo the legend with all the resources at their disposal without the slightest twinge of conscience, because they just know better (and because they think that destroying a legend will make them superior).
Debunkers have done their worst to undo Western Civilization in many ways, from insisting that great men in previous eras must have been vile and unworthy because they didn’t subscribe to today’s fashions in politically correct behavior, that the Allied Powers in WWII were only in it for the money and markets, that the Beatles weren’t really geniuses (they just stole all their material from some obscure band they saw in Frankfurt in the early sixties), and that rock and roll will eventually die.
The debunkers have looked at the whole spectrum of WWII fighters, and decided that the certain aircraft couldn’t possibly have deviated so far from the norm. I think that this is certainly the case with the P-47; compared to the standard smaller and lighter European fighters, it (and the F4U and F6F) was big and heavy, with not only armor in the usual places, but the sheer number of layers of stuff in the fuselage made it hard to hit anything vital, and what you could hit was so over-engineered that you had to get a multitude of heavy hits to bring it down. But that would make it above average in this regard, and the debunkers can't have that.
And that’s just hitting it from the rear. The R-2800 was the finest radial engine of the Second World War; only the Merlin has a comparable reputation or powered as many dominant fighters. It was legendary for its ability to take hits from light MGs to 20mm cannon and still run away from the opposition and get its pilot home, often hundreds of miles away. It was the Golden BB shots that were memorable rather than the regular hits, but in this sim, every hit to the engine compartment of an R-2800 is a Golden BB.
The M-82 of the La-5/7 is easily the most rugged engine in the Il-2 inventory; it will take some hits and keep running fairly strongly, and the BMW in the FW 190As will keep going after a few strikes (even from a 12.7mm MG), but the R-2800 will stop on a dime almost every time it is hit with a spitball (and let’s be clear here; I maintain that 95% of the hits made to the engine compartment should not be possible for the rear gunners, AI or human, much less that 99.9% of those hits would have done anything like the damage they usually do). AI gunners are still making high deflection hits from 500m and more away, so the bullshit factor has always been very high in that regard (and oddly enough, the debunkers ignore the historical realities in this case).
Both of these engines were closely cowled, and their interiors were packed tightly with all sorts of tubing and wiring; any hit to these areas that penetrated the skin of the aircraft would probably have done some serious damage, whereas the R-2800 was not so closely packed and the bulk of the cylinders’ diameters were made up of cooling fins. I would also suggest that it was so big and made so well made that it was not nearly as susceptible to a couple of rounds bouncing around inside the cowl as these other examples. There are multiple records of R-2800s getting their aircraft back to base with two or three cylinders shot away, with tree limbs 10-15cm in diameter stuck in the engine compartment, or with large portions of one or more propeller blades shot away (unbalanced props would be catastrophic for most engines).
Every time this comes up, a debunker says something like “Well, you only hear about the aircraft that made it back; you never hear about the hundreds that didn’t come back, so there.”
Hah. P-47s and F6F Hellcats were the two safest fighters to fly in combat in WWII, and they were both powered by the mighty R-2800. An awful lot of them did come back, in much greater proportions than any other aircraft performing the same sorts of missions. And these were very widely used in all theaters, in greater numbers than most of the other ‘safe’ fighter/bomber types that are touted as ‘rugged’.
Look out debunkers. We've found you out.
cheers
horseback
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