why is gunnery so much more difficult in clod than in 1946?

[Blackdog_kt]

There are various reasons for the complicated gunnery, but at the same time i get anywhere from 15% to 45% accuracy depending on what i'm going up against.

The gunnery is indeed harder, but the increased sense of speed and "being in the game" thanks to the new graphics makes it easier to judge distances and angles in order to make corrections.

First of all, the physics are more complex. The aircraft have a more pronounced inertia and stall-fighting with engines at full power is harder due to the combination of high power at low speeds (prop and torque effects), especially if you are chopping and re-applying throttle to force or avoid overshoots (you get yaw changes with every throttle change).

Second, someone tested this on simHQ and he said there is prop-wash modeled. If you fly directly behind another aircraft you get turbulence and that complicates your aim.

Finally, the new damage model makes things more varied. I wouldn't say random because it's all very accurately calculated (you need to damage an oil rad or engine to see oil streaking past and so on), but there's loads more variety. Shooting from dead six is only good if you can score hits with cannons and cause structural damage. Otherwise it's better to have a bit of deflection so that the target presents a bigger profile for your rounds to connect. This way you can hit the pilot, engine or fuel tanks.

I especially like how each kill seems different, because there's a lot of individual components to damage. I might chop parts off the enemy aircraft, or it might simply start leaking oil and after a while the engine goes up in flames from an overheated engine whereupon it starts trailing 2-3 new streaks of smoke and so on. This dependency of various components to each other makes such cascading failures possible and creates images we've only seen in gun-cam footage up till onw.