Spitfires vs. Bf-109s at the White Cliffs of Dover - Youtube vid by me.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Lololopoulos

hey cheesehawk,
how do I know how far away my target is then by looking into 109's gunsight? Is it set automatically to my convergence value as I input to the loadout menu?
thanks!

German gunsights only have one setting. I'm not entirely sure if it's calibrated based on the Spit or Hurricane (i guess they have fairly similar wingspans anyway), but it's a case of "when Spitfire/Hurricane wings touch the bars target is X meters away", where X would be a suitable value ( not more 200-300 meters i guess).

From that point on it's approximations by the pilot: double the wingspan for a twin engined bomber so that when wings touch the bars it should be about 2X meters away, and so on.

The easiest way to test it would be to make a short, airstart mission in the FMB with your 109, a Spit and a Hurricane. Set them to have low fuel and no ammo so they won't fight back and run for home, enable icons and fly behind them until you see their wings touch the bars, then check the icons for the range. Or wait for one of the guys with technical documentation or knowledge on the Revi sight to pop in and answer it for us


EDIT: Actually i couldn't resist so i flipped through Flea's datasheets and checklists and the answer is there on page 10. The revi is a 100 mil gunsight, which means that a target with a wingspan of 10 meters fills the gunsight (wingtips touch the bars) when it's 100 meters away. The Spitfire has a wingspan of 11.23 meters and the Hurricane sizes up at 12.19, so neither of them exactly fits the gunsight. I guess they went for the approximate rule that "fighters have about 10 meters of wingspan".

According to Flea's excellent document, when a Spit fills the sight it's 112 meters away, for the Hurricane it's 122 meters (as you can see, these numbers are approximately ten times the quoted wing span). In other words, since absolute precision is impossible anyway, just keep in mind that when they fill the sight they are tad further than 100 meters and you'll be ok. So if you have a convergence of 200 meters you should shoot when their wingspan is about half the distance from bar to bar.