Long bursts more effective than multiple short ones?

[Jumoschwanz]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

I get the impression that in this game a long, on-target burst will do more damage than multiple short ones
Am I right about this, or am I just imagining things?

I agree that is a question for the guys that wrote the code.

I have not noticed anything of the sort though. I have blown an A-20 in half with a lucky short burst from a kilometer away with a single 20mm cannon, and then I have seen ammo poured into close up targets and have had them intact enough to fly home and land.

On hard settings where you have to learn to make blind shots where the target is hidden by part of your aircraft while you are shooting, the only time you are going to be really accurate landing long shots would be head-on or from dead-six, which is going to change the damage compared to a shot taken while a target is taking fire laid down for it to fly through while it is crossing your path at an angle.

Even the amount of G forces the target is handling can make the difference on whether or not part of it breaks off while it is taking hits.

S!

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

I get the impression that in this game a long, on-target burst will do more damage than multiple short ones even if the sum of the short ones lands as many bullets as the long one.
Am I right about this, or am I just imagining things?

Hitting the exact same spot twice with two short burst is more difficult than hitting it with a single longer burst IMHO. If I can fire from up close there seems to be no difference between two short bursts and a single longer one.
But any result can and will be skewd by your own perception - and randomization.

[MaxGunz]

Can you land a whole long burst in the same spot except from dead 6?
I find tail-shooting to be a waste of ammo.

Well, except with wing guns from real close but most of those hits go around the tail itself.
P-51 started out like that. Get close and one long burst blew up many fighters.

[K_Freddie]

The problem with firing a long burst is that you waste a lot of ammo if your siting is off, which generally the case with all of us.

The way I went about it, was to practise deflection shooting, using short bursts to site the target. Once you have the target 'sited', feel free to blast it, but here's another point.
With short burst, you start doing incremental damage, making it harder for the target to fly. This makes it easier to target in subsequent bursts, where once you have it nailed, you can pour as much lead into it as you're got.

Perfecting deflection shooting is great for high-G moves, as is this game the G-wing stress looks to be connected to shell damage, and wings and bits fall off much easier.

[Woke Up Dead]

Originally Posted by K_Freddie

Perfecting deflection shooting is great for high-G moves, as is this game the G-wing stress looks to be connected to shell damage, and wings and bits fall off much easier.

This makes sense in theory but I think I asked about this once and was told that this is not modeled in the game.

[K_Freddie]

Odd.. As I seen wings fly off so easily when I know I'm not on target - maybe too many lucky shots then.

[swiss]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

This makes sense in theory but I think I asked about this once and was told that this is not modeled in the game.

As far as I know it was added around 4.10.
(When Stangs and Fockes began to lose their wings in high-G maneuvers)

[MaxGunz]

Wing damage greatly affects wing strength for a while now.

Try flying with 50% or more FILTER on your pitch axis on stick settings if you've been breaking wings too often. See if it helps you accelerate any better.

[greybeard1]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

... Seems that two bullets on the spot ten seconds apart should do the same damage as two bullets on the same spot milliseconds apart.

I don't remember ever having read anywhere the principle on which it is based the damage model of IL-2, and, when they lack the basic information, you can imagine anything.

I mean, it matters of "bubbles" like in EAW or damage boxes, and how are they dimensioned?

Then, each of them how many states of damage does have? And transition from a state of damage to next is a matter of "points" given by incoming bullets?

I think that without these info (and more) we can't answer to your question. In principle, two bullets on same spot should give the very same effect, independently from their separation in time.

BTW, about hypothesized effect of bullets on a stressed structure, there's no official evidence. From 4.10 Guide: "Once damaged then its structural integrity is reduced so the ultimate load reduces as well." That's to say bullet hits reduce available G-load, but this latter admittedly does not affect resistance to bullet.

[MaxGunz]

The damage model uses 100's of 3D parts, all with hit points as one value to express both strength and ability to take damage.

We know this because throughout we have been shown this as well as explained about with some questions answered. When FB came out we were shown engines with 20 different parts that could be hit and destroyed, that was just the engine of one plane modeled on the real engine of the real plane. The airframe, instruments and pilot/crews are all modeled down to pieces and with every major step the new planes modeled to higher detail and occasionally planes from older versions got upgraded models thus some planes became unbalanced as to vulnerability.

We know the structural strengths are and were tied to hit points, the base of the Gigant can take massive hit damage because it had to be beefed up to not collapse when the model landed.

I guess you had to be there and actually thinking at the time.

If you want to know about EAW hit bubbles I can probably dig up the source code I wrote for the EAW Tweaker I wrote in 1999 that allows a one-pass even adjustment to all the hit bubbles both hit points and size. That was out before the hand-adjustments by committee ECA that Charles Gunst did manage to keep good control of.
The Tweaker uses a C++ class object to handle both EAW cabinet and mod files, it even takes care of opening, checking and creating needed mod files as part of the object instantiation. It's practically a library.

EAW hit bubbles are nothing like as detailed as even the original IL-2. EAW hit bubbles only know 'hit' and 'how hard'. IL-2 DM knows the part hit, the angle of the hit and the hit energy down to relative velocity and explosive power attributed to the projectile.
But then a computer capable of running masses of planes in EAW might start to slow down with 4-8 planes in the original IL-2.

Ask around if you didn't see. There's still probably sites showing those IL-2 model details and you may have such pictures as part of one or more IL-2 discs or patches.