Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[ElAurens]

I can attest to the P 40 one shot insta-stop.

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

I hear you, but your reply, and most of your subsequent replies in this thread make good arguments about unrealistic accuracy of AI gunners, not about the unrealistic fragility of the American engines. If you try attacking the same bombers with the same tactics in a different planes, you might conclude the R-2800 is just as tough or tougher. That's certainly the impression I get.

I would rank the fragility of engines according to their aircraft roughly like this, from most delicate to toughest:

- Bf-109
- Ki-61
- P-40
- P-51
- Hurricane
- Tempest
- Italian liquid-cooled planes
- P-38
- Spitfire
- MiG
- P-47
- F4U
- Yak
- LaGG
- F4F
- FW-190
- La 5/7
- P-39
- Japanese radial-powered fighters

Part of my argument, probably obscured by the more obvious gunnery flaws, is that some aircraft are disproportionately hit even more than that their DMs are overstated/flawed. I've flown the 109 and 190 regularly since the first year the sim was sold, and while the 109 has an inline engine, I've never felt that it took a disproportionate number of engine losses, certainly nothing like the P-40. My immediate impression is that the 190 loses its engine or takes engine damage quite a bit more often than the 109. It also gets hit more often, even though it was a bit faster and capable of rapid change in direction and it needs considerably less firing time to obtain the destruction of its target. Once hit though, it usually gives you reduced power for a good while rather than packing it in immediately the way an R-2800 or the P-40's Allison often will.

Admittedly, by this point I have about 10-20 times as many 'hours' in the 109/190 over the P-40 in all their respective versions, but the P-40 hours are still pretty significant. I have less time in the Mustang than the P-40, but it seems far more likely to lose its prop pitch than other aircraft that have a DM that includes loss of PP (how about the Zero for a comparison? It's props were license built Hamilton Standard models, and I've never lost PP in the few combats I've tried in it, and that spinner is -or should be- like the Mustang's, a big target). I haven't flown the Ki-61, the Tempest or the Italians in any appreciable combat situations, so I cannot offer an opinion on them.

I tried one short campaign in the early Hurri, but it was enormously frustrating not least because the campaign was developed for an earlier patch of the game, and some things just weren't possible that had been before the notorious 4.0x patches. It did seem to me to be in much the same class as the P-40, as far as the glass jaw.

The Hellcat in my opinion is far more likely to get hit than either the P-47 or the Corsair; in ratio of hits to engine losses, they appear to me to be about even --much too much damage much too often. Similarly, the Mustang is far more likely to get hit than a Spitfire, although the Spit seems to lose control surfaces or take a PK more easily.

Of the five though, the Hellcat is easily the greatest bullet magnet; it's like that one kid in your group of friends who was always caught or recognized when all of you were doing something you shouldn't.

Yaks and LaGGs seem to me to be about right; I have more hours in them and P-39s than the P-40, and the constant concern in Soviet fighters was overheating; hits to the engine make it overheat or die fairly quickly; the engines were always very closely cowled, so any hit to the engine covers almost invariably led to hitting the engine (oddly enough, even though hits to the engine tend to take it out, it rarely damages the MGs mounted above it).

This is also true of the 190, the Lavotchkins, the P-38, and the Ki-43, but not nearly so much in the case of the P-47, Hellcat, Mustang, Spitfire, Hurricane or P-40; these aircraft look remarkably abbreviated when the engine covers or cowls are removed for maintenance, even more so than the 109. I am also aware that the P-40 and the Mustang had some armor plating behind their spinners to protect the engine and pilot in a headon fire situation (which doesn't seem to be very effective in-game...)

The Soviets also don't seem to get hit as easily overall as some western types; they and the Airacobra seem to benefit from some sort of 'grace' that doesn't extend to the P-40, the Spit and later American types, which a few passes against a flight of He-111s (armed with multiple low-tech single 7.9mm popgun positions) would quickly illustrate.

The F4F is actually safer than the F6F against the Betty in my experience, despite being slower and less armored (and the early war examples of the F4F-3 lacked self-sealing tanks and pilot armor; first clashes in the Pacific featured boilerplate literally being hand installed on the hanger deck the night before a mission).

Fragility seems to me to be at least partly as much of a function of how likely you are to be hit; it would be interesting to do a comparison of attacking passes at bombers generally acknowledged as particularly dangerous in spite of being lightly armed, like the He-111 or the Betty. If you made multiple passes in each aircraft at roughly the same angles and speeds, you can observe which aircraft take disproportionate hits and or damage, and draw your own conclusions.

cheers

horseback

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by horseback

Shooting accurately from a maneuvering aircraft, even a bomber in a gentle bank, was next to impossible. Ai gunnery from rear gunners and ground flak in this game has always been ridiculously accurate, probably more than modern automated systems today.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I don't have the data to prove what you're saying, other than somewhat generic stats on bomber casualties due to flak and fighters. We can trade anecdotes all day, but I'd love to see actual statistics to help back us up.

If anything, it seems like bomber gunners (at least rookie to average gunners) have been "nerfed," in 4.12, if only by unrealistic bomber formations and doctrine. But that's only by comparison with the laser-like precision with which gunners prior to 4.12 could shoot you down. It was if were were a generic Imperial TIE fighter pilot and the gunners were Han Solo and Luke Skywalker!

But, gunners must have had some usefulness, otherwise bombers would have dispensed with them earlier.

I think that damage or kills due to heavy flak is about right - as long as you take into account the fact that each gun in the game can actually represents an entire battery. Low to medium altitude flak is downright lethal, but that might actually be realistic. Veteran ground attack pilots learned to come in fast and low, make one good pass and get the hell out.

I don't have a problem with gunners starting to shoot at 500 meters range, but that should mostly be "suppression fire" with very little chance of actually hitting. Shots at anything other than minimal deflection angles against a plane flying a relatively straight course should also have almost no chance of hitting. But, if you make an attack from 6 o'clock level against a heavy bomber, without approaching at a very high closing speed, you deserve every bullet that hits your plane.

Turning speeds for turrets seem to be about right. At least for the U.S. turrets, there's pretty good performance data, and actually possibly a few turrets that actually still work. In archival film, you can see that they turn pretty quickly - something like 120 degrees per second.

But, against that, something that isn't modeled in the game, at least for human gunners, are the effects of G forces, vibrations from the plane itself and wind buffeting of the turret and guns if the guns are angled into the plane's slipstream. All those things make bomber gunnery a bit too easy, at least for a human gunner. I don't know if the AI models those things, but it should.

[FC99]

Originally Posted by horseback

When flying offline campaigns, using the tactics that were actually successful against individual, or even small groups of bombers or Me 110s or 210s is suicidal. It's a perversion of history, and it can be fixed, at least for the offline user.

Slow the gunner's rate of rotating their guns.

Limit their effective range to the historical levels of 150m maximum; you can increase an attacker's probability of being hit beyond that as a function of how many defending aircraft are in range.

Make the aiming point a circle the diameter of the greatest visible dimension from the angle viewed; that is how human beings aim something as imprecise as a machine gun at targets that far away and coming at them rapidly.

Factor in gunshake and aircraft motion. That, more than anything else, is what made hitting anything more than a couple of degrees wide so difficult with 'controllable' short bursts. Call of Duty can do it; DT should be able to as well.

They can be "fixed" but the problem is that you think that AI gunners are insanely accurate while I think that they suck big time.

And we are still left to deal with the improbable fragility of the R-2800 engine and the aircraft it powered.

Test setup:
Planes : Ju88 and P47D
Distance: 200m
Test method:
Both planes are on the airfield, P47 engine running.
Player is in Ju88 rear gunner position.
P47 is behind Ju88 with front of the engine exposed to the gunner like in typical 6 o'clock attack.
Result:
Bullets Fired: 1200
Bullets Hit Air: 1047
P47 engine still running although at 90% and with some components damaged.
And as many times before FACTS>>>FEELINGS , P47 is one tough MOFO and for every FG guy's story about one ping kill there is a JG guy with the story about P47 soaking dozens of 30mm hits and flying away.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by horseback

RE: Jug's (or Hellcat or Corsair's) size relative to an La-5 would be essentially irrelevant to the human eye until you get within shooting range, at which point it will seem closer than it actually is and distort your aim

But, on the other hand, it's slightly easier to see the Jug at greater distances, and assuming you know what you're shooting at, there's more to hit.

Originally Posted by horseback

LW along Channel Front in early-mid '43 had a terrible time adjusting to targets the size of the B-17 and P-47 after two years of shooting at Spits and Blenheim sized bombers in daylight.

Likewise, the Japanese initially had problems with getting the right range on Superfortresses. What would be nice is if the game modeled AI aircraft ID a bit better, so AI gunnery is downgraded against "unfamiliar" plane types of unusually large or small size. As it is, the AI immediately knows the right range at which to engage everything from a V-1 to a Gigant!

Even better would be if a critical failure with visual IFF meant that allied planes might accidentally attack you! That was a common problem for Mustang pilots, as well as Soviet fighter pilots operating near U.S. planes.

And, of course, certain planes would be easier to identify that others, for example the P-38 was specifically used on some occasions because its appearance was so distinctive.

Originally Posted by horseback

even if you're crossing his cone of fire at an extreme angle at high speed a split second after flailing his aircraft with a two or three second burst of 4 or 3 x .50"

This speaks to the difference between manually turned guns and turret guns. Turrets were generally more effective. By contrast, single guns hanging out in the slipstream were pretty useless. That's one of the reasons that the radio operator's dorsal 0.50 caliber MG on the B-17 was often removed.

Originally Posted by horseback

First, change the rules for AI aiming to a circle the diameter of the target wing span . . .

Like you said, but also:

1) Reduce accuracy by some percentage for manually-turned guns vs. turrets to simulate vibration from the airplane and guns.

2) Reduce accuracy by some percentage if the angle of the gun is at more than something like 15-20 degrees from the the plane's fuselage, to simulate slipstream effects.

3) Reduce accuracy by some percentage as the plane's speed gets much above 150 mph, to reflect wind buffeting.

Originally Posted by horseback

Second, assign a speed limit of X degrees per second of rotation for the gun installation type

.

The game already models this. Other than that, your points about hesitation and reorientation are valid. Currently, one of the nice things about fighter AI in 4.12 is that they will pause for a moment before choosing another target, whether to check 6 or just to determine that they're actually pointing themselves at a bogie.

Originally Posted by horseback

I find the whole defensive gun crew model of the sim to be oversimplified and unrealistic. Every time I tried it, I wanted to wash my hands afterwards.

Yep. IL2 was designed as a tactical mud-moving sim, not a heavy bomber sim. It's just one of those things that the sim is never going to do well, and more's the pity, because I absolutely love my Western heavy bombers.

And, yes, CoD seems to get a lot of the details of running a heavy bomber right.

Intercoms, oxygen supplies, effects of wounds at high altitudes, loosening jammed bombs, intercom communications, switching fuel tanks or moving ammo around the plane, and maps that let you fly from London to Berlin and back, maybe not in CoD, but certainly not in IL2.

[Igo kyu]

I'm currently using 4.7, but I agree with everything Horseback says about over accurate bomber gunners, it always has been ridiculous, at least since the original Forgotten Battles.

The problem is, the only information the program has, is the exactly correct position, speed and heading of our fighters. That's available, with no work, somewhere that can be got at easily (if it wasn't, we wouldn't be in a flight sim). Generating approximations for those data, particularly accurate approximations of the data a human in the relative position of the gunner in of a bomber would have had, would be hard.

There's probably the processor grunt to do it now, but there wasn't back when IL*2 was originally written, so the code presumably wasn't writen that way. To get to a position where it could be done would presumably require a wholesale re-write, such that you might as well write a completely new simulation.

On another angle, most big air battles resulted in very small loss ratios even for the losers, the day the Stukas withdrew from the BoB, their losses were something like 20%. In IL*2 we often get most or even all of the bombers, I agree that the fighter losses should be lower than they are, but the bomber losses ought to be lower too.

[The_WOZ]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

Hi WOZ, do you happen to know the full list of these planes with the simplified damage model?

Someone here once posted an image of these damage boxes in a Zero, and the lack thereof in the P-39 (maybe it was you), but I couldn't track down the list of planes or the tool used to illustrate the damage boxes.

Thanks,

WokeUpDead

Yes it was me who posted that image on the SOV forum, I found about the missing internal damage models while investigating how to make new planes for IL-2. The tools are easy to find at the modding sites such as SAS.

I just did a quick search in a easier way now and here's a list of planes without proper internal damage models (or at least not used in the code):

C-47
Fi-156
Fw-189A2
G-11
IAR-80/81 series
Ju-52 series
Ju-87 series
Ju-88 Mistel
L2D
Li-2
MBR-2
P-39/P-400/P-63 series
Tu-2
U-2

[Jumoschwanz]

The Stuka I was flying was the D5, the newest one, which flies like a real POS compared to the B Stuka, it is not going to turn with any Spits, and from the feel of it there must be a hell of a lot of more armor added to it's weight than the early Stuka.

Again, if anyone has not read Hans Ulrich Rudels amazing account of living through 2500 Stuka missions and WWII they are missing out. Yes he was probably a Nazi, but there are a lot of other things to get out of the book than any bias or propaganda that may be injected. He must have been hit by hundreds of rounds from AA and aircraft guns and cannons and there is no account of him having serious problems with flaming tanks. He never bailed once, crash landed a few times. He was riddled by La5 and P39 and Rata fire to name a few stories that come to memory.

If the best simulation IL2 can do right now with the P47 is to have it's tail fall off with X number of 20mm hits, then that is okay, it is just funny how you can set yourself up in the qmb behind a bunch of Friendly p47s and go down the row and get the same result on one after the other, almost like you are breaking the tails off of frozen lobsters.

Of course in real life the location and number of hits from an enemy aircraft would be so random it would take a supercomputer to model the different effects of each, I am sure no two kills in WWII looked exactly the same the way they can be reproduced in IL2.

It is a great sim and TD has never done anything but things beyond the call of duty.

Jumo

[JtD]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

I'm currently using 4.7, but I agree with everything Horseback says about over accurate bomber gunners, it always has been ridiculous, at least since the original Forgotten Battles.

4.7 and 4.11+ are like day and night. Gunners received a complete rework with 4.11 (think it was, maybe even 4.10) and since then, they just suck. Sometimes they get lucky, but mostly they suck.

[majorfailure]

The engine on the P-39 is not tough at all - if you get shot from behind and slightly off-angle. Against ground fire and defensive fire it is very well protected.

And vs. gunner accuracy -currently playing vs. US/British, and on the first few missions I bothered to make head on or high off angle attacks vs. B25G/J -until I got lazy and tried to shoot a few from behind and it worked like a charm. Just go in there from 6'o clock below/high with lots of speed, shoot, and break at the latest at 200m.

Though VS. B-24 or B-17 this does not work. But using high or beam or head on attacks with good speed one nearly does not get hit. I have seen a flight of AI B-17s chopped up by AI Bf109G6s from behind with no losses once or twice, but most of the time the AI Bf109s lose one or two. And they more or less park behind the B-17s.

I like the way gunners are now, the still pose a limited threat - you can't get totally careless, but its not as fustrating as 4.09 and before where they shot out your pilot/engine with 50% reliabilty from 300m+ no matter what angle and speed you had -and even regularly killed you on head on passes.

If anything is done to lower their accuracy even more we will arrive at ridiculos scenarios where a single AI Bf109G will shoot down a whole flight of B-17s.