I prefer East despite of Korea

P-40E, M and M 105
 

Will we ever get a working fuel gauge with these aircraft?

Actually I just watched a training film from a DVD on the P-40E and later variants. There were at least three fuel tanks mentioned (fuselage tank, forward wing tank, aft wing tank) when the fuel tank selector switch was shown and also all three fuel gages were shown in the movie (fuselage and forward wing tank and aft wing tank) during the cockpit checkout.

Fuselage Tank - fuel gage on left side of dash/control panel to the left of the turn and bank indicator and above the flap/gear indicator.
Forward Wing Tank - fuel gage on the floor, the one we have in the game that doesn't work and is just right of center.
Aft/Rear Wing Tank - fuel gage on the floor, adjacent to the one we have in the game, but just to the left of center.

It would be nice to get working multiple fuel tanks guages like the P-51. This would certainly be better than the current warning (idiot) light telling you that you NEED TO LAND VERY SOON and is essential especially if you are going to use the P-40E & M on the Slot map.

I've changed my opinion about 'Sniper' AI gunners since I started flying a few bomber missions and jumping to the back seat.

Despite controlling the aircraft with my right hand and the gun with the mouse in my left hand, I found it surprisingly consistant hitting attacking fighters as they attack at relatively shallow angles and slow closing speeds as they climb up to attack me from the rear.

And I'm not an expert and haven't been trained in arial gunnery

I think the old tailer gunner AI's need to be given a break, and pilots need to re-assess their tactics attacking bombers!

Cheers!

Personally, I don't like to fly bombers or use turret guns, but my kid brother does, so I set him up with a QMB mission in a B-24 vs 16 Normal AI Zeros on full realism settings. I was fully expecting him to get annihilated but he shot down 5 Zeros with the tail gun before running out of ammo, then switched to the belly turret and shot down another 3, finally limping back to base on only two engines but with a tally of 10 Zeros killed, and the remaining 6 having all taken varying degrees of damage.

Given those results, I would agree that maybe the gunner AI isn't so unfairly overpowered, but it still seems to get me everytime I'm feeling lazy and can't be bothered to set up an attack run properly.

Anyway, if I ever do fly a bomber online, I know who I want covering my ass :)

Those results are however totally unrealistic, in the real war that wouldn't have happened.

Though I do note that that is with 0.5 inch guns, which makes it a bit more tolerable.

I do sometimes suspect that in single player mode the game adjusts the AI's performance to what it thinks the player wants, like Quake does, which I suspect results in changed hitting power for guns (friendly guns changing power seperately from to enemy?). I don't know what's going on, I do know some missions the enemy "can't hit a barn door", some the friendlies can't, some both can't, some the enemy can't miss, and it doesn't seem to vary within a mission and seems non-randomly related in a series of missions (this is mainly in Forgotten Battles automatically generated career missions).

Wasn't this dealt with in the 4.09 patch release

To go into further detail on that battle, the B-24 entered combat with an altitude advantage, dived through the Zeros climbing headon attack and then continued in a shallow dive, meaning the Zeros took a very long time to close to effective range, leaving them as sitting ducks as they slowly closed in from dead astern.

Real pilots would not behave in that way, so yes the combat results were unrealistic, but I think that if real pilots chose to attack a well armed bomber such as the B-24 in that fashion then they would probably meet a similar fate, so I think the issue there was with pilot AI, rather than the hitting power of the guns.

If the Zeros didn't have cannon, that might be almost plausible, but they do. Even coming in from dead astern, one Zero outguns one Liberator. Undefended bombers in daylight in WW2 were shot down. The US planes using 0.5 inch guns were better defended than most, but they still needed to fly in formation, and needed escorts.

Kate and TBM
 

G`day

I wonder if it is possible to make the TBM and Kate torpedo bombers player flyable?

The TBM is out, due to a legal issue (do a forum search for 'Grumman' to find out more).

AS for the Kate, if there is sufficient detail available to do a proper cockpit etc, it should be possible, but whether TD do it or not is really up to them, as with all the new aircraft they do.