Sometimes i also like full real. If we got a lever for most stuff, we know how things are, but no mater what we have, if HUD is off we can not operate a bombsight. And as you mentioned, with radio beacons is the same.

This request has come up before. I would personally prefer if a configuration file was made, similar to the conf.ini. You could disable whichever messages you want such as "enemy aircraft destroyed" while keeping important stuff like "bombsight angle".

I know many people who have said that they have wanted basically the same thing. Definitely a great suggestion.

I noticed that I dont even hear any of the emitted noises at all. Might my game be broken or is it due to HUD disabled?

i don't know about any official modifications with 2 UB instead 2 schkas/2 shvak in wings + 1-2 shkas, was only some various experimental works with TKB-150 (name of UB in 40) and 12.7 mm variant of shvak too, and how said Luno13 in mass serial production with 1 UBS + 2 shkas was only type 29, but, we can't really say what not was some not mass field changes (i not saw any info about this), plus, was armed UTI-4 with 2 UB (type 15b) - in total, now we have type 18/"24", so, without serious changes you and we all can get correct i-16 type 24 (m-63 + 4 shkas, now in game type 28 in fact, if i'm not wrong), type 28 (m-63 + 2 shkas/2 shvak) and not so powerful heavy armed type 27 (m-62 + 2 shkas/2 shvak), it's all historically correct, balanced (type 24, good engine but only shkas, or type 27, not so good engine but shvaks, etc) and i think more than enough at first time...

be good if DT do late type 29 (m-63 + 2 shkas/1 ubs, 650 planes in total, good performance and balanced weapons)...

type 15b, type 17 + new less powerful shells for shvak (similar with 12.7 mm effect), planes of other countries (chinese, finnish, spanish etc), other early types (maybe, and little experimental series, with different weapon) and little changes for all (like 2-4 rs-82), need too, especially, because in USSR i-16 was used in combats very long time including early types (uti-4 was used how training plane until 1946)...

and interesting fact, in last Maslov's book about i-16 i read what 23 feb 1944 pilot Кудымов had a fight with fw-190 and down him...

how much it's true, i don't know, anyway it's interesting info, here this fight in his memoirs...

Looking at all those different flight performance reports for the P-40 that TD provided with their latest update, I'm wonder if the game engine could support some way of degrading aircraft performance without messing up FM too badly or making multiplayer servers falsely detect cheating.

It's pretty obvious that badly made, worn out or poorly maintained planes aren't going to develop peak performance, so I'm wondering if there's some way of modeling that in the game.

Perhaps a slider switch which lets a server admin or mission builder degrade engine power and/or control surface responsiveness by 5-10%?

Maybe this could be a half step towards actual random inflight system failures.

Interesting stuff. I was sure the Type 24 had a UBS wing armament but everything you guys are talking about suggests not. It would be nice to at least have ShKAS as an option on the Type 24 if not the default with ShVAK as the addition.

Server admin for online, mission builder or player for offline. Obviously, for fairness/full disclosure, the fact that a plane's performance has been degraded should be stated upfront.

Performance reduction gets set before the scenario begins. Any change after that gets logged as cheating. Simple.

Realism? Things like that happened all the time during the war.

Also, some WW2-era planes suffered from serious reliability problems, so NOT modeling random system failure is unrealistic. For example, the He-177 and Westland Whirlwind could have been great if they had had more reliable engines.

I'd also point out that IL2 already has a limited engine failure model where you can set your engines on fire if you throttle up a jet engine too fast, so why not expand it to prop driven planes?

Of course, like anything else in the game, you should have the option of turning off the random failures option for offline play, and the server admin controls can turn it off for online. And, again, it should be set before play begins and should be obvious to everyone involved.

Finally, having the option of triggering damage or degraded performance before a scenario starts will finally allow fans to fly missions where some of the planes in the sky have already suffered battle damage.

As it stands, mission builders have to create those sorts of missions by having planes fly over concentrations of enemy flak and hope that the flak inflicts the correct sort of damage to make the scenario still interesting.

Lack of ability to degrade performance or assign damage to planes before play begins also makes it impossible to fly missions like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnIVCxuc-fg

Some of you may remember that in the original release of IL2 it was possible to foul your spark plugs during warmup. It really was not much of an issue because of the button marked "refly". And that's just what everyone did, hit refly.

I can see that for some offline folks this would be a good thing, but online it won't ummm, fly, so to speak.

Nice movie. I wonder, where are those internal B-17 shots are from? I guess, they're from some FPS game, MOH may be? Anybody knows for sure?