Their whole RAGE engine is just great, not just the physics part ;)

on an earlier comment about the PS3 system specs, you also have to realise that a console is years of research and investment to get every peice of hardware to work 150% compatible with each other part to bring out the best performance. PCs can't do this for their most important task, being able to do many things. Video game consoles are meant to be pure gaming machines, while the PC is 10 or so uPnP pieces plugged into the motherboard and it'll do what you want to a certain extent. Not to mention the PS3 has the ability to give developers 6 SPE giving it some serious processing power that not even computers have yet. The same goes for the 360 with 3 processor cores doing 2 threads at once each. So while the consoles might not have big numbers like computers do, you have to realise millions of dollars of research making small numbers add up to huge results.

So in reality, the ability to do complicated things like a dynamic damage system is limited by the developer's power and skill to create a game, especially in the Playstation 3's case where not many people have had the training in using as many SPEs at once.

Apparently you people haven't flown straight behind the HE's for very long (good bit of flying on your part :P ). I have had a great variety of damage actually. From a head on pass I got my canopy rocked with bullet holes. I've had my own oil fly from my engine and land on my canopy and NOT run off. I've been shot inside my cockpit killing my pilot instantly (had absolutely NO other damage on my plane so don't try and dispute that). I've had my engine stop and have seen tails ripped off. The coolest was on a 60 degree turn, colliding with another P-51d in flying perpendicular to my path; scared the crap out of me and made my plane EXPLODE in mid air. Nothing really left except for the propeller just falling slowing back down.

It isn't same-y... I just don't think the AI is good enough to hit you most of the time to fully experience the damage model. Wait for MP and then start to complain...

I was flying behind a Stuka and the rear gunner shot up my engine (right before I downed him) and caused my canopy to turn black, I could only see out of the upper right side, I couldn't even see through my sights. Then I got into a chase with a 109, this went on for roughly 3 minutes until he dove down to the water and I crashed because I couldn't see the water.:-P

It was so cool. That was the funnest chase I have had yet while playing the demo.

Same thing happend to me with the permanent oil though I could still see 50% out the front, and I completely neglected keeping my speed up so I was scratching 200 and I couldn't keep altitude and bam.

Earlier though, I was just screwing around in the Spitfire seeing how low I could successfully do a barrel roll, 38 altitude over water is my best, how long to recover from a stall and all that. At one point I was flying straight up and so were my wingmen who were trying to keep up with my crazy flying, he got ahead of me, stalled out, and while I was stalling out he was falling backwards and chopped my whole wing off while I was having some hangtime.

The look of the damage modeling is very well done. However if it is a static model then that is somewhat lacking but also understandable on console. Especially with that amount of detail being pushed. The game looks absolutely amazing. Some smoke effects need optimization but everything else looking good. Storm of War damage modeling sounds exactly what I would expect on a PC today with 2GB of application memory required. I'm still amazed at how much detail they push on these consoles using streaming technology.