Yak-9T - incredible firepower (or maybe incredible tank's lack of armor?)
 

Hi DT
Please pay attention on strong disproportion between aircraft's firepower and armor of tanks and self-propelled tank destroyers.
See results of an on-line sortie here - http://www.il2.corbina.ru/sortiedeta...&playerid=2245

Destroyed in only one(!) sortie:
21(!) tanks (2 of them were heavy Pz.VIE "Tigers"!)
6 APCs Sdkfz251.
5 armored Rocket launchers (Opel blitz Rocket)
4 trucks
------------
Total: 36 tanks and vechicles

Please do something about it

Was this an unlimited ammo scenario? If so, with a skilled player I could believe it.

While the Yak-9T is one of the most heavily armed planes in the game, its low firepower and relatively limited ammo make that many kills unlikely otherwise.

No, ammo was LIMITED, that's the point. Almost every shot kills a tank.
I think there is a common problem with armored units..

It says that he fired 200 rockets.
Are you sure this was not some MOD cheat?

I guess no cheat here, just skilled pilot + good joystick & maybe pedals. I think pilot is OK, but wrong is armor model..
I can believe that 37-mm shell could destroy a tank, but not with single hit and 100% probability...

How could he fire 200 rockets in a single sortie? Or did we understood the mission outcome screen incorrectly?

I'm afraid it's only a FBDj's bug. I've looked several players stat pages - most of them have strange figures in section "rockets"
So I still think the "example-guy" shooted only 37-mm gun and 12,7-mm MG..

The Yak-9T carries 252 rounds of ammo, 200 of which hit. FBDj shows it as rockets fired, bug with the database.

I've done similar things, too, 80% hits with the 32 37mm rounds, mean 25 (medium) tanks gone.

So what's your verdict on the issue?
Are tanks too soft, is Yak-9T cannon to strong or, perhaps, the cannon is to easy to use and control? Or everything is OK?

The cannon has significant random spread angle compared to other guns. Although, I doubt it makes much of a difference if fired from point blank range which I assume is happening here.

IMHO moving tanks are too soft.

Tanks are soft probably due to gameplay reasons. Historically, aircraft were generally useless against tanks (except Ju-87G). But ingame, it wouldnt make any sense that you cant kill tanks at all. So I think this is a compromise between realism and gameplay.

I don’t want to start a flame war, but this seems to me excessively trenchant. Soviet Union won the war with "useless" Sturmoviks, and RAF fielded equally "useless" Typhoons.


Perhaps it would be a good idea to make some experiments under repeatable conditions. Any volunteer?

I think it depends on your definition of "useless". If you mean physically detroying tanks then I would agree.
But I'm sure air attacks were disruptive and damaging to the enemy regardless of whether the tank itself was actually "destroyed".
I think the biggest "effect" though was simply to morale and logistics by forcing the enemy to adapt their movements to allow for potential air attack. Even if the attack never eventuates, or inficts insignificant damage when it does, having to allow for it still burns up vital resources, slows down movement, and affects morale.

Personally, I consider claims about tank destroyed largely mythical, beginning with the biggest over claimer in human history (Hans Rudel, but this is my opinion, of course, even if based on simple mathematical analysis).
I agree with you that actual number of tanks directly destroyed from the air was surely low, far from what propaganda said for years. And – in my opinion – the Ju87g was not better than other anti-tank aircrafts with similar performances and armament (the Hurricane IId, for example).
Your analysis of the real impact of air operations is true, and could be largely extended to strategic bombing.

In any case, all of this is clearly off topic. I must apologize with Pershing. Returning to topic, I think that some experiment under controlled and repeatable conditions (scientific method, you know) should be the first step to solution of this problem. My two cents.

Off topic how?
The topic is the in-game abilities of aircraft to destroy tanks en-masse and that is what we're discussing. Personally, I view the "anti-armour" missions the game generates as merely being symbolic for general "very difficult ground attack" missions simply because of the dearth of ground activity generally. Basically you are attacking ground units with only a small chance of limited success, as opposed to when you are sent to attack soft targets which you effectively wipe out completely.
In other words, I think of it as a pure "game mechanism" rather than a genuine attempt at replicating ground attack. Seeing tanks burning is merely the game's way of saying your attack has disrupted an enemy ground attack, I don't regard it as "you have destroyed four tanks".

Since a very large part of the air war was directed at ground targets I would love to see a more believable implementation, but I don't know what capability is possible with the IL2 engine.

I particularly enjoyed F15: Strike Eagle III and Falcon 3.0 for their ground war implementation many years ago and would love to enjoy something similar from the newer sims. But even with modern weapon systems I doubt I ever tallied 36 vehicles killed, not even in Longbow 2.

I think all IL2 really needs is the ability to inflict a range of effects on vehicles (and other ground units) rather than simply "dead". Then you could certainly "hit" 21 tanks and even destroy several of them, but most would be vehicle damage or crew losses rather than "destruction".

Here you hit a point.
A downed plane is invariably a total loss (unless it finds a friendly airfield just below). Obviously, a damaged tank can be repaired. More obviously, the repair is easy if the damage is light, as is common when the damage comes from the light armament of any anti-tank aircraft. We should consider that a 37 mm (Ju87g or Il2-37) or 40 mm (Hurricane IId) gun is very light by tank’s standard. A track can be easily damaged, and this damage effectively stops any tank, but can it be considered “destroyed”? Only if it’s abandoned to enemy hands. So, here I agree with you: it’s not off topic and it’s not a matter of gun-versus armour only.

This is the truth. Contrary to popular belief, IL-2 was almost completely useless against tanks, it couldnt really do anything against them. However, it was a TERROR against troops, convoys, and light vehicles, and inflicted huge losses to these units. German tankers didnt fear Sturmoviks. Infantry did!

I still think that the only aircrafts that were capable of destroying tanks effectively were the Ju-87G and the Hurricane IID/IV (forgot this one earlier). 20,23 and 30mm guns were unable to even slightly damage them. In theory, the Hs-129B3 was also useful, but it was a poor weapon system in reality.

http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-...hbusters4.html

English is not my language, so I’ll try to summarize precisely my opinion: all WWII era anti-tank aircrafts were very moderately effective, including Ju87G and Hurricane IId. The “popular belief” about their effectiveness is based on propaganda and over claiming pilots. Over claiming is perfectly understandable. A pilot flying above the battlefield, evading AA fire with all the possible speed, could not tell if the tank he fired at was really destroyed, or only damaged, or simply hit without any damage. Claims could only be verified in the aftermath of a battle if a serious survey is done on abandoned tanks. This was seldom done. One exception was the Battle of Falaise Pocket. Here, a serious survey registered an over claiming of ten to one and more. Perfectly average, I think.
This is not surprising. WWII aircraft were in general lightly armed. The most powerful gun was probably mounted in the nose of the Yak 9k, but even 45 mm was not enough to assure a tank’s destruction with a single shot. I don’t know if this is correctly modelled in our game. I didn’t fly many ground attack sorties, and found PTAB bombs – as modelled – more effective than 37 mm guns.

This was also true on the Western Front. After D-Day many German tanks were captured because they ran out of fuel and had to be abandoned. That was directly caused by effective Allied tactical air strikes which completely disrupted the German supply network.


Something that hasn't been mentioned, both in terms of limitations of the IL2 damage model for ground vehicles and in historical limitations to killing tanks using aircraft weapons, is that planes were usually engaging the enemy from rather extreme ranges for the weapons system and at a very high angle relative to the tank's armor plate.

This was sort of mitigated by the fact that skilled ground attack pilots could choose their angle of attack to hit the tank's weakest armor and that most tanks didn't have much armor on their upper decks.

A more realistic damage model would take into account things like angle of penetration relative to armor, reduction of armor penetration due to range, chance that a missile will break up or richochet when it hits armor, and the effects of layered or stand-off armor (e.g., the "skirts" on many German tanks).

As others have said, a system which has states of damage other than "perfectly functional" and "dead", and which allows for effects such as crew kills and mobility kills would also be helpful.

And, as a final issue, many vehicles were equipped with top-mounted MG which could be used in a light AAA role. This was particularly true in areas where air attack was likely. There should be a lot more MG fire from "soft" convoys.

So far as I know, armour thickness and armour sloping were optimized against enemies on the ground (enemy tanks and artillery), and tanks were quite vulnerable to aerial attacks. That is, a 3.7 hit from above could do as much damage as a 7.5 hit from the ground. Dunno what consequencies it had, but SOME consequencies it must have had.

There are three types of armament that could be used from the air against tanks. Rockets, if they hit would be devastating, because of the relatively huge explosive content. Bombs would be moreso, but they would have to detonate on impact and that would very probably destroy the attacking aircraft, so that that would be unlikely to happen. The third thing is guns, but there are two types of warheads here, solid shot, and high explosive. High explosive wouldn't get through the armour. Solid shot might, but that is much less effective as an air to air weapon. Most of the guns in IL*2 fire high explosive air to air rounds, it is after all a flight simulator, but those would have been ineffective against tanks in the real world.

There are explosive AP rounds.

Aircraft weapons were very well capable of destroying tanks, the biggest difficulty was to hit the target. And that was easiest with guns.

One can also be sure that a single hit of say a 100g projectile of a 20mm cannon penetrating armour and then exploding inside the tank would not always destroy the tank. That's something not even a ~6kg round of 75mm cannon would manage all the time. But, nonetheless, against medium tanks say up to Pz IV size, even the small 20mm cannons did occasionally work as tank killers, provided they had a high muzzle velocity and a heavy projectile with decent AP qualities. The Hispano for instance had all that.

I'm just wondering if there is no problem at all here. Sure in a testing environment you can wax a dozen medium tanks with a high angle 37mm shot. I'm not sure if this is an issue or not... in real life you'd likely be dealing with small arms fire and maybe mobile AAA making this sort of repeated attack against a formation of tanks somewhat unrealistic.

Please, read this:

http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-...hbusters4.html

"During WWII, the large majority of aircraft attacking tanks with aircraft mounted weapons used 20mm cannon or simply HMGs. These include aircraft such as the Supermarine Spitfire, Hawker Typhoon, Hawker Tempest, De Havilland Mosquito, most Ilyushin Il-2s and Il-10s (some had 37mm cannon), Yakovlev Yak-7/9, Petlyakov Pe-2/3bis, Lockheed P38 Lightning, North American P51 Mustang, and the Republic P47 Thunderbolt. The average 20mm cannon with standard ammunition had great difficulty penetrating the 12-15mm top armour on the Pz IV H, and almost no chance against the 16mm top armour on the Panther and the 25mm top armour on the Tiger I, even if they managed to hit them! The reader should also bear in mind that on average the strike angle of cannon shells on the top of AFVs was usually in the region of 30 to 60 degrees, because aircraft could not attack vertically downwards (the Ju 87 Stuka came closest to this ideal attack angle, which also dramatically increases the accuracy of any air launched ordnance). In general 20mm cannon only inflicted superficial damage on even light tanks, with the most severe damage being penetrations through the top engine grill covers and damage to the engines."

"German fully tracked AFV losses on the East Front from 1941 to 1945 amounted to approximately 32 800 AFVs. At most 7% were destroyed by direct air attack, which amounts to approximately 2 300 German fully tracked AFV lost to direct air attack, a portion of which would be lost to other aircraft types such as the Petlyakov Pe-2. From 22nd June 1941 to war's end, 23 600 Il-2 and Il-10 ground attack aircraft were irrecoverably lost.(21) Whatever these aircraft were doing to pay such a high price it wasn’t destroying German tanks. If that was there primary target, then over 10 Il-2s and Il-10s were irrecoverably lost for every German fully tracked AFV that was completely destroyed by direct air attack on the East Front during WWII.
"

WW2 aircraft guns had low armor penetration capability. The GAU-8 Avenger, even with uranium rounds is only capable of penetrating 69mm @ 500m. (only 38mm @ 1000m) The Hispano or the VYa is nowhere near to this monster gun.

I read several pages of this myth-buster. Overall, I strongly believe that over claiming was enormous, and not only in aircraft versus tank. However, this same myth-buster gives some suspect numbers and makes some unsubstantiated claims. This, for example: “In addition the RAF and USAF had given the Soviets critical air superiority for the first time (in 1944)”. No comments or details are given to this piece of “undisputable truth” that sounds to me as a simple nonsense, reducing the accountability of the whole analysis to the typical low level of web literature.

As off topic it may sounds, this discussion is probably pointing to the one of the most important point of any “realistic” simulation. If true combat effectiveness would be really implemented, we should expect our kills (of anything: tanks, aircraft, vehicles, ships, anything) to be reduced by a factor of probably ten. On the contrary, the probability to end our simulated career as KIA would be augmented by the same rate. Not very fun, I think…

Yes, I completely agree. In fact, I also dont want it to be changed. (especially because I love to fly IL-2/10) I just pointed out on that in RL, things were different.

The thing with armour piercing rounds is that if the round hits the armour, it either bounces off, breaks up, or goes through. If the round breaks up, it won't go through because it's no longer a single mass but a bunch of smaller masses. When a round goes through armour, then the armour has broken up and the projectile retains most of the kinetic energy it had when it first hit the armour, so it does a lot of damage from that, if it gets into the engine comparment probably breaks the engine. There may be an explosive payload, but to do damage there doesn't really need to be.

I hope that you are aware that by far the most WW2 AP rounds were explosive rounds. For a reason. For instance, rounds having pierced armour do not retain most of their energy, unless the armour wasn't worth mentioning in the first place. Rounds without explosives usually were some hard core rounds (tungsten for instance), which offered superior penetration at the expense of damage capacity. In case of aircraft guns this often was a popular trade off, since the small calibre guns otherwise wouldn't penetrate at all.

For comparison, the very good German 30mm tungsten core round carried only 75% the energy of the standard AP round, at the muzzle. Further away, even less. It had far better penetrating power, more than two times as much at 500m, but if both rounds got through, the standard round would wreck far more havoc.

An AP projectile penetrating armor sprays red-hot or molten fragments of metal around a very small space. Those fragments ricochet and start fires. You DON'T want to be in that space. While a 20-30 mm projectile won't usually make the tank blow up or burn, it will damage the engine (if it penetrates the deck armor or ventilator grilles) OR kills or injures part of the crew (if it penetrates the turret or hull).

Even if it doesn't catch on fire, a tank with a badly damaged engine and/or a dead/seriously wounded crewman is going to retreat. Alternately, the crew might bail out, either because the tank can no longer move or because the drivers are dead, or on the reasonable assumption that more bad things are about to come their way.

In any case, the tank is as good as "dead" that day, even if the mechanics can later wash out the blood, fix the engine and patch the armor.

A simple fix to the ground vehicle damage model in IL2 would to be have three damage states: Undamaged, Immobilized/Partially destroyed (representing a crew kill or actual mobility kill) and the current damage model "Brewed up"/completely destroyed. No new damage textures are needed for Immobilized - the vehicle just stops moving.

This intermediate damage state is important, since the disabled tank remains a target for further attacks. That means that you and your allies waste ammo on a "dead" foe.

Pictures of knocked out WW2 AFV frequently show multiple penetrations. Example here:

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i2...ps736b6ffd.jpg

Actually, for much of the war, tanks mostly carried standard AP rounds. Ammo like HEAT/APEX or HESH were later war innovations and they were often in short supply, as were standard AP rounds with tungsten penetrators.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a simple AP round penetrating armor generates plenty of heat and shrapnel even without the benefit of an explosive charge. Obviously, APEX or its ilk are better, and tungsten core penetrates better, but ordinary AP is plenty deadly against armor.

Conversely, soft vehicles sometimes fared better when hit by AP rounds, since the round might penetrate without fragmenting (e.g., going through the wood and canvas sideboards of a truck) or produce minimal fragments (e.g., punching through the sheet metal of a car's body). Very soft targets, like canvas or flesh, might not even trigger HE rounds.

This also holds true for cannon shells against early war canvas-covered aircraft like the Hurricane. AP rounds would just punch a small hole in the canvas without weakening the plane's structure, and HE rounds might blow through without exploding.

No offence intended, however:

In the context of tanks, I am not aware of that. Air to air AP may have been different, there wasn't that much armour in 'planes, and doing damage once the armour was pierced would probably be worth it.

That is not what happened. If a shot hit some armour, then things happened very fast, microseconds not milliseconds. When there is an impact, the parts can rebound without damage, or one can be damaged, or very unusually, both. The reason it's unlikely that both will be significantly damaged is that it's more or less a race to be the last to pass the limit of elastic deformation. The item that reaches the limit of elastic deformation first, is deformed plastically, and damaged. The item that is damaged gives way to the item that is undamaged, and the energy that was stored in the elastic deformation of the surviving item is restored in the rebounding of that item to its normal shape (which is why it's silly for tanks to have hitpoints that can be whittled away in some other sorts of games, shot either pierces the armour, or does almost no damage).

That's not what I understood of tungsten core rounds. They were compressed in the barrel to get a much higher muzzle velocity, and since KE= 1/2 MVsquared, though the mass might be less the higher energy made penetration much more likely. Sabot rounds were similar, apparently less accurate than normal AP rounds, but much higher velocity, and thus KE, and therefore more likely to penetrate if they did hit.

Check out manuals given here:

http://www.lexpev.nl/manuals/germanyold.html

You'll find plenty of (German) ammunition manuals, for aircraft and artillery. German tank and AT guns often had two types of AP rounds - the standard AP round with explosive contents, and the "only use if penetration cannot be achieved with the standard AP round" round without explosive contents.

Naval artillery to my knowledge used only explosive AP rounds. Aircraft standard AP rounds were also explosive, with specials available. AP bombs were explosive. All this to the effect of generating splinters, which simply add to the damage of the splinters created from penetration. There were very few AP weapons to rely solely on kinetic energy in WW2.

Pursuivant, the shrapnel created by a single 20mm or 30mm round penetrating is by far not enough to reliably take out a medium sized or larger WW2 tank. You may get lucky, but to be sure you'll need more than one. Even to reliable do considerable damage, not the outright kill. It's one of the reasons small calibre AT guns in widespread use at the beginning of WW2 were replaced by bigger ones - even if you achieved penetration, you'd still need multiple hits to stop the tank.

Igo kyu, no matter the what participant gets damaged in the impact of the projectile, to remove the armour from the original position you need energy, and the amount is the same no matter if the projectile just penetrates, or easily. Assume a certain armour can just stop a certain projectile coming in at 500m/s. Now if the same projectile comes in at 600m/s, it will go through, but end up at 330m/s and at 800m/s come out at 620m/s, for the same loss of energy. The energy to displace, tear up, heat up the material has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile.

What you are considering is solely the aspect if a round can penetrate or not. It's also important but not all. It is about the mechanical strength of projectile and armour. A thick, hard armour will break up an AP round, a thick, soft armour will stop the AP round intact and a thin hard armour will break up under the impact of the round. You are completely right that a penetration with both the armour and the projectile suffering significant damage is rare - but this has little to do with the energy required for penetration.

The reason why the standard AP round carries more energy is because it carries part of its energy as chemical energy of the explosive inside. This energy does not change with muzzle velocity and range, and will only be converted to damage after penetration. The 30mm round mentioned carries 14g of PETN (iIrc, don't want to look it up again). This equals about 50% of the muzzle energy of the tungsten core round, and with the projectile twice as heavy, the tungsten core round ends up with less energy than the standard AP.

I think nobody wants "true combat effectiveness", but maybe DT should correct airguns/armor ratio to reduce power of AP rounds a little...
Sortie results shown in start post seem too unreal to me..

Yes, very few. Just all existing british AP ammo starting from the Boys rifle to the 20pdr AT gun. They didnt use APHE at all. Americans also had these "shot" rounds for 57, 75 and 76mm guns. (although their use in combat was limited)

Yep, British practice was different. They went with solid AP shots in land warfare for most of the war. Not so in the air or at sea.

Just some basic knowledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_penetrator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_explosive_squash_head

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophoricity

There is two issues here...
 

1.A penetration is not necessarily a kill in real life. And that is more likely so when we have a smaller round (even 45mm is small in tank warfare) barely penetrating. That could be fixed by implementing a more complex or a randomised damage model.
2.Pilots in Il-2 are too good at shooting, and they don't have their life at stake. They can train as many hours shooting at as many tanks they want, and fly as daring maneuvres as they want. This is not fixable IMHO. (Just as an example: I can attack a German PzIII/IV AFV with a Beaufighter, shoot it up and get away with it most of the time, and that took me some hours training and a few virtual lifes and virtual Beaufigters - and I used up some virtual Panzers, too. And I have to fly a maneuvre that in real life would be rated somthing in between suicidal and dauntless.)

P. S.: Why is it that "soft" ground targets don't blow up with the first hit (penetration)? Do they soak up damage, till a certain amount is reached? And couldn't some similar model be applied to tanks, too?

Agreed. But, my point about 20-30 mm AP rounds is that if they penetrate they're going to do a fair bit of damage to their local area - probably resulting in injury or death to a crewman or to some vital system. You won't get a "brew up" or "catastrophic kills" with a fuel or ammo explosion, instantly dead crew and a fiercely burning tank, but you will get a tank which can no longer operate offensively - which is what IL2 "kills" are actually measuring.

This is why I think it would be more realistic for IL2 to have three damage states = healthy, mobility kill/retreat/crew bailout, dead. No new damage textures are needed, you just have mobility killed/retreat/crew bailout tanks stop moving. The player might see a HUD message along the lines of "enemy tank damaged".

Additionally, there should be an option for "realistic tank armor" which considerably boosts the armor and durability for AFV, making them much harder to actually kill and bringing actual tank kills in the game in line with modern research into actual effectiveness of air-to-ground attacks. Perhaps doubling or tripling existing "panzer unit" scores for heavy tanks, and doubling panzer unit scores for medium tanks, would do it. Light AFV might get a 50% increase in panzer units, with no increase for soft vehicles.

That way, assault planes could still be hell on earth for convoys of soft vehicles, but not the "tank killers" they were purported to be.

This is only true for APHE or similar rounds. If you're talking about standard AP, as was used at the beginning of WW2, the penetrator was just a piece of hardened steel. Soon after the war started standard AP was upgraded to Armor-Piercing-Capped (APC) where there as a soft metal tip placed on the tip of the shell to help it "grip" the armor rather than shatter on impact.

From there, there were a number of improvements to standard AP, such as API, APHE/APE/APEX, HEAT, APDS, APIT and APT. The Germans were the pioneers in developing APHE and APDS rounds. The British never developed a satisfactory APHE shell and mostly used just AP or APC for their tanks.

APHE possibly, but APDS? Did you mean APCR? I have read that APDS was fairly heavily adopted by the British, I thought it was even a British invention, though I can't back that up.

My bad. You're right. I was working from memory. FWIW, Wikipedia claims that initial work on APDS was by a French company, but later the designers were evacuated to the UK and completed the work there.

As for APCR/Panzergranate 40, while the Germans were one of the first nations to develop it, shortages of tungsten meant they had to discontinue making it.

Why not? For online campaigns which track things like number of AFV and ground vehicles available some people want historical realism for ground kills.

As I suggested before, why not just have an option for historically accurate AFV kills, at least against aircraft-mounted guns?

If you don't like it, just turn it off. That way, people who want the ability to shoot up dozens of tanks to emulate the purported feats of the IL2 at Kursk and the Typhoon and P-47 in Normandy will still be happy.

I don't think that anyone is suggesting that rockets are overpowered, or that it's unrealistic for a single aircraft to shoot up dozens of soft ground vehicles. The only issue is that cannon-equipped aircraft are a too effective against medium and heavy tanks.

The simple solution would be to just double or triple "panzer ratings" for those vehicles against aircraft guns.

A better solution that would require a whole lot more work would be to provide hard targets such as ships and tanks with a "damage resistance" or "hardness" rating, where unless energy from a shot exceeded a certain threshold, there's no penetration.

After that, you'd have some sort of "hit point" mechanism for generalized damage, with either more detailed modeling for "critical hits" to engine, drivetrain, ammo or crew, or just a fixed percentage chance for a critical hit of some sort.

I think that would be unfair and lead to bogus results like unkillable light tanks or APCs...
I think that is what the game does? Even if it is just a simple comparison if the kinetic energy of a round is enought to penetrate the armor.
A complex damage model would need lots of work, I'd think -and may not even be worth the effort. A hit point model would be okay, but it would have the disadvantage to completely elliminate the chance for a catastrophic hit. If it is doable, I'd like to have a random chance model. This could be weapons based, and applied to tank vs. tank, too. Just as an example -numbers are guesswork and would need adjustment:
A .50 cal round that penetrates has a 0.05 chance to completly obliterate the target, and additional 0.2 chance to do significant damage(target stops moving/shooting/both). The other 0.75 chance it would do nothing of significance.
A 75mm projectile that penetrates then could destroy the target in 0.75 cases, do significant damage in 0.2 cases and do nothing in 0.05 cases.

This adresses the every penetrating hit a kill issue and allows damaged vehicles. Disadvantage is that there is no differenciation between shots that barely penetrate and those that do easily if both projectiles are fired by the same weapon. Solution would be to base random chance tables on remaining energy after penetration.

I think it would be more or less simple to do it, there should be a difficulty option:
1, arcade mode: no change, everything stays as is now.
2, realistic mode:
7.62 could destroy unarmored vehicles only
12.7mm effective up to APCs. All tanks, including light ones invulnerable
20mm, same as 12.7, but small chance against light tanks.
23mm, effective up to light tanks, small chance against medium. Heavies invulnerable.
30mm, effective up to medium tanks, heavies still invulnerable.
37-45mm, effective up to medium, small chance against heavies.
75mm, kills everything easily.

Look guys, the way it is, if a projectile doesn't penetrate, it doesn't kill. You can spray all the 7.62 into even a lightly armoured tank, and nothing will happen.

Yep, but please teach the AI not to waste light ammo on armoured targets. I have lost many AI mates due to return fire when their bombs were gone and they pathetically continued their attack with LMGs... :rolleyes:

I disagree, decent non-penetrating hits can cause spalling of the inside surfaces of the armour.
7.62 is unlikely to "kill" a tank.

I disagree about spalling with 7.62mm on heavy tanks, it should do, as it apparently currently does, nothing.

I didn't say that 7.62 would cause spalling.
But a projectile does not need to penetrate the armour to "kill" the tank.

It does nothing.
Other than entertain the crew inside with rain-like sound. ;)
(proven, a relative of mine was a panther driver)

Penetration are already modeled in the sim ever since 4.07 actually. For example, the NS-37 is ineffective against the frontal armor of most tanks, and 50 cals can kill open top vehicles if you fire at the correct angle. Fun fact, I've one managed to kill Pz-VIs with the 23mm cannon from the IL-2, you'll need a 90 degrees dive and open fire at the deck to do so...


Ships have detailed damage modelling that ground vehicles don't, it is very much possible to disable a turret in a battleship with a 500lb bomb. Unfortunately the damage modelling on ships are still fairly primitive (I've never seen a ship looses power before, and it's HP is too little, unlike planes with nearly unlimited HP), but the system is there.

It is possible to extend the DM of ships to ground vehicle as well, things like realistically modeled engine compartments, ammo stores, crews are a walk in a park to make, it's just that it'll require extensive research about the specifications of every single vehicles made for IL2.

On another note, even aircrafts used hit-points .Try putting a glider on take-off against a sea of LMGs, after about 10 minutes the glider will eventually blow up...

I was referring to the game. But yes, even none penetrating hits can in theory kill in real life.

That would replace a fairly decent armor model with on that is totally bogus.
There may be a few exceptions, but currently the IL-2 armor model is that what couldn't be penetrated IRL cannot be killed in IL-2 (Okay, in real life projectiles could shatter on impact, bounce off, etc -but that would be too complex IHMO).

The problems start what happens after a AFV gets hit with a penetrating hit -it is always a kill, while in real life depending on hit zone and remaining projectile energy it may very well have not been lethal or do damage at all. So while in real life it is usually necessary to hit a tank many times with small projectiles until some serious effects are achieved, in IL-2 one penetrating hit is all it takes.

That is where the changes need to be made -NOT EVERY PENETRATING PROJECTILE KILLS.

Uhhh - no.
What makes you think that is the case?

Again: You can disable an AFV without penetrating it by damaging the engine(protected only by light armor) or the tracks.
Anything that goes into the crew compartment means sudden, painful death for most of the crew - and that is the only goal of armor piercing ammunition: To kill the crew.

A SMALL round penetrating will not have a large spalling effect -especially if we talk about rounds, that lost most of their energy for penetrating, which will be the case for most aircraft fired rounds. And a SMALL round, that lost lots of energy is not going to bounce around inside the tank a lot.

Yes, but you need LARGE rounds for that (~75mm+ -and then even HE rounds can destroy tanks), a .50cal is not going to cause spalling. And tracks, I doubt that even large rounds could damage most tank tracks - if not by fluke hits at the connecting bolt heads.

Bounce?
It's not about bouncing.
I've seen a a t54 where a flechette went right through it, entering the turret on one side, leaving the hull on the other side just above the tracks.
Leaving just two tiny holes the diameter of a thumb, yet the crew would have 0 chance of survival.
Any penetrator will tear off metal from the exit hole. Those are tiny fragments, with razor sharp edges, at very high speed.
And the best: They are super hot, able to ignite the hydraulics in your tank.



answered above.


I never claimed a .50 can cause spalling(although it will go right through an m113 btw, lol), or disable tracks.
:confused:

You are talking about high energy kinetic penetrators, which has not much to do with rounds fired by aircraft IMHO -the speed and the missile weight are far from anything a wwII aircraft sports. And a round that went right through a T-54 will have had a huge energy surplus after penetrating, and if I am corrcet also partially fragmented and ignited -and that should have killed crew and/or inginted charges. I seroiusly doubt that usual aircraft rounds wil have similar effects -if I am correct in the assumption that neither DU nor tungsten carbide found widespread use (though the Ju87G used WC rounds), and the smaller the calibre, the less spalling should occur.
But we are talking about effects aircraft bullets can do to tanks, not tank vs. tank gunnery. Tank vs. tank is a different issue IMHO, because of the much greater bullet velocities and masses involved. And if we talk tank vs. tank, then you are right that a penetration should in most cases fatal to the hit AFV -and that even non penetrating hits can do serious damage.

Not sure I understand what you want.
Anything smaller than 20mm cannot penetrate tanks, 37mm can, and the latter is everything but small caliber.

Btw: iirec Rudel mentioned setting some T34 on fire with 20mm guns, but only because of the tanks external fuel tank.

Japanese tanks can be killed by bullets as small as .50cal.
And what I want is some armor model that takes bullet size (or better remaining bullet energy after penetration-then for APHE the additlional chemical energy could be used, too) into account. So that not every penetrating hit is a kill.
Hmm, T-34 did use diesel fuel, that does not burn instanteneusly, must have been a lucky hit.

An idea that crossed my mind too, then again phosphorus can light pretty much everything.
Feel free to download your very own copy of "stuka pilot".

On most armored vehicles 7.62 mm or similar rounds does nothing, except for AP rounds against very light mild steel armor at close ranges. In a few cases, though, you might get spalling against slightly heavier armor, which might injure crewmen or damage very delicate components. Spalling is unlikely to do any damage to the drive train, engine block or gun, however.

Practically, shooting small caliber bullets at AFV does three things:

1) It allows you to aim your heavier guns. You shoot first with light caliber guns, observe where your bullets fall, then shoot with your heavier weapons - assuming they have roughly the same trajectory or you correct accordingly.

2) It forces AFV to remain "buttoned up" limiting the crew's visibility from inside the vehicle and preventing them from manning top-mounted AAA MG.

3) The rattle of bullets might "rattle" the crew. Inexperienced tank crews might retreat or maneuver defensively, on the assumption that all those bullets are just a precursor to something much worse. In some cases this is a valid assumption, since MG were sometimes used as ranging weapons for AT guns. This result could be built into a "mobility kill" option that makes tanks move defensively.

Not just Japanese AFV. Lots of light/early war AFV should be vulnerable to 0.50 caliber AP rounds.

This is a good addition to my proposed damage model where you have an intermediate "damaged" stage for AFV.

Projectile size is a pretty good substitute for complex math about shell composition, angle of attack, fragmentation, fuse reliability and all the rest of it when determining whether a hit does no practical damage, serious damage or kills a vehicle.

Or an explosive or incendiary round.

Is this the same "Stuka Pilot" written by the guy that didn't even know that his aircraft used a dive siren?
If Rudel didn't understand something so basic about the operation of the aircraft that made him famous why would you consider anything else he wrote to be entirely factual?

What are you referring too?

You haven't read Rudel's book?
He states that the Stuka did not have a siren and that the noise was simply a result of air passing through the dive brakes.

Don't know which Stuka he was speaking of(only B models had sirens), couldn't find that passage either(Ballatine pdf Version).
Do you know the page number or can you narrow it down a bit?

It doesn't matter which model he was speaking of, his claim is that the dive scream was not deliberately generated by a siren, which we all know was indeed a siren.
I don't have the book handy but if you have it in PDF try searching it for references to the siren.
I thought the sirens were installed more by date than by model? Weren't D's also fitted with the siren early on alongside the B's? I know when the D's were converted to G's the sirens were removed as they weren't dive bombers.

Many veteran authors make many mistakes in their technical accounts. I've red at least a few books that mention 30mm cannons when they really mean 20mm cannons for example. That's just about their own equipment. Then you have them talking about what the enemy uses and that gets even less accurate... but that's easy enough to chalk up to the fog of war.

I think veteran accounts are important pieces of first hand historical research but they don't always make for the best place to gather technical details. It doesn't invalidate the research but it does mean that you have to look in many places for the best answer.

Yes, that is my point when it comes to offering it as evidence to support "brewing up tanks with 20mm cannon fire". I'm sure it's easy enough to achieve, but "Stuka Pilot" is not the reference to be looking at.
If the man that made the aircraft world famous, and reknown for its screaming dive, didn't understand how it worked, or deliberately denied the system while knowing otherwise, it certainly taints anything else he offers as factual data.
The book is a good read, but it is far from factual and is certainly tainted by his own political agenda.

I don't remember Rudel making such mistake about the sirens, but then again it's been a while since I read the book. I do remember that he misremembered some Soviet plane designations though. It's still a great book, I had some great laughs reading it (not because of the content or errors, but emotion and style)!

Stuka Pilot pdf

Sorry, still cant find any reference to sirens.

Actually he only made the G famous, that was the one he was involved in the development.
That's probably the only plane you should trust him when it comes to specs.

Do you have a link to the original German edition?

no
was a pita finding the Englisch .pdf already

Getting back to the problem of over-effective aircraft weapons vs. tanks, here's a useful data point.

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Fo.../000016-2.html

The takeaway (by Niklas Zetterling, author of several books on the Battle of Kursk) is that on the Eastern Front the OKW reduced the number of ground vehicles claimed as killed" by aircraft by 50%, and reduced the number of ground vehicles claimed as killed by ground forces by 30% when figuring estimates of actual totally destroyed AFV. The numbers produced using these formulas agree fairly well with actual Soviet records.

So, while I'm still hunting for actual confirmation in primary sources, it seems like pretty good evidence that air power is overrated against tanks.

Of course, what these formulas don't take into account is repairable damage and crew injuries/kills.

IIRC, the rule of thumb for repairing AFV during WW2 was that for "killed" vehicles 1/3 could be returned to service overnight, 1/3 could be returned to service in a few days, and 1/3 were write-offs.

For a slow retreat or poor supply situation, I'd guess that the 1/3 that could be repaired in a few days actually had to be written off - either cannibalized, abandoned or destroyed to keep them out of the hands of the enemy. For a rout or terrible supply situation (e.g., Stalingrad pocket, Normandy Breakout), assume that any damaged AFV is a lost AFV.

Perhaps not relevant to single missions, but useful for dynamic campaigns.

To give vehicles and other ground units more involved damage modeling does it require re-coding?
Or is it a simpler matter of extracting the SFS and editing the text for each model?

Realistic (i.e., "aircraft like") damage modeling for ground vehicles would require a massive rewriting of code, so it's a non-starter.

Just reediting "damage ratings" (described in terms of "panzer units") is a simple text editor job where you don't even need to code to change the values.

My solution of creating a third "partially damaged" state for ground vehicles might actually be feasible, since it just requires reprogramming how ground vehicles behave once once they take damage beyond some percentage of their total "hit points." No special effects or change in damage models would be needed, the vehicle just stops moving or starts retreating and perhaps the player gets a "Car/Tank Damaged" message on the HUD display.

That does sound like a fairly simple and effective fix.

Fresh example of Yak-9T's "multikill" - http://www.il2.corbina.ru/sortiedeta...&playerid=2774.

8 "Tigers"
6 StuG IIIG
1 Panzer IVJ
.... :-(

If nothing else, it seems that the late war heavy tanks need to be seriously up-armored and/or need a higher threshold for the sort of guns that can damage them. I could imagine a Pzkw IV or a StuG (based on the PZkw IV chassis) being taken out by a lucky hit from a 37mm gun, but not anything based on the Tiger, Panther or Josef Stalin design.

Most versions, Pzkw III. :)

You're right, but I was thinking StuG IV, since the other victims were a Pzkw IV and a bunch of Tigers. Hence, mid to late war German armor.

Checked achtungpanzer.com

It turned out, the Pz.III should be tougher than the Pz.IV!

thickness/angle:

Pz.IIIH:
Turret Top / Bottom: 10/89
Upper Hull Top / Bottom: 17/77
Lower Hull Top / Bottom: 16/90

Pz.IIIL/M:
Turret Top / Bottom: 10/83
Upper Hull Top / Bottom: 18/79
Lower Hull Top / Bottom: 16/90

Pz.IVD:
Turret Top / Bottom: 10/83
Upper Hull Top / Bottom: 12/84
Lower Hull Top / Bottom: 10/90

Pz.IVG:
Turret Top / Bottom: 10/83
Upper Hull Top / Bottom: 12/85
Lower Hull Top / Bottom: 10/90

Starting from the H variant, turret top was reinforced.

StuG IIIA:
Top / Bottom Superstructure: 11/78-90 & 17/85
Top / Bottom Hull: 16/90

StuG IIIG:
Top / Bottom Superstructure: 11-11/75-90
Top / Bottom Hull: 16/90

I think all of them should be quite vulnerable to 30mm and above, but enough to stop 23mm, unless the aircraft dives on them vertically. (which is very unlikely)

For curiosity, the King Tiger:

Top / Bottom Turret: 40/78 / 40/90
Top / Bottom Superstructure: 40/90
Top / Bottom Hull: 40-25/90

Should be totally invulnerable. (except for the Hs-129B3)

Perhaps even 20mm AP. Depending on the exact shell type and striking angle, 20mm AP could penetrate up to 60 mm of armor plate:

http://www.tarrif.net/cgi/production...ration_adv.php

But, the numbers given in the article above only give information for 100 m and 500 m distances and doesn't correct for strike angle relative to the armor.

More typically, an attack aircraft is going to be shooting at ranges from 100-300 m and at angles of 45-60 degrees relative to the target's top armor (or 30-45 degrees relative to its side armor). An angle is going to boost the effective armor value. At deflections of much more than 45 degrees, there's a high chance that the shell will either richochet, break up or gouge the armor without penetrating.

Again, depending on the exact shell type, a hit from a 20mm gun at 100 m and at close to zero degrees angle off might still penetrate.

So, it's just possible that the armor values for the heavier tanks aren't broken and our Yak-9T pilot might just be very brave and very good. That's a possibility, since players in IL2 get a LOT more gunnery practice than their real-life counterparts ever did, and they're a lot more fearless about getting close to their targets since death, injury or capture are just momentary inconveniences.

Additionally, the hyper-inflated kills might be a product of bad scenario design. Realistically, by the end of WW2, just about every worthwhile target was protected by lots of flak. Protect those tanks with a few AA guns and the Yak driver's virtual life gets much harder.

If you're trying to hit a tank from 100 m, or even 300, diving at 45 degrees and above, it's highly unlikely that you're going to pull out of a dive at all :D. A bit too low for these kind of stunts I'd say!

Nah, 300-400m in a 45° degree dive is okay to do (especially in a slower plane with good elevator authority) - and if memory serves me right was a tactic used by IL2 pilots in real life. Takes some training till you learn to judge the right moment for the pullout, but then you can do it on a regular basis. With the VYa armed ILs it is possible to destroy PzIII/IV AFVs that way. It gets unreal when you need a ~60° dive at ~400m in a fast plane with so-so elevator authority (Try destroying PzIII/IV vehicles with a Beau/Mossie - it is possible to pull that off, but the risk is beyond what non suicidal real life pilots would have done IMHO).

Impossible with ordinary guns. Thats almost as powerful as a GAU-8 Avenger! The weapon you are referring to is a 28/20mm squeezebore gun, with very special ammunition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.8_cm_sPzB_41

Check the other guns on that site. They are using much larger cartridge than aircraft guns, and their barrel lenght is also significantly longer. (except the Breda).
Even modern 20mm guns are unable to penetrate more than 40-45mm armor:
20mm APDS DM-63 44mm at 1km (1988 )
Bottom of this page: http://collinsj.tripod.com/protect.htm

WW2 20mm guns could penetrate around 10-15mm armor, which is not enough against tanks due to the dive angle.
A Tiger, KV-1, IS-2 should be completely invulnerable, only the 75mm could kill them.

Also, from wikipedia:

And the Vya was far more powerful than any 20mm in the war!

First of all, in game considerations of ground objects vary a little, but to the effect of calculating armour thickness, they are just two boxes when refered to tanks, and a single box when refered to TDs.

Tanks got front, rear, sides and top armour. Tanks turrets got side the same.
There are not that many hit boxes, only 2!

You can't diferentiate a track hit, a tripulant shot, or an engine disabled by a lucky shot. To the effects of the game, a damaged tank, is a destroyed tank.

Actually that's not so different from actual war, any crew inside a disabled tank in the middle of a battle, will get the hell out of the tank. Disabled tanks on the battlefield, aquire the strange property of being magnetic to lead...

On the guns side, they got a pen table porbability, if low caliber, you require more than one pen to kill the object, higher calibers may kill them with a single shot. 37mm is efective against almost all in game tanks.

Now, the game accept a .50 killing thick armour, if you are capable of hitting them in really big numbers. But it is actually not likely.

TD have allready made ground vehicles far tougher. It is not so easy to kill a light AFV as before TD taking the lead.

So, if a guy could kill so many tanks and armour with a single plane, getting 100% efficiency, they being mostly Pz IVs and less, I will just think it is mostly unlikely to be done without any extras. His aim is far too good. But the pen is perfectly normal for all of them unless he killed them all from the front.

http://www.wwiiequipment.com/index.p...kets&Itemid=60
Accordind to this 20mm Hispano was almost capable of this when using special APCR ammo - that in turn had considerable accuracy issues.
That is not entierly correct.
From above source standard AP shot for 20mm Hispano penetrates almost 30mm of plate from ~100m, 0°. For ~350m and 40°, this is about half.

And if I remember correctly BK 37 with APCR penetrated 140mm, 100m, 0°. Even if a 45° shot at 300m does less than half of that it would still punch holes in Tiger I/II (30/40mm top armour) and IS2(25?mm top). And the NS37 should be able to do roughly the same, having somwhat lower muzzle velocity while firing a much heavier shell. So there is nothing wrong with that part of the game IMHO.

Wrong(and changeable) is the every hit is a kill concept because:
-at higher angles there should be a considerable rate of failing projectiles
-not all projectiles that penetrate an AFV result in a kill or even damage, especially if the projectile is of low mass and has low remaining energy

Wrong(and not changeable) is further what human online pilots can achieve:
-hit rates far exceeding that what real life pilots could do, in part because of much better training of players and in part of conditions not simulated(e. g. battlefield smoke or inaccurate projectiles)
-flying maneuvres that would put a real pilots life in danger and the ability to train those maneuvres many times over at no cost besides lots of crashed virtual planes and lots of virtual lifes lost.

I dunno. That 140mm sounds unbelievable to me. If you check the link about modern ammunition, you can see that such performance was only possible with APFSDS munition (Bofors). Also, the much larger ZIS-2 AT gun was capable of penetrating 145mm armor @ 500m, with tungsten ammo.

I read somewhere that the reason why the Gemans desperately tried to mount the PaK40 on aircraft was because the BK 3.7 was totally useless against IS-2 and ISU-152 tanks, both with 30mm top armor.

From russianammo.org:

Maybe. If you shoot just as you come out of your dive and you're not going too fast you can sometimes make it. I agree that it's not something a real life pilot would do, though.

Alternately, you can strafe at 20 m or less, getting a nearly 0 degree angle off shot at a tank's rear side or turret armor. That works too, but again it's far more aggressive than a real life pilot would be.

I agree. A good general rule of thumb is that a WW2 era gun will penetrate mm of armor equal to its mm of bore at 100 m.

My point was that some types of 20 mm ammo could hypothetically penetrate the top armor of a PzKw or even a Tiger if fired at very close range at just the right angle. But, I think it's quite unlikely and would require a very aggressive, very skilled on-line pilot.

More likely, I think that the armor values for certain late war AFV are crocked, or IL2 overstates penetrating ability of 20mm guns vs. armor, or both.

Yes, it sounds "fishy" to me, too. But even if it were only 70mm, it should still be barely capable of penetrating the 30mm deck armour at 45°/300m.

When attacking those tanks from the sides (nice big target, 90° makes shots very likely to acheive results) which would very likely work against T34s, the result would be disappointing. And even if attacked in a 45° dive from above, there would be the problem of ammo disintegrating/bouncing off and also ammo that gets through would lost a real lot of its energy and thus be less likley to do damage.

So a real world pilot firing 30 shots at IS-2, would achieve 6 hits, of these 3 disintegrate, 2 do no damage, and 1 kills an IS-2, while an IL-2 online pilot firing 30 shots at IS-2s gets 15 hits, and all of them kill their target.
From the same site:
"The AP shells were belt fed and could penetrate 40mm up to an angle of 45°;"
That would make the NS-37 capable of defeating the Tiger Is armor, but not the Tiger IIs armor, at least not regularly.

Pz3/4, can be done -with 20mm Hispano. Only needs a high risk approach, 45°+ dive -with lots of training possibly doable on a regular basis.
Nah, I think they are fine. Try shooting up Panzer3/4 tanks with anything 20mm besides Hispanos, there is no fun in that -but maybe I'm not good enough as a pilot.

Sorry, but IAm a bit confused here. Why do you keep talking about 20mm power when the airplane used bores a 37mm one?

The NS37 if I remeber it well.
I'am a bit surprised to know that it could carry so many 37mm ammo.

But if there is anything bad modeled here, was this canon recoil effects on the little yak.

The same thing applyes to the il2 3m with two 37mm non synchronyzed canons.
Only the first shot could be aimed, on the second shot the plane will be absolutely out of its mark.

The discussion got away from this particular case towards the question if there is a general flaw in IL-2s armour model (either projectiles penetrating deeper than they do IRL or AFVs having less capable armor than IRL).
IMHO there is none, and as an example i mentioned 20mm cannons, that do perform up to specs as far as i tested.
At least the recoil makes you have to adjust your aim after 1-2 shots, that seems okay to me.
But it does just that ingame, doesn't it?

Yaks have the most realistic FM amongst soviet planes, they are very well modeled. So I think recoil is OK, at least for the "T". Only the NS-45 should have stronger effect, but who cares about that prototype plane?

The starter of this thread?


No, in game they are sinchronyzed.

You are right about that. Could have sworn the Il-2-3M jumped around like a bucking bronco when firing its cannons. Ahh, maybe this was changed (accidentally?) when the asynchronous firing of .50 cals in the Corsair and others was fixed?

Nope. It was ever sinchronyzed.

Are you talking about the Corsair or the IL-2?

Previous versions of the game had synchronized guns where you could mash the trigger and watch perfect streaks of 6 tracers coming out at exactly the same time from beginning to end of the belt. There was actually enough space in between that an aircraft could fly through it. They fixed that after a very long thread in Oleg's Ready Room forum.

As for the IL-2 Type 3M. The first shot is always synchronized but successive shots progressively get out of sync to the point where its easy to control the first shot with the tap of a finger but holding the trigger makes the aircraft jump around a lot.

The IL-2
The laser firing .50s, were at last adressed in a topic that started talking about tracer visibility at long range. But laser .50s were introduced after their first implementation in the game., On the start they weren't sinchronyzed at all. Bearcat have had a lot to do with the .50s becoming a 6 laser simultaneous shot. He didn't ask for that, he asked for less dispersion, but the six laser shots was what he received as a solution. Nevertheless, .50s attitude have nothing to do with IL-2 3M guns.

Are you sure of that? You make me check, just to see if something was changed lately. But no, you still can straffe a whole column with them without lossing aim. The funny thing, is that the 7.92, originally the green lasers, now have more dispersion than the 37mm, and also makes the plane shake a lot! :)

The big difference in between the Ju87G, and the IL2-3M, was that the firing was sinchronyzed. So, on the IL2-3M, you got 2 canons firing at different times. Originally it was developed as a TD weapon, but ended being an antishipping weapon, because it's accuracy was not good enough to hit a tiny tank.

Also the Ju87G canons absorb a lot of the recoil, the IL2-3m 37mm won't absrob much.

Over the last years we overruled the IL2-3M from every campaign we made because of this.

That was what i remembered, too.
BUT either my memory is wrong, or this has been changed - the last time I've flown IL2-3Ms is way back, maybe 2008ish. I first didn't believe RPS69, too. But i tried it ingame and you can now hold the trigger down and there is no serious asynchronous recoil - or there never was?