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Originally Posted by IceFire
Dead 6 (or right behind) is a bad place to be because of defensive fire and because you're wasting a lot of bullets on structure that doesn't matter as much.
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It's especially bad vs. the Wellington because there's a power turret in the tail with twin guns and a very good field of fire.
If you do have to hang out behind a bomber and can't overtake them quickly (about 50-75 kph faster), try to hang out at 300-500 m and take "sniper" shots at one of the engine nacelles. Usually there will be a fuel tank behind or adjacent to the engine and you might get lucky and start a fire.
Ideally, you'll have your guns converged for your preferred firing distance before you take your sniper shots. This is particularly important for planes with wing-mounted guns, less so for planes with nose-mounted cannons or with guns in the wings which are mounted quite close to the fuselage.
If you have to get within 300 m, try to shift around after each shot you take and don't stay in one place (relative to the bombers gunners' point of view) for more than a second or so. Plan your shot at a vital part a second or so in advance as you jink around above and below the gunner's field of fire and make "snapshots" as your target comes into your sights.
Also, practice your gunnery. Try to challenge yourself by taking increasingly tricky high-speed, high deflection shots. Just set up an easy mission in the QMB, give yourself unlimited ammo and go.
If you're not used to how a particular plane's guns work, there is a program called "Sniper's Corners" which turns an Excel spreadsheet into a sort of gunnery calculator. Using it, you can get a sense of how much lead you need to give a target in different attack scenarios.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IceFire
With a P-40C (Tomahawk II) you also have somewhat limited firepower.
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More to the point, in IL2 the entire P-40/Hawk 87/Tomahawk/Kittyhawk series is very vulnerable to damage from the front. Just about any bullet in the nose is going to kill the engine and/or oil coolant system. Bullets that miss those systems WILL go through the windshield (where the armor glass isn't modeled) and will kill the pilot. If that doesn't happen, your control cables will get hit. I can't count the number of times I've quit a P-40 bomber intercept mission with the pilot dead, engine stopped and/or control cables severed.
If you can learn to live with its crummy high altitude performance and vicious spin recovery characteristics, the P-39/P-400 or P-63 are my bomber interceptors of choice. Even better, for some reason IL2 does a poor job of modeling hits to the guns in the P-39/P-400s nose, and the hits to the oil/coolant system take 20+ minutes to finally kill the engine, so you can take a lot of abuse and keep on blasting away. Your only risk is a pilot hit through the windscreen (again, bulletproof glass and armor plate between the cockpit and the nose guns not modeled).
But that's not an excuse to just hang out behind a bomber formation and soak up bullets. Practice your deflection shooting!