Hellcat F6F-3 DM
The engine can survive about as many small caliber bullets as the P-47D-10 can. The armor glass does what it's supposed to. It doesn't seem to pick up fuel tank hits like the Corsair does, and the tank hits it gets stop fairly quickly.
Those are the good points.
1) The forward fuselage between the engine and the cockpit picks up damage at a ridiculous rate. The light damage texture actually shows up more and bigger bullet holes than are required to trigger that texture!
2) The cockpit is also tremendously vulnerable to damage, with just two rifle caliber bullets knocking out the gun sight and several gauges even though they actually never got near the control panel. The damage model actually knocked out more gauges than there are bullets to hit them! This isn't a unique problem to the F6F, but it really shows badly here.
The damage model doesn't take into account the fact that the armor glass is slightly angled, and extends slightly below the level of the cockpit, so bullets fired from 12 o'clock level can get in through the gap to knock out the gunsight or wound the pilot.
3) The wing damage model outright sucks. I don't say that lightly, but it appears that the damage model is offset from the physical model, so that the game thinks that bullets which should actually miss the plane's wing hit it.
As with all other machine gun damage models in the game, the game engine can't tell which hits would cause instant stoppage (e.g., barrel, receiver), which parts will cause eventual stoppage (e.g., ammo boxes), and which parts aren't going to have an effect on the gun's functionality (ejection ports, empty ammo boxes).
Perhaps because of the offset wing DM, hits that should miss the guns actually hit them.
When you're flying the F6F-3, expect to lose at least 20% of your guns within the first few passes against ace bombers.
Lots of aileron hits. A common problem with all the older planes' DM, but especially unrealistic against rifle caliber bullets which produce minimal shrapnel and basically have to intersect perfectly with cable runs or bellcranks to sever or jam even one control surface.
I collected several of these hits over several missions despite just one or two rifle caliber bullets getting anyplace near the actual cable runs.
As is normal for IL2, any control cable hit results in complete loss of control authority, even when it's not possible in real life.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1406107200
Proof that the F6F-3's damage model is offset from the visual model. Note the bullet trajectory that missed the wing, but still counts as a hit!
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1406107466
Proof that the F6F-3's DM for its machine guns is weird - two guns knocked out by two .303 bullets, both of which realistically would have passed under the guns.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1406107568
Picture of the gap where the armor glass should be, allowing a bullet to penetrate the cockpit.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1406107651
Same hit from the inside. You can see that the bullet that nominally knocked out the gunsight should actually have been stopped by the armor glass.
Also notice overmodeling of cockpit damage. There are two potentially penetrating bullets, one of which should have been stopped by the armor glass, but three damaged cockpit instruments!