Give me some "holy sh... did that just happen" ideas

[woodchuck]

No doubt this must have been covered before.
How about those hair-raising secondary explosions we see in guncam footage of strafing attacks on rail cars or trucks.
Strafe the wrong rail car and a great load of metal, ammo and debris shoots up several hundred feet right in front of you !
I've seen many guncam clips of this that make it seem impossible that the pilot flew thru all the junk and lived.

That'll put the fear of god in you.

[AndyJWest]

Originally Posted by woodchuck

No doubt this must have been covered before.
How about those hair-raising secondary explosions we see in guncam footage of strafing attacks on rail cars or trucks.
Strafe the wrong rail car and a great load of metal, ammo and debris shoots up several hundred feet right in front of you !
I've seen many guncam clips of this that make it seem impossible that the pilot flew thru all the junk and lived.

That'll put the fear of god in you.

This already happens in IL-2. I've learned the hard way that it is a lot safer to strafe trains side-on than head-on, simply because of the tendency for a hit to set off a chain reaction that catches you as you over-fly the target. Side-on, the obvious attack method tends to encourage an end-to end strafing sweep, which only needs to be continued to avoid any overflight. It would be nice to see a good steam-train blowup though - I think I once saw guncam footage of half the boiler hurling skywards. Not something you'd want to run into...

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

This already happens in IL-2. I've learned the hard way that it is a lot safer to strafe trains side-on than head-on, simply because of the tendency for a hit to set off a chain reaction that catches you as you over-fly the target. Side-on, the obvious attack method tends to encourage an end-to end strafing sweep, which only needs to be continued to avoid any overflight. It would be nice to see a good steam-train blowup though - I think I once saw guncam footage of half the boiler hurling skywards. Not something you'd want to run into...

I quite like straffing oil trains, you do have to break off so you don't overfly the explosions. The thing is, or maybe used to be, if you attack from the rear, the flak truck behind the tender will hit the oil waggon closest to it, and you don't get the kills for the waggons that go off after that. I haven't seen it in a while, but I don't attack oil trains from the rear any more.

[blades96]

No holy sh*t moments but there are a number of general things that would help immersion that would be nice to see introduced. Sorry if some of this has been mentioned already.

1. Pilot careers, where you start off as a rookie that goes up with someone more experienced who can give you some general advice, such as how to carry out an attack, attack from direction of sun, keep an eye on mirror. Then as you go through the missions you move further up the command structure and take control of squadrons yourself. Better develop the characters of those you are flying with as well so you care about them more, rather than just being numbers.
2. Better pilot chatter. More of the pilot lingo that was used such as "bandits at 8" and that kind of stuff. Also, pilots screaming as their plane goes down in flames. Would be nice to hear yourself giving orders as well.
3. Better sounds. It is impossible to get the graphics perfect right now but it should be possible to get a very good approximation of the sounds that would be heard in the cockpit of these old planes.