Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[horseback]

Originally Posted by JtD

So, even in the worst bomber vs. fighter encounters (from bomber perspective), it is about 2 bombers lost for every fighter lost. Why do you expect to take on 8 vs. 1 odds and end up killing everything without being harmed?

For what it's worth, I took up a P-47 vs. 4 veteran G4M and shot them all down, 5 times in a row, without ever having my engine killed. And since I was attacking from the rear quarter, I took several 20mm hits every time.

Actually, it came out a bit higher than that; on two occasions, my sights were shot out on the first pass, rendering me ‘combat ineffective’, and given the damage I normally took in the first couple of passes, a RL Hellcat driver with a long flight back to his carrier would retire quickly after any noticeable damage, so it should have been scored Betties ten+, me about two and a half if we play RL rules.

Why do I expect to come away unharmed? Because it would be much more realistic. I’ve detailed the inherent difficulties a real gunner would experience myriad times, and pointed out how any reasonable amount of gunshake/vibration would limit accuracy at ranges over 150 m or so. I kept my speed up and my angles steep and complicated—meaning high or low and off axis—and I never maintained a straight course as long as I was within 500m of them. In an actual Hellcat, I would have been untouchable; the worst I could have expected was some scattered light caliber rounds in the rear fuselage.

That 20mm stinger was hard to move about and would have been really tough to aim at any off-angle, and leading a high speed target with any accuracy would have been next to impossible (think about it; that whole rear glasshouse had to be rotated to bring the gun to bear on any target not directly behind the aircraft; given Japanese production quality and maintenance standards of the time, I’d be surprised if more than half of them didn’t jam in combat).

In this game we have Ichiro Schwarzenegger at the rear gun, and he can spin that monster around at blinding speeds and maintain the precision of a neurosurgeon.

RL fighter vs small bomber formation encounters rarely went the bombers’ way—rarer, in fact than documented occasions of a P-47 flying through a grove of trees and returning to base. The individual bomber or a majority of the formation might survive, but they would be pretty badly chopped up and their survival would be more due to the fighter pilot’s poor marksmanship or lack of ammo/firepower than to any skills the bomber’s gunners would have possessed. In general, the fighters would get away scot-free unless one of them was stupid enough to fly alongside to wave or salute; even when the attacking fighter lacked the speed advantages of the later types and ‘crawled’ up to the bomber’s rear, the fighter pilot’s guns would be more accurate and effective well before the tail gunner could hit him 19 out of 20 attacks.

In Il-2 Sturmovik ’46 and its predecessors, that historical reality has been stood on its head; seriously, damaging hits from over 750 meters? From Rookie gunners?

And as for your results with a P-47, I will point out that the Jug has 1/3rd more firepower, is a good bit faster to gain speed and requires about a third less trim input to keep it stable and on target than a Hellcat in this game. You should get better results; the most I got in any single QMB was 6.

cheers

horseback

[horseback]

I agree that fires in the fuel tanks is the way that I get most of my heavy bomber kills (other than the odd lucky shot to the cockpit with a head-on initial pass). With cannon fire, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. But, with HMG fire, it almost seems like they burn too easily.

Actually, machine gun rounds starting fires is entirely reasonable; ball, much less armor piercing rounds striking aluminum actually melt their way through. Aluminum melts at around 1160° F, and I can say from experience that splashes or spalling of molten aluminum can start anything reasonably flammable to light up; hydraulic fluid, oil, aviation grade petrol, or thirty plus years ago, my co-worker’s denim jeans (and thank God he had been wearing heavy, high-topped work boots when that stuff splashed on his ankles or he might have lost a foot). Add any incendiary or tracer rounds to the mix and there can easily be flames.

I would argue that it takes much longer in the game than in real life for a fire in a wing tank or fuselage to become catastrophic; I’ve seen a great deal of gun camera film showing B-17s and B-24s, much less Betties (and Sallies and Zeros and Oscars etc) folding up in seconds once a fire gets started anywhere near a fuel tank. Any sort of fuel plus lots of oxygen (at 200kph, the fire is getting plenty of oxygen) creates a blowtorch effect.

Whoosh!

cheers

horseback

[horseback]

The realism isn't sometimes in history, but it is in trying to reproduce the danger of a war situation.

I agree with most of what has been said by Horseback, however, historcally, nothing flying was easy meat for a WW2 pilot (unless he was a great ace), and this must be represented in game, with AI skill improving with years (BTW that's why i'm not really happy with fighter AI ace aiming in 4.12, it was so much better in the previous patch).

Bomber defensive fire during WW2 were as described by Horseback, but still the majority of fighter pilots weren't ace and did not even have a single kill.
We cannot pretend we are in WW2 when we run IL2. A sim, has to make us feel the danger of a combat situation: IL2 does this well and still we have the confortable choice to decide whether we take the risk or not.

Compared to the real WW2 combats, what we have in IL2 is immensely easier.

I agree with several points you make, but I’d go about increasing difficulty differently. The original explanation for the gunners' unGodly accuracy and range was 'scale'; there was a fairly small limit on how many aircraft you could put into a mission without overtaxing your computer and crashing to the desktop, so every aircraft and gunner had to 'stand for' four or five (or ten) other aircraft. That excuse is no longer valid.

Hitting other aircraft was more difficult in real life; turbulence, prop wash, wing flex, guns jamming, mechanical aborts or (shockingly often) the pilot forgetting to unsafe his guns. How about the need to change the bulbs in your gunsight in the middle of a dogfight? Finding the enemy was the greatest problem by far; unless he came to you in huge numbers and you were directed to him by Ground Control, chances of actually seeing and engaging enemy aircraft were exceedingly low. Even with radar direction, finding them in any kind of cloud cover was often a matter of luck; early systems couldn't give you accurate altitude information.

Making the enemy rare would lead to people leaving the game in droves, as would most of the other stuff I mentioned. We play for the combat ‘experience’, or what we imagine it to be; for the offline player, at least, using the actual tactics the aces used should almost always be successful. They are not.

If you are flying a USAAF fighter campaign in Europe, your primary natural prey is not single engine fighters, but the twin engine zerstörers, whose rear gunners were practically useless at their guns at those speeds and altitudes; their primary value was as an extra set of eyes. In this game, they are the most dangerous opponents you can encounter and the rear gunner’s twin 7.9mm guns are several orders of magnitude more dangerous than the two cannon in the nose. At any range or angle, it is usually safer to take on four Ace FW 190A-9s than it is to approach one Rookie Me-110G from the rear...

In that sort of situation, the frustration factor is huge. You know that you are doing everything exactly right, and you are still getting hammered. Ultimately, you put the game away and move on to something else, at least for a while. I would expect that the game loses at least ten offliners for every online player every year—and it is almost certainly the grotesque accuracy of the ai gunners that is the main cause. I’ve taken at least four ‘breaks’ of eight or ten months over the last 12 years, but I have come back. How many don’t return, ever?

The attraction of the online game is not re-creation of the actual air war but the competition; since the ai gunners are a relatively minor factor in that environment, the guys who want to fly bombers want the extra protection factor of the ai gunners' accuracy, since they will be found by the opposing fighters.

The off-liner looks for immersion; let's define that as a temporary escape into someplace else--we might as well call it a role playing game as much as a 'shooter'. In that context, you want things to work consistently according to the historic rules you know, and in those theaters where the enemy came to you, the individual good & aggressive pilots consistently scored heavily, even when they were flying technically inferior aircraft (see Finland, the Battle of Germany, the Battle of Britain, Malta and Guadalcanal for examples). Bombers and multipassenger aircraft were 'easy meat', most definitely including the 'heavy fighters', regardless of the number of defensive guns they carried, because of the limitations of human accuracy at any range or angle with hand fired automatic weapons and their lack of ability to maneuver or run away.

At the very least, the offliner should have a 'Full Real' option for the defensive gunners, to implement the changes I've suggested in whole or in part. Making the fighter to bomber contest disproportionately difficult is neither competitive nor realistic for a WWII fighter oriented simulation.

cheers

horseback