This cant be realistic - 500+ hits, plane still flying??

[Viper2000]

Originally Posted by ReconNZ

OK - I know HE111's are big planes, but i sat dead astern one, and put over 500 rounds into him, he was just slightly smoking!

C'mon Luthier and the team, surely this can not be accurate??? Ive seen what a .303 round can do - most if not all of my hits were to the wings, in line with the engines. I could have sawed a wing off i hit it that many times!!

Simple experiment for you.

Take a sheet of paper. Make a paper aeroplane.

Get it flying nicely.

Get a pin. Make a hole in the wing. See if it still flies. Make another hole. See if it still flies...

Assumptions - A paper dart has a wingspan of 210 mm if it's made of A4 paper. He-111 has a wingspan of about 22.6 m, so roughly 100 times bigger. Meanwhile 0.303" ~ 7.7 mm, and 100th would be 0.077 mm, which is a pretty tiny pin hole.

Yes, there are lots of differences between a paper aeroplane and a real He-111, but this should give you a rough idea of the scale problem.

It's really rather difficult to cause structural failure with machine gun rounds. Mostly you score kills by killing the crew, causing fuel/coolant/hydraulic leaks, breaking engines and starting fires.

If you want to regularly break your target into little bits then you need missiles full of HE...