Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[horseback]

Originally Posted by JtD

Funny, considering the several thousand rounds spent, I would say a hit once in a while is statistically prone to happen. After all, firing solutions don't get a lot easier than with a dead 6 approach.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. I can only assume that you've never fired an automatic weapon of any kind, much less an actual machine gun at a target even 100m away. 'Once in a while' is not three times in one flight; I would guess that considerably less than a thousand rounds per plane was fired at you during that flight, and that you were rarely if ever actually in a truly 'steady state' range/angle/angle from any of those gun positions.

Can you prove it is theoretically impossible to hit an aircraft from 500-700 m away? Otherwise, the chance for a hit is always there. That's just life.

Theory involves statistical probabilities; here the probabilities are not merely being violated--they are being gangraped.

If you are at a 'dead six' to any one of a formation of 4 Betties, there are at least 7 guns that can always be brought to bear on you at any time (the 4 tail gunners and the three top rear gunners of the aircraft you are not directly behind), there is one gun that can usually be brought to bear on you (the top rear gun of the aircraft you are most directly behind) and finally, there are maybe three guns that can sometimes be brought to bear on you (the three side guns of the flanking aircraft in the formation). At best, only one of those guns has an actual 'zero deflection' shot at you. The rest have to calculate some degree of deflection.

In my experience, the ai guns usually fire about three rounds every burst fired, and at ranges outside their 'guaranteed kill' ranges, fire random un-aimed bursts about 2/3rds of the time; the rest of the time, if you continue in precisely the same vector or curve you are going when the shots are fired, you are likely to be hit. Since it is nearly impossible for a human to 'fly' with that sort of consistency, you usually move a bit higher or lower or off to the side of where the burst is aimed, and as a function of distance from the point the shots are fired, the size of the miss is determined by how far you can move off-vector or curve between the time the burst is fired and when the rounds arrive at the targeted point.

Are you suggesting that you were the recipient of over 300 total bursts of ai fire from each aircraft in each mission? The 'chance' of a random hit is always there, but if you get hit more than once, it isn't chance.

In short, the closer you get and the less you react to or anticipate the gunners's fire (I don't recall seeing muzzle flashes 99% of the time, but I don't really look for it) the more likely you are to be hit and the difficulty of the angle and speed don't seem to me to be very great factors, even for 'Rookie' gunners once you come within about 200m. That is not quite a 'spray and pray' solution; once you enter their firing cones, regardless of speed or angle, you will be hit, period, very badly hit if more than one gun is involved.

That's not life. It's not even a reasonable imitation. From my own experiences, using high angle, high speed, high deflection attacks, I should hardly ever be hit at all. Instead, I get shredded more than half the time, and much less often take 'only a flesh wound.' I have also come to believe that what you are flying has more to do with your likelihood of taking a hit than how fast or at what angles you attack. I got hit a LOT more often at the same speeds and angles flying a P-39D than I did in an F6F, and I got hit a lot less in a P-40.

You don't even want to know what happens when you bring a Mustang within 700m of a Betty formation (and this is weird, because nobody can keep a Mustang absolutely straight and level in this game, but you can hear round after round banging into your nose and wings at an increasing tempo as you close to 500m or so).

Anyway, if I had killed twenty Betties within just 10 missions in 1 vs. 8 situations, for 8 hits into my aircraft in return, folks would probably want to know my secret, not the secret of some loser gunners. I'd certainly not run to my superiors and whine, after all, I'd be the highest ranking US bomber destroyer ace.

Standing off at ranges like that wouldn't be all that different from dropping the rounds on the Betty from a great height like so many little bombs. Setting your convergences for ranges more than double the accepted effective range of your guns makes them useless at any realistic range for the real targets of American fighters--other fighters. Unlike the ai, you can't adjust your convergences in mid-flight.

It's an artificial comparison. Killing 20 Betties at those ranges is not quite as unrealistic, impractical and improbable as the phony accuracy levels of the ai gunners, but it's in the ballpark.

cheers

horseback