4.12.2 de-bugging

[Pursuivant]

Is it just me and my crummy flying or does the P-40M seem extremely vulnerable to "critical hits"?

I've been flying a lot of 1-1 missions against the Ace AI Ki-43II (i.e., 2 0.50 caliber guns, sniper-like accuracy within 200 meters) and it seems like even a single second of gunfire will do something terrible to my plane.

If I'm lucky it's just a jammed gun, more typically it's some control surface rendered inoperative, a pilot hit or really severe engine damage which results in the engine conking out within seconds. Mind you, the actual plane never breaks apart - or even shows heavy damage, it's almost always a pilot kill, messed up controls (usually 2-3 at a time) or inoperative/flaming engine.

This seems at odds with Clive Caldwell's assessment that the P-40 "would take a tremendous amount of punishment, violent aerobatics as well as enemy action," plus the fact that the P-40 had armor around the engine and cockpit which allowed it to survive head-on passes against the Ki-43.

Mind you, I think that the game gets the P-40's basic ruggedness right in terms of light damage/heavy damage/broken damage modeling to the airframe. It's just that there seems to be something wrong about the likelihood and severity of critical hits.

Flying against another contemporary opponent, the Bf-109F, I'm getting much the same sort of damage, although the Bf-109's programming makes it much less likely to take head-on shots and Bf-109F Ace AI doesn't seem to have the same inerrant accuracy as the Ki-43.