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#1
06-03-2014, 04:48 AM
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Anyhow, that would explain why some inline engines are so vulnerable. Bullets will generally go right through aluminum, although some grades of aluminum make decent armor (the M113 APC had 3/4" of aluminum armor which prevented penetration by most small arms fire). So, it's not so simple as figuring joules of energy vs. mm of homogenous rolled armor and dividing by some factor to get penetration of cast iron! 
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#2
06-03-2014, 04:53 AM
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More pictures
#1 Bf-109E-4 getting smoked by a Wellington III Ace gunner at medium range (~300 m when hit) from a shot from above. I didn't play it out, but I'd suspect that the engine has 5-10 minutes to live. Also notice two different bursts of MG fire passing extremely close to the plane from other Wellingtons at extreme range (600+ meters). Kind of a poster child for toning down Ace AI gunners, especially since most gunners were trained to hold their fire until the enemy got within 500 m. http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401771087 #2 Bf-109E-4 getting smoked by a Wellington III at medium range (300 m) by a shot through the prop. Expected engine life 5-10 min. http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401771087 #3 Same as above but notice the remarkably tight grouping of hits on the Bf-109s nose at 450+ meters! http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401771087 #4 P-51B flamed by Ace Wellington III gunner at about 200 meters while maneuvering. While the shot doesn't show it effectively, one .30 caliber bullet was sufficient to set the forward fuel tank on fire, and another shot smoked the engine. A better view would have shown the bullet hitting right in the middle of the forward fuel tank. And this wasn't a fire that broke out after fuel hit the engine, the plane was suddenly engulfed in flames. http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401771087 Last edited by Pursuivant; 06-03-2014 at 05:06 AM.
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#3
06-03-2014, 01:04 PM
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A couple more pictures of the P-51B's vulnerabilities.
#1: P-51B after getting zapped by the nose gunner of an Ace AI Wellington III at about 200 m range while closing at about 550 kph, so perhaps about 750-800 kph total closing speed. Normally, I'd call this a fair hit - lots of extra energy, close range and I wasn't maneuvering much - except that you'll notice that none of the bullets' trajectories actually directly penetrates the engine block or the cooling system! (The bullet at the top was also glancing.) Even with a soft aluminum engine block and lots of extra energy on the bullet, there's a good chance that realistically all of those bullets would have ricocheted rather than penetrating. And, ONE glancing shot was sufficient to instantly seize up the engine. No warning, just a dead engine. Not realistic behavior even for a mortally wounded engine. http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401800105 #2 P-51B after getting hit by the tail gunner of an Ace AI Wellington III at 450 m. This one caused a coolant leak, so perhaps 5-10 minutes of engine life. In addition to a remarkably tight bullet grouping by the quad machine guns (almost no dispersal at all - the bullet in the wing is from the head on pass I took earlier) at extreme range, you'll also notice that the bullet that inflicted the fatal damage penetrates exactly where the P-51 had 1/4" of armor plate! So, either an AP bullet or the armor plate over the coolant tank isn't properly modeled. http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachm...1&d=1401800123 Last edited by Pursuivant; 06-03-2014 at 01:10 PM.
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#4
06-03-2014, 01:33 PM
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Despite what I posted above, I think there are some places where shots between gaps in armor are realistic. While complete armor diagrams are hard to come by, especially for Soviet planes, it appear that there could be gaps in armor, especially between armor glass and the forward armored firewall.
For example, on many planes, there is a slight horizontal gap between the firewall armor and the armor glass. This means that shots from directly ahead and slightly above can get through the gap to injure the pilot.
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#5
06-04-2014, 08:51 PM
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Do each one of those bullet lines represent one bullet or a volley? I ask because in game, planes do occasionally fly through a stream of gunfire. I do agree that larger planes/Bombers tend to fall apart too easily. But given a simplified factor (I'm assuming it's much more complicated) how much more 'tougher' would you make the larger panes closer to a realistic catastrophic failure?
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#6
06-05-2014, 08:51 PM
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You can set up arcade mode by setting "arcade = 1" in your conf.ini file. Quote:
For cumulative damage from 20mm and smaller rounds, and from collisions with small planes, there should be some other mechanism to indicate "the plane doesn't fly anymore". Possibilities include extreme levels of drag or loss of lift, or inability to control the plane due to damage cable runs and control surfaces. I think that this would be easy to implement, since all the developers would need to do is set an energy threshold required to trigger a particular breaking part effect. As a very rough guess, I'd say that for light bombers and dive bombers this would be .50 caliber, for lightly built medium bombers and transports it would be 20 mm, and for anything bigger it would be 30 mm. I believe that this is realistic because if you look at film footage of bomber shoot-downs by fighters, the lethal damage is almost always from engine failure, fire, or pilot kills. Rarely, you get a bomb hit or fuel explosion which blows the plane apart. Control surfaces might come off, but the plane itself is never broken apart just by gunfire. The pictures of bombers you see falling in pieces are due to the plane suffering a direct hit by flak, from its bombs or fuel exploding, or from it being torn apart by air resistance or g-forces. Remember, the Luftwaffe estimated in 1943 that an average pilot required 20 20mm cannon hits to bring down a B-17 from the rear. There's no way that a B-17 or any other big, heavily built plane (B-29, B-24, Ju-88, Wellington) is going to fall apart after just 5 or so 20mm cannon hits, as I've often seen when flying IL2. Last edited by Pursuivant; 06-05-2014 at 08:55 PM.
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#7
06-06-2014, 04:18 PM
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BTW, some few extintions back, when most of us were young, someone complained against the effect of buzzaw as something missing on il2, when using .50s but even then, 5 20mm shots to brake a B-17's wing, is absolutelly outstanding in my game experience.
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#8
06-03-2014, 10:48 PM
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@Pursuivant: Those pics show what the problem really is, and is not engine frailty: it's the incredibly unrealistic gunner accuracy in this game, when most RL reports and accounts testify gunners were more a dissuasive resource than a real threat for pursuing fighters, except at close distance and straight flying.
As I've stated many times gunners in this game -both AI and human- have it too easy to aim and shoot. AI because it cheats, humans because a real gun station would never move as fast, accurately and lightly as a mouse pointer. If real gunners were so effective, then contraptions like the Defiant would have been a resonant success, and not the failure they were.
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#9
06-04-2014, 12:00 AM
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Good point Dux.
__________________
 Personally speaking, the P-40 could contend on an equal footing with all the types of Messerschmitts, almost to the end of 1943. ~Nikolay Gerasimovitch Golodnikov
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#10
06-04-2014, 01:48 AM
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The ability for gunners to easily track targets is just one of the problems. * IL2 makes flexible guns much more inherently accurate than they should be, by ignoring natural bullet dispersion over range due to atmospheric factors, and lack of inherent accuracy due to turbulence, slipstream buffeting and airframe vibration. * Gunners have much better and faster ranging abilities than in real life, especially at long range. Functionally, even experienced turret gunners were useless at much beyond 500 meters. For this reason, experienced gunners held their fire until their targets were within 300-500 yards. Yet, there's an abundance of evidence that IL2 AI gunners are not only opening fire at 700-800 meters, but also score multiple hits! * IL2 ignores the fact that it's very difficult even for skilled airmen to properly estimate range in the absence of other objects to help judge size, and in thin, clear air at higher altitudes which makes distant objects seem closer than they are. It's also difficult for the human eye to adapt to looking for distant object in the absence of other objects to focus on. Experienced airmen had to focus first on a distant part of the plane, and then start looking for distant foes once their eyes adapted. * In some cases the game overestimates a gunner's ability quickly to slew a hand-held gun around, especially when when the plane is pulling Gs or is traveling at high speeds and the gun barrels are hanging out in the slipstream. * 4.12 went a long way towards making gunners less accurate when the plane is maneuvering, it still doesn't go far enough, IMO, to make it difficult for gunners who aren't seated and strapped in to shoot while the plane is pulling Gs. For example, the gunner in the top turret of the IL-4 had just a "hammock" to sit on, with no back or foot support and no seat belt. How he was supposed to shoot when the plane was doing anything other than flying straight and level is a puzzle. * IL2 ignores any change of flexible gun or crew "malfunction." Turrets and guns never jam, turret windows don't ice up at altitude, guns never ice up due to cold or overheat after they fire long bursts, and gunners don't need to spend time changing magazines or belts when they run out of ammo. Nor do gunners suffer from frozen or numb fingers, have their goggles fog up, suffer from hypoxia or slip on piles of spent shells at their feet. * While 4.12 introduced a realistic lag time for gunners to "acquire" their target (that is, detect it, identify it as hostile, calculate a firing solution and aim prior to opening fire), I'm not sure that it's applied evenly, nor is there greater target acquisition time when attempting to shoot targets at extreme (i.e., beyond 300 meter) range. * AI skill levels for bombers are too "generic" and it's highly unrealistic for an entire bomber crew to have even Veteran level skills, much less Ace level. For example, in 1942-43, many U.S. bombardiers and navigators never got gunnery training and even graduates of gunnery school got so little effective realistic practice that they had to be retrained once they got to the combat zone. Even worse, until about 1943, many Soviet air gunners didn't get ANY realistic gunnery training! So, you might have an Average or even Veteran pilot, plus a few Average gunners, and a few Rookies (or even men who were completely unqualified and whose skills are even lower than IL2 currently models). * Gunners with restricted arcs of fire and limited ranges of motion are far too effective. For example, I find just about all the gun positions in the Ju-88 or He-111 to be useless at effectively engaging a maneuvering enemy, since they have such limited visibility and arcs of fire. And, for just about all of the gun positions in those planes to engage planes at the extremes of your arc of fire you have to move the gun in such a way that you can't aim. Realistically, any gunner lying on his belly is also going to have to contort his body to take shots at targets as the edges of his arc of fire which will further harm accuracy. Based on this, I think that any gun with much less than a 120 degree cone of fire (e.g., most tail gunners in two-seat attack aircraft) should have severe penalties to hit anything other than a non-maneuvering target, both due to the limited ability to track the target before it enters your arc of fire and the limited arc of fire itself. Despite this, I've regularly taken hits while maneuvering in a single engined fighter from the ventral and rear guns of the He-111 or Ju-88, even at extreme ranges. * If IL2 wanted to have historically realistic gunnery, Rookie level gunners (i.e., those selected for gunnery training school) would achieve a maximum of 1% hits against a slowly maneuvering target flying roughly at 90 degrees of deflection to the gunner's plane at 250-300 yards while more more less flying in parallel to the gunner's plane - similar to training conditions against target drogues towed by slow-moving target tugs attempting to simulate "combat curve" fighter attacks. Lesser deflection and less maneuvering would slightly boost hit percentages, faster movement or more maneuvering by the target would drastically reduce hits, as would engaging targets at longer ranges. Closer targets would progressively boost hits, to a maximum of about 5%. Average level gunners (i.e., graduates of a good gunnery school) would have 2% basic accuracy, Veteran 3% and Ace 5%. These represent realistic hit percentages expected for graduates of late-war USAAF, USN/USMC and RAF gunnery schools, and tests of veteran gunners. All of these levels assume some level of formal gunner training. Remember, a fair number of gunners had NO training, or such bad training as to represent no real training! Last edited by Pursuivant; 06-04-2014 at 01:56 AM.
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