I disagree with this somewhat. I used to think this in the past when I was very bad at gunnery in SB, but now that I’m mediocre I do find myself agreeing that some damage models are busted.
B17s do legitimately go down weirdly easily. On the flipside, B25s, Il-2/Il-4/Il-8 Ju-288s, B26s and Me264 seem to eat a lot of shells and just keep on flying. Especially the Ju-288 and B25.
Oh and PBMs. Those things seem to take a weird amount of punishment without a care in the world.
I’ve had plenty of games where I dove on a Il-4 in my C205 s1, got point blank and fired off a 2 second burst into its engine, did a lag roll and repeated some three times in a row until it finally caught on fire. Another time, counting frame-by-frame, I unloaded 6 rounds of mg151/20 into the right engine and it exploded into fire, raked the tail section with another 8 rounds and it kept on flying for a fair few minutes while burning.
Whereas I’ve intercepted a japanese B17 in my F4U-4B and lobbed a single burst (so 4x20mm) onto its wing and it went down promptly.
For fighters,
RB does make fighters tankier due to mouse aim. In SB, I’ve plenty of kills AND deaths where damage to a wing caused assymetric drag & lift which caused one wing to stall significantly earlier than the other wing and promptly enter a spin which due to the damage ruining stability might be irrecoverable. An orange wingroot or black wingtip - even without severing the wing - can become a death sentence.
Earlier today I flew out the C205 S1. It’s a plane that feels awfully stable in turns and I never depart flight with her when I’m not damaged. Well, I decided to try and shoot down a yer-2 and got all kinds of holes knocked into me. Result? When I tried fighting a Yak-9 I stalled out and spun into a tree because I didn’t realize my left wing was that badly damaged!
thats obscure to say the least. somebody probably whined about dying to that bullet in just the right way for the dev to accidentally not make it burn, id speculate it was a upset dev but that would require the devs to play the game
RB does make fighters tankier due to mouse aim. In SB, I’ve plenty of kills AND deaths where damage to a wing caused assymetric drag & lift which caused one wing to stall significantly earlier than the other wing and promptly enter a spin which due to the damage ruining stability might be irrecoverable. An orange wingroot or black wingtip - even without severing the wing - can become a death sentence.
I’ve had the same experience, but I think this can be attributed to the flight instructor making it significantly easier to fly with a damaged plane.
Some of the damage models are definitely messed up, I just think on average the mouse aim is a bigger factor. That said, when you see things like Yak-3s or premiums in general seemingly never wanting to take damage, you can’t really ignore that damage tends to be a bit lopsided.
I would partially agree but I think the answer is more nuanced on mouse aim as Adam the Engineerd had tested Mouse aim vs Sim cockpit with a stick and showed the two are more closely matched.
All these shots with a single 20mm would kill a P-47 in 1-2 shots in-game. when IRL we’ve seen how much damage they could take.
I think that it’s more of a factor of a plethora of unmodeled effects and the pilot factor that you simply cannot emulate.
Similarly, I find that the game gets flight damage wrong and how it removes lift makes no sense to what we’re currently seeing. At the same time. The flight instructor is suicidal when it comes to damaged aircraft. there’s times where I’m actually fighting the flight instructor to save a plane where when I swap to full real controls I will wind up with better chances.
They were definitely more rugged in real life, as were a lot of radial engine aircraft, but probably not by as much as you’re thinking. Most of the irl reputation is in regards to flak, fragmentation, and rifle-calibre machineguns. Cannons would still be able to kill them consistently without too much more ammunition than against normal targets.
EDIT: And some of it was probably the engine being powerful enough to pull the plane ahead and ignore some of the aerodynamic damage.
You were barely striking the tail end surfaces, elevators, flaps with a good chunk of your MGs making it look like you were doing the majority of your work with 20mm.
It was me. Before Mineshells had 20g of PETN, which is mentioned a single time in a German source.
But that value doesn’t make much sense.
British examination’s of German shells showed that Mineshells were filled with 17g PETN.
But in late 1942 or sometime in 1943, Mineshell we’re filled with HA 41 instead, which is a 4:1 mix of phlegmatized RDX and aluminum dust.
The aluminum releases additional heat which makes the round have a better incendiary effect but more importantly increased the blast performance.
Because aluminum has higher density the weight of the filler increased from 17g PETN to 18.6g HA 41.
The 20g figure was either wrong or was due pouring the explosive instead of pressing, which increase the density.
But I’m not sure that PETN can easily be poured.
The Soviets at one point replaced their separate explosive and incendiary filler with just A-IX-2.
Which like HA 41 is a mix of RDX and aluminum.
Resulting in good blast and decent brisance and incendiary effect.
My problem is that we have good documentation of cannon armed damage, from pilots reporting the damage they received to images of the aircraft and even military studies.
I trust Greg on this matter when he states that ‘he has hasn’t seen a reported loss of a P-47 from wing loss’ compared to planes like the P-51. I’m not saying it can’t happen. But I find it very unlikely.
The general metric that planes crashed was either due loss of controls, fires, or the pilot was killed. As the Optimum caliber program showed. What usually took a plane out was a specific shot that hit something extremely important, taking the aircraft out. As I’ve shown, the P-47 kept it’s wings even after directly taking a 500lb bomb directly under it. as well as reports showing the aircraft sustaining multiple 30mm cannon rounds.
Gaijin in general designed control surfaces very easy to break, and the P-47 is a big aircraft with large control surfaces
Look at your video. Use the < > keys and count your cannon rounds compared to your MG rounds in the top left compared to your MGs. You’ll be surprised by how little you fired… You struck the left wing maybe once with a 20mm, struck the right wing’s flaps, you hit right behind the cockpit which it’s seat has an armored plate and then what killed him was you cannoning his elevator. The vast majority of the sparks you’re seeing was just your 7.92 pelting him. Which plenty of aircraft can tank.
My issue is that damage to the wing is utterly minimal and for your rounds to do anything functional you have to hit within a very specific convergence.
Japanese, russian, and swedish machine guns take little effort to garner any kill because they score a boat load of damage onto the aircraft. If your idea is to change matchmaker to suit U.S. planes better then you’re going to have to pull Gaijin’s teeth on that. They really don’t want to make changes like that, especially to suit a single nation.
The issue is that unless you strike within a very specific convergence or you get lucky. Most of your shots are not hitting the engine, but instead swiping at the wings. This makes it difficult where some of your shots will get away doing jack all even though you sprayed the guy down. It’s annoying to fight La-5s only for my shots to barely do anything unless I direct nearly everything I have into a small fuel tank in hopes it alights or RNG decides to bless me.
I’m not event talking about API. But our normal incendiary round actually doing something. a plain incendiary round doesn’t even penetrate.
You can see it even spawns fragments but it’s hilariously enough being affected by the real shatter bug where the fragments spawn inside one another canceling eachother out.
My issue is that damage to the wing is utterly minimal and for your rounds to do anything functional you have to hit within a very specific convergence.
Damage to the wing should be minimal. No argument where you change that will go anywhere. I’d say the main arguments you could make, having seen everything so far, are that pure incendiary “I” rounds should penetrate more than they do, or that the other .50 cals which are overperforming should be brought down to the US .50 cal level. That won’t do anything for you against cannons, because with the way gamemodes are currently set up cannons are performing about as well as they should compared to .50 cals, with some exceptions.
Then 20mms should be nerfed as well. The damage they do is absolutely massive compared to what they should realistically be doing. Would you not agree?
Ju-288 should go down easily being late war German, probably not the best construction.
But B-25 are solid aircraft afaik, and it seems like the B-17 is just too weak. The Ilyushins had a reputation for toughness but anything German or especially Japanese shouldn’t be very durable
Some of them do more damage than they should. Generally, though, I think you somewhat overestimate the punishment a plane can take, and how quickly a 20mm will get it to that point.
