Dear Gaijin team,
Every patch polishes flight models, weapon physics and damage effects, yet heavy bombers still fall apart after a handful of cannon shells. The gap between in-game fragility and real-world resilience is especially clear when you compare data.
Luftwaffe post-mission analyses concluded that a B-17 usually needed about twenty 20 mm hits from the rear to go down, and even the deadly head-on pass still averaged four to five shells before a kill . In War Thunder a wing or entire tailplane frequently tears away after two or three HE-I rounds. Self-sealing tanks, duplicate spars and armour plating simply do not matter if the mesh fractures on the first burst.
Defensive guns make matters worse. Fully trained AI gunners wait until roughly 200–300 m to open fire, despite 1944 USAAF / USN manuals instructing crews to start spraying at 600 yards (≈ 550 m) so fighters flinch long before they are lethal . Short bursts and wide spread mean attackers can settle on a bomber’s six, clip its elevators and leave unharmed. New pilots grind their first Wellington or He 111, explode in seconds, then abandon the line—hurting match variety and queue health.
Gaijin often notes that a blanket buff could turn a few “bomber gods” into flying CIWS units. True: a handful of Ju 288 or Mosquito aces already spin-roll at 3–4 g and laser-beam fighters that misjudge approach angles. But the answer is not to keep every bomber paper-thin. It is to separate survivability from high-G accuracy:
Increase structural HP so wings and tails survive five to ten 20 mm impacts (or kinetic equivalent) before catastrophic failure.
Raise AI and third-person engagement range to 400–500 m, pushing toward ~600 m with full crew skills.
Tie defensive-gun accuracy and burst length to instantaneous G-load; over ~2 g the cone should widen sharply, reflecting real-life difficulty of sighting under heavy manoeuvre.
One more factor tilts today’s balance: mouse aim. A modern desk mouse plus instructor smoothing delivers a level of gunnery precision no WWII ace ever dreamed of. Even joystick users admit that mouse pilots “snipe from a kilometre with effortless accuracy” , and community posts joke that War Thunder pilots “get 75 % hit-rates because we have mouse aim” . If fighters enjoy such artificially high hit probability, bombers deserve a matching bump in structural tolerance just to stay on the board long enough to reach their targets.
A moderate durability buff, combined with G-linked dispersion, will not resurrect the era of “invincible flying fortresses.” It will simply let average crews survive the first head-on, drop ordnance, and try to limp home—while still letting elite pilots show off by threading turrets through a tight lead.
Please consider:
• Re-auditing bomber wing and tail break-points to align with historical damage studies.
• Extending defensive gun engagement to historically documented distances.
• Applying a steep accuracy penalty under high G-load to curb the handful of acrobatic turret aces.
• Balancing the increased fighter lethality granted by mouse aim with a commensurate bomber durability boost.
Bombers are supposed to be lumbering, tough mission carriers, not disposable score balloons. Giving them realistic staying power—while tempering turret performance during violent manoeuvres—would restore the strategic layer that first drew many of us to War Thunder’s combined-arms vision.
Thank you for your time and for continually refining the game we love.