The only bombers that are tough to shoot down, if you don’t know what you are doing, are the BV-238, TU-4 and Be-6 and one or two others that I fail to remember the names of and all those are relatively rare. And these bombers are only hard because of their defensive armament. If people would use their brains and shoot the wings instead of the body of the bomber they’d discover that bombers are flying free kills.
If you don’t know how to shoot down a flying brick then maybe you should avoid them. Bombers are the most vulnerable planes in the game. Any fighter is more dangerous. The B-17 is fragile for a bomber. The B18s are tough but any pilot in a fighter can knock them out of the air with out taking damage if that pilot has any level of skills. BTD isn’t a problem nor is the TU-2 nor the B7A2. They are probably tough for you to knock down because you keep attacking them the same way. Try using a different method of attack.
Edit: The only flying tanks in game are the IL series. IL-2s in specific
A correct flown B-18B is one of the most annoying targets in Air RB. The only real threats for it are I-225s and P-47 D-28/30 - as those guys can outclimb a B-18B and attack with the necessary excess speed.
Basically all others are way too slow at altitudes above 7.500 meters. Without the nerf of gun damage of the 13.2 mm and the introduction of ridiculously high shot dispersion at the end of 2022 the plane is rather a 4.3 plane. It outruns all 109s with gun pods and can can fire at them at 2.5 km or more and force them to dodge and they have no realistic chance to get in gun range of their 20 mms.
Same with B7A2 - a good pilot can maintain his alt advantage very long - and it outturns almost all single engine fighters.
Regarding the topic:
There is zero need to bash on bomber pilots when fighters camp the enemy airfield (like in the provided replay) - real smart fighter pilots stay above 7 km and turn their engine off - this avoids spotting from below (upward spotting ~ 6 km) and avoids a contrail.
But smart fighter pilots are as rare as smart bomber pilots…
So as long as enemy fighters think it is a good idea to camp the airfield within spotting range - the simply create the problem and come then to the forum to complain about it.
All they have to do is to extend far enough and thereby allowing the enemy to start a bombing run. As soon as the distance to the enemy airfield is large enough, the bomber can be intercepted without any risk - but this requires 2 things: Brain and patience.
I met you a few days ago above Malta - and you got damaged by a Me 264 (and died later due to this damage). U managed to drop and i got the other B-17 (he was in bombardier view) because this guy simply just looked not forward - real smart pilots without airspawn planes reverse climb on this map as the distance from bomber spawn to drop on enemy bases is too short - it allows no frontal attack on co-alt.
You were skilled enough to dodge my fire, but most B-17 pilots are unable to use the main strengths of the plane - comparably high speed above 7 km and insane gunner range (~2.5 km)…
G8N1? In all of my years of playing this game, I’ve only seen a few actually good bomber pilots which is sad but also not surprising. Also planes like the B7A2 can be incredibly dangerous since they come with an air spawn and offensive armament. I have like a 40+ KD in the B7A2 (Homare 23) because it’s that ridiculous if you know what you’re doing.
It’s not hard for bombers to give some sort of the fight but the average bomber pilot is so bad that all they know is pressing spacebar and wanting AI gunners to do all the gunshipping for them.
That’s pretty good, but the low number of battles (9) means that it can easily fluctuate. 100 battles and a 40+ K/D would be really good.
B7A2 and SB2C are basically fighters with an air spawn too.
Sure bombers can be good. But if people didn’t just do a brainless head on with everything that out guns them they might be able to do more than get shot down. I see people play chicken with wyvern after wyvern…They lose 90% of the time because that things 20s shred everything. Is the B7A2 a single engine bomber?
___We need AAA it is part of fairplay in this game.
Over a years this mechanic works in way “AAA catched you — then you can not collect the bones” it’s fair.
Any last player can choose continue battle or leave it by fixing machinery and pressing J after that.
Peeple that whants disasble anti air are simply looks for “meat”, covers a fact that being last on map they will not be funny in try to save expensive machinery.
After the economy changed, much players can play high BR and not fall to minus, appreciate.
We all already agree with AAA if it changes, players will feel difference, which cause in bad game expirience. Just stop change game mechanics. Live with this is much more simple than relearn.
Instead of removing the AA, nerf them. Bombers are already SEVERELY trashy in air-rb already, and as a player who just plays B-17s for fun, its an absolute pain for me to have a squad that destroys all of the bases before they regenerate, and then all three of us gets red and pilots died 5 seconds after approaching the airfield at like 6000 meters in altitude. You could either add flak that actually shoots rounds instead of magically sniping you 7km away, or actually add AI to the random fighters/bombers/strike aircrafts flying around the map and somehow make this CAP.
Now there are SA2, MIM23, SA10, MIM104 files in the game. Although SA10 and MIM104 are too powerful for current game maps. But when can we expect to see SA2 and MIM23 deployed to secure airfield?
SA-2/S-75 really doesn’t make sense as aifield defense as it’s minimum launch range is 6-7km and most models couldn’t engage anything below 3000m. SA-3/S-125 would be the appropriate counterpart for MIM-23 for airfields and we already have the naval version of it as Bravy’s Volna-M missile so only ground AI model needs to be added.
You get to choose the fuel load, and when you do you make a compromise between longevity and performance. If you chose to take a low fuel load to be competitive, then you should have to take the risk of having to make yourself vulnerable when refuelling. This would make taking higher fuel loads actually a viable strategy.
You also are in control of your trigger discipline, and you are in control of whether you get damaged or not. If you run out of ammo or have to repair, that is probably because to some degree you did not play ideally early on. Its fair that you should have to face some sort of consequence.