Im sorry but having a gunner that is 75 expert lvl crew and its not shooting at enemy that is 500m and less behind be is just pure BS. Back gunners need buff, but not to the point that that will be deadly as airfield AAA
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Bombers just exist as RP and SL pinatas with no value in the game.
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they used to have one tho
once apon a time bombers could win the match quickly, and their gunners would shred anyone that got too close
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How many years ago is that, 10? The issue with bombers ending games quickly is, as always, just bad game design and not a problem with the bombers itself… but even a decade later they have not though of anything but random bases spawning in the middle of nowhere, even though Sim actually has had some modular airfields for the longest time.
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not that long ago 3 years max
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It’s actually 4 years - we had issues with way too low BRs of stuff like Me 264s at BR 3.7 and long before with B-29s/Tu-4s just kill the enmemy airfield in one pass. That’s why we had the 4 bomber limits.
The introduction of the F-4E in March 2020 made it even worse due to the insane payload.
With the Starfighter update in May 2020 respawning bases were introduced - killing the only possible win condition for bombers (airfield kill) effectively.
Imho it makes no sense to open the next thread regarding ai gunners, i counted 4 in the last months - always repeating the same stuff.
You might want to check this thread, i added 2 links from identical discussions within my response:
I kind of prefer the AI gunners being where they are, but I think in turn bombers should probably be a bit more resilient. There is actual war footage of B-17’s taking a dozen Mk 103 shots to the wings and fuselage before going down, but the same plane in war thunder will die to 3 rounds from a 15mm cannon.
4 Likes
I’m a bomber main and over the years of playing, from closed beta to now I think the machine gunners are fine. Ultimately your suppose to ay the game not just have Ai do all the work. At those ranges the player should be controlling them and the player fighter should be vsing a player bomber not its Ai.
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Imho you refer to the famous 110 attacking B-17 guncam vid. It were actually 20mm mine shells - at least that’s what you read in hundreds of posts in the web.
Although i agree in general (despite wt and irl are 2 separate worlds) going this path is imho off topic.
I read a very nice thread dealing with some of the stuff still affecting the current bomber damage model - you might take a look:
I think it should be looked at more of a “fighters only have to deal with guns that shoot forward and fly at the same time, whereas bombers have to deal with guns that don’t shoot forward while flying at the same time.” From that perspective, the AI gunners should most definitely be sufficient to kill a plane within 0.8km (and definitely within 0.6km), but perhaps not beyond that.
The problem is that you cannot make any assessment from a sample size of 1. It might just have been an outlier.
The only actual study on aircraft durability available only conducted tests on the P-47 and B-25. And they only really assessed the probability of a kill of single hits.
Yes they make statements on multiple hits, but those are calculated as if the target got magically repaired if it survived a hit.
Even under these conditions the average number of 20mm HEI(US) hits a b-25 could take was about 12.
And again this is under the condition the plane gets repaired after each hit. So cumulative damage is not taken into account.
Regarding the footage, due to the nature of the distribution of the number of hits until the plane goes down, all outliers are of the nature that the plane takes more hits than it should. So outliers of bombers taking way more hits shouldn’t be rare either, explaining the footage. Maybe i will create a graph to show this and post it.
If you just look at the hits themselves, and look at and order them you would see that most the bombers will die on the first hit, second place would be the second hit third would be the third hit and so on.
So the distribution has a long tail. Again explaining the outliers.
The study can be found here:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA800394
So compared to the research the video footage is misleading
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How insistent you are with the infamous AI gunnery! Don’t you see that it’s impossible to integrate it into a competitive environment among human players? Who really wants a mere computation to determine whether you win or lose a fight instead of the valuable difference in skill? Why the hell am I playing PvP if I don’t crave participating in such a challenge?
If you want gunners to be truly meaningful, urge developers to enhance manual gunnery: the only acceptable form of aerial combat.
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If you want gunners to be truly meaningful, urge developers to enhance manual gunnery: the only acceptable form of aerial combat.
It would be better if you could controll your plane at the same time, but when you decide to turn your plane with keys while you are in gunner position, your plane just get back into position that it was before. So either you can fly and dodge the plane or turn into gunner view and have 0 controll over your plane.
My approach to the subject is “like many things that exist in War Thunder, it happened once therefore we can do this thing in the name of gameplay and satisfy the ‘realism’ part of the game to some degree”.
The alternative is that bombers just continue to be a mega-meme with no home in the game except a few clown machines like the F-111 and Pe-8 where you press spacebar to randomly get 0-19 kills and then ride off cackling like a deranged ‘Bond’ villain.
Exactly, that’s one of the implementations I desire the most. Currently, to control the aircraft while firing, you need to switch it to realistic control mode, which is quite inconvenient or most ignore it.
Imagine how much would it improve if more bombers showcased evasive maneuvers, or even initiated turn-based fights (with the advantage of having flexible gunnery), instead of remaining still like piñatas, passively awaiting death.
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Plus would be nice if the gunner when you are not operation them would work like they do on AI bots that fly around, those fucks can open fire at you from like 700m and can pretta easily shread you or even damage you pretty well.
Although i share your general view on this topic - there is slight mistake in your first paragraph - there is no need to use realistic controls, simplified flight controls (SFC) are enough.
I fly for years exclusively with a HOTAS in Air RB - just with SFC (realistic makes imho no sense/overkill), instructor off and use a mouse for turrets. No problem to dodge incoming fire and shooting back at the same time.
Thats a terrible idea.
It only needs to happen once?
So you consider a game realistic?
Vesna Vulivic survived a fall from a plane, 33,000 feet (10.16km).
So since there is a single instance a game.is considered realistic if humans in it survive falls from 10 kilometers altitude?
This is bonkers. There is a reason single instances are meaningless in any research.
I do not consider War Thunder to be realistic, no. You can’t shoot a 1940’s pickup truck in the engine with a 152mm howitzer and then repair it in combat conditions with no logistical support in 40 seconds.