Changes to Bomber Survivability Feedback and Discussion

Did they buff tailgunner accuracy or something, i am getting killed by tailgunners even when i am maneuvering far away now. I completely support a buff to bomber health, but the tailgunner accuracy being buffed too is too much

i just played a game in my B52H and i managed to tank a missile to my wing! wow! thats so overpowered!

but i also cant simply choose to ignore i was lit on fire for 7 minutes had my entire right side wings control surfaces burn off and i later crashed into the ground from losing control over a very very very slow burning down from a permanent fire.

Dont take things out of context please, as i havent seen a single instance of “bomber tanks x weapon!! so op!!” where they only count the initial impact and tend to ignore that its still a guaranteed kill

nope

thats normal if the bomber player can aim
cuz gunners are stabilized superhumans that operate in a hive mind (aka every bomber with at least some gunners can practically send an entire wall of bullets straight into your face)

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dude…
i mean i think nobody is going to say that bombers should be onetapped
but i have had bombers survive multiple 50mm hits to their main body without it even taking out anything essential to the bomber
tell me how fair and realistic that is

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Yes, it is a kill. The issue has never been the ability to “Kill” bombers, but rather than ability to do structural damage. the highest thickness for aircraft cover is 2mm of aluminium, yet a burning engine does not melt that. Note the thermal mass is very low here and the fire is oxidized by the blowing air.

The initial explosion from missile is extremely powerful, and the wing spars (depending on where they are) are from 12mm thick (wall thickness of a 50+mm width square bar) down to only 5mm or less. They were designed this way not to make sure the wings don’t snap under fire, but rather because the wings themselves produce a ton of lift, and must support all 2 engines on one wing to pull the vehicle forward.

Why should they snap upon an impact from a missile? Because they were designed with a small margin to begin with. They were designed to support the stress of lift, drag, and the pulling engines, but they’re not designed to support that after several HE rounds have exploded at the bars. Metal fatigue, cracks, all sorts of problems come in, and they lose their structural rigidity.

On the ground, the test firings ignore the forces of aerodynamics and the forces of thrust. In reality, the wings of planes sure DOES have 12mm of steel for its spars at some point, but it has it to support the massive amount of stress caused by the large wings, heavy aircraft, and the thrust of the engines. Upon firing at it, only a bit of damage will compromise the structural integrity of the spar, and it will snap due to cracks. Metal is not magic, and armor in war thunder ground is not how steel works in real life, especially under great stress.

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To further add onto the discussion, I’ll like to remind everyone that the main issue with bomber DMs right now is the skin thickness and spar strength.

The bombers currently have their skin be somewhat equivalent to 4mm-12mm of RHA, which is a massive issue (The actual wing cover material is only 0.5-2mm of Aluminium, which is equal to <1mm of RHA). As many have noticed, the 20mm HE rounds don’t do anything and must load AP to be able to pierce the skin to do damage on the inside, causing most vehicles with 20mm cannons to “literally do nothing” and their machine guns are what’s lighting up most of the fires due to AP rounds. If you are using immediate action incendiary, you’re also out of luck.

To iterate on the wings, all we need to do is to give it less armor equivalence (of course), more or less restore its reasonable hitpoints, give it more hit zones. Fires should still cause a lot of damage to the cover but not much to the spars, and there should be a separate hit zone for bombers right on each engine where the fires will spread if the engine is to be lit on fire.

The wing spars currently are modeled like tank armor, and their thicknesses are more or less correct. The issue is that the wing roots have the same thickness as the wing tips. In real life as for the B17, I believe the roots are about 12mm-15mm thick hollow square tube of around ~58mm wide? and the wingtips are also a square tube, but only around <5mm thick. This means the structural resilience of the wing square tube spars are different depending on where it is. The wingtips should be easier to shoot off than the wing root, but this is not modeled.

Additionally, simply modeling it as “RHA” or giving it similar values to tank RHA resilience would be completely unrealistic. Tank RHA is not constantly under tension, and is not under stress. The spar of planes are designed to support the lift of the wings, therefore support the weight of the aircraft, as well as the thrust of the engines. This makes it so that they are “already under stress” and some small imperfections in the structure quickly lead to cracks due to metal fatigue and how metallurgy works. Metals are a crystal structure, and a 15mm RHA sheet would be able to withstand a 20mm SAP round if it’s stationary and not under stress, but if it’s under the stress as the part of a wing spar of a bomber, the 20mm SAP round would cause that spar to shatter.

To clarify, it’s not “Penetrating” the RHA, it’s causing it to shatter and crack due to stresses in the crystal structure of the metal.

Going back to the damage model of spars in the game, as of currently HEI rounds do nothing to the spars, even on the higher calibers. It seems that the spars are modeled in such a way that it’s almost impervious and has a massive health pool. This is unrealistic. Metals crack under stress, and HEI rounds bring it over the stress limit. A 20mm HEI round that detonated very close to the wing spar should at least “yellow” the wing spar of a bomber, but certainly not cause it to instantly snap. Several hits in the same spot makes it so that more cracks form, and therefore the wings will snap off.

Again, to ensure that gaijin is actually looking into this problem, please refer to my bug report and submit sources and continue more discussions at my bug report so it’s much more organized.
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/DELo1NeAl4iz

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PV-2D camping the air field rn. Gaijin???

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RB is a mess right now but Sim it’s utterly unplayable.

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image
really bruh

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Yeah, and it’s genuinely insane that some bomber players are also asking for AI gunners to get buffed, ON TOP of the DM buff.
It’s like they want the game to literally play itself while they go and watch instagram reels or something.

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It’s a modified quote from the movie “The Shining”. Maybe you’re too young to know it, it was just for a laugh.
Anyway, even though nobody will care, I’m leaving WT for a while. The way it has become, at least for me, it’s unplayable, and I don’t intend to spend my free time on a game that worsens my mood instead of improving it. Thanks to everyone for the time we spent together.

Cheers!

well most of them do
they just want their shiny top tier plane
just to realize that they have no idea how to play the game at all
then they call the plane or game trash and go play something else or keep dying over and over as a useless teammate

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Just out of a game (Canyon Africa, Ground Strike, BR 4.3, Arcade) where a B-34 and two B-25 were circling the red runway at less than 1000 feet altitude for more than two minutes despite 3 fighters and our airfield AAA all shooting them up.

Anybody who claims that this is somehow more historically accurate is out of his goldarned mind.

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That’s exactly what they want.

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no it wasnt, field aaa arent “shooting” anyone in random modes. Only in sim and NE. In random modes there is just a zone of constant damage that applies constant amount of damage to your plane.

Normal field aa destroys bombers easilly.

not on all maps
but yea most the time its just a zone that deals area dmg to a random spot on your plane over and over

“Normal field AA” is also subject to the changes to the bomber survivability model, so it’s no longer true that it destroys low-flying bomber “easily”.

That’s not an opinion, that’s the observable fact. Low-flying bombers circling the opposing team’s airfield are now a regular feature. It simply did not happen before the bomber DM change. It also did not happen in actual war. So much for historical accuracy.

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Where did you test that to say that “normal field AA” doesn’t work against bombers?

AI spaa works perfectly against them. Actually damaging them and their modules.

Was playing with my friend and made a comment: “Yeah but that Fw-190 is being escorted by the Bv-238” and the situation was really put into perspective.

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