It doesn’t.
The Sparrow uses a proximity fuse.
My Grammarly is doing silly corrections. The point is, the missile shatters the propellers, which causes a huge loss of lift, resulting in the plane going down.
I have no issue with this damage being modelled within War Thunder, just make no mistake that the B-17’s wing and fuselage withstood the explosion.
You can also visibly see that the plane is intact after the explosion for a few frames afterwards. Just don’t forget that intact doesn’t mean flight-worthy. This B-17 lost its right propellors, which is a slow but guaranteed kill. This is how bombers should be.
https://youtu.be/LLm294W9h6M?si=nVMu3uazBo9kwKvP Meanwhile, between 1:44 and 1:50, wings receives 4-5 hits, and we can visually see that the bullets did not affect winga; at least there is no visual evidence of structural integrity being compromised.
Please also watch the part from 2:35 onwards.
This is not how it is in the game. It is nowhere even close.
Furthermore the footage does show that damage from a proximity/fragmentation warhead detonation is not negligible like you erroneously claimed earlier based on LLM-generated citation.
It is same with all of the bomber players in this thread; completely incapable of making their own arguments and resulting purely to asking Grok to do it for them. But you guys aren’t even good at that either; hence you don’t think the US ever used B-29s for target drones.
There were B-29s converted to target drones; they were designated QB-29. The same thing was done to B-17s as well.
R-40 proxy is 13 meters
This does not change the fact that the missile is incorrectly pre-detonating before reaching the point of least distance to the target
according to gaijin proximity fuses in the game are programmed to only go off when they detect the target within their radius is getting further away from the weapon, and only then should the warhead be triggered
it’s so obvious that the QB-29 was a thing because the USSR operated the Tu-4 themselves
Propellers do not shatter in WarThunder from nearby blasts like these, as far as I’m aware, so you are correct in that regard.
I do not believe I ever called the damage negligible.
Also, what exactly do you mean by LLM citation? There are plenty of safety calculators where you can input various factors to get the results you need. We’re living in the 21st century; we can precalculate things for a ballpark estimate.
Ah, you’re accusing me of putting a prompt into an AI for a quick answer. You’re also accusing me of making the claim that the B-29 was never used, which I never stated.
The Damage to Thick Steel Plates by Local Contact Explosions
Field Blast Tests and Finite Element Analysis of A36 Steel Sheets Subjected to High Explosives
Blast Radius Calculator | Overpressure Distance from TNT
3 Blast loading | Blast effects on buildings | Books Gateway | Emerald Publishing
B-29 Superfortress - Osprey
Here are a few sources I have been using.
Please do not accuse me of using AI to make things up. If and when I do use it, it is only to quickly gather sources, as Chrome, Bing, and other search engines are horrificly shitty at finding them in bulk. I take the sources they find, sift through them, and do my own research on the information while checking citations. I do not use the AI to give me direct answers; it is merely an additional search tool, no different than a browser in function.
What is the source of this information you’re referring to? Is it some kind of devblog or in-game files, perhaps?
After digging into some QB-29 statements and sources I could find, there doesn’t seem to be an exact figure for how many were made, let alone how many were shot down, especially by air-to-air missiles. Maybe I’m missing it, but I can’t find any information from skimming Frederick A. Johnsen’s Q-birds or Christopher R. Van Valkenburgh’s Superfortress Graveyard.
You did.
This is exactly what you are doing.
You are queuing AI for the studies and then having AI cherry-pick information to piece together a poorly constructed argument. For instance the first 2 sources you are using are talking about steel plates and steel sheets…something the B-29 is not made out of. All 4 of your sources on blast damage have nothing to do with aircraft.
My guess is you didn’t even skim them yourself. You almost definitely had AI just give you an answer and then copy-pasted it’s list of sources.
Mom i’m on tv
I didn’t say negligible, as losing half your surfaces is not negligible and likely results in gradual death if you don’t head for base quick enough. I’m also explicitly talking about War Thunder in this context. A real plane would have far more issues, undeniably, thanks to the small components scattered throughout it, though total structural integrity failure is not one of them, as you can see from the Sparrow footage. In War Thunder, you would lose your surfaces and some gunners, but your engines and pilots would be fine.
Can you point out what is incorrect here?
I can’t remember exactly where I saw it but it was on this forum somewhere from a dev or smin relaying info from devs
Then you need to show it so it’s easy to find if it’s somewhere around here.
This one guy is saying itll probably go down from difficulty to control, not cause its gonna fall apart, dont twist my words for your gain.
I couldn’t find it exactly but I have found a source indicating that for SAMs and A2A missiles the optimal proximity fuse for a missile is one that basically does more or less what I described
This document below has it, when I’m not tired from being awake for 42 hours I’ll see if I can find a link to it
Office of Scientific Research and Development. National Defense Research Committee. Summary, Photoelectric Fuzes and Miscellaneous Projects. vol. 3 of Summary Technical Report of Division 4 [Ordnance Accessories] NDRC. (Washington DC: 1946): 2-3. [declassified 27 Oct. 1960]
They could just re-enable the ability to destroy nukes and this wouldn’t be a problem lol
Thanks for doing those tests!
They really need to add some modifiers for specific weapons, so large anti-bomber guns and both rockets and missiles deal a lot more damage to bombers.
I still have a feeling that the Phoenixes proxy fuze triggers too early, but that’s an additional issue on-top of the lack of damage then lol
I definitely agree with that.
The damage model for planes needs an overhaul, but as I’ve mentioned before, until such an overhaul happens, bombers need a simpler durability fix.
Certain other planes deserve such a fix as well, but that needs to be done on a case by case basis, not as a general buff for every plane.
Spoiler
With such durability buffs, we are going to need some SPAA buffs as well though

