I am not sure if you have the right perspective on this topic - the ai engagement range would be still far below your engagement range with manual gunnery.
Most people are not aware of that their survival in a bomber is connected to keep chasing enemies as long as possible inside their gunner range (up to 2.5 km) but outside the effective range of their fighter opponents (0.50 cal = 1.7 km, 20mm cannons up to 1.5 km, higher calibers even >2 km).
Yes (in general) and no for reload time - i aced a lot of aircraft with gunners with lev 75 crews. The only really useful crew skill is the aced reload time of gunners (like 10 sec for 0.50 cals and the 13.2mm Akan cannon) which allows you to put constant pressure on enemies, force them to dodge (losing speed & extending your time to pepper him).
The main problems of manual gunnerey are:
Convergence of multiple turrets (best example Bv 238)
Absolutely! I’m surprised gaijin have decided to model its legendary durability accurately. Finally I can fly the Canberra as the designers intended: like a cannonball.
(All jokes aside this is a bit much)
Tldr ww2 air players arent ground players and dont like aiming, and instead want everything they look at to be lasered to death instantly upon their arrival; thus we cannot have fun gameplay.
(Wrong reply i meant to click the message above this one)
its even worse on naval with its lot of auto-aa guns - not even that planes are mostly killed on their first attack but also often all of the dropped bombs detonate mid-air
“The conditions of bomb damage and detonation while they are still on the aircraft have been adjusted. The explosion is now possible either on a direct hit of a shell with more than 80 kJ of energy: so a minimum of 23-30 mm AP shell, or on an explosion of a shell with 30 g or more of explosives in TNT equivalent right on the bomb: so a minimum of 30 mm shell. For a guaranteed detonation of a bomb a shell with at least 3 kg of explosives in TNT equivalent is needed: so a minimum of 100-122 mm HE round. But many hits of shrapnel and low-caliber projectiles are not harmless to a bomb, as they can render it unusable without exploding it, after which the bomb will get discarded.”
On the dev server, as part of the damage model overhaul coming ot heavy bombers, they have made it far harder to detonate the internal bomb bays, you specifically need quite high pen AP rounds to do it.
Now whether they need to increase it further or not, I cant comment on, but compared to live, they have made it far harder to do
It’s nice to see it being changed, though realistically, AP rounds shouldn’t be detonating bombs at all. It makes sense for HE and incendiary, but those usually detonate on the surface.
Oh, another thing. We (atleast two) bomber interception gamemode tests in the past, and they both had the same issue of ai bombers just being wiped out within a couple minutes.
Are we gonna get more test modes now that bombers aren’t just wet paper towels?
