Indeed, but those same 20mm HE are more efficient against fighters. Again, I’m making the choice to specialize myself for fighter combat and thus struggle against bombers, and this is fine - but there’s a step between “struggling to damage bombers” and “being outright unable to damage bombers”. There’s a point where enough HE should have a significant effect beyond just eventually setting aflame an engine that’s going to keep working flawlessly for the next 15min anyway. I’ll stay by my point : not all planes in all configs are equal, but if a player makes a significant mistake or completely botches an attack, they should be punishable. As things stands, in many situations and against a variety of opponents, bombers can make comically gross mistakes in choosing, who, where, and how to engage something, and yet not be punishable anyway. Some aircrafts with 37mm ap shots or lots and lots of mg rounds may be able to punish them, but most simply cannot, and that’s not engaging in general…
I see both of these as tremendous positives. The latter because airfield AAA has been long complained about for how many years now by this point? I remember when it got added in 1.53 in its present ridiculous state and people immediately started camping behind it ever since.
The former is good because a large fraction of fighters have substantial multirole loadouts, especially the likes of nearly all modern jets. And before anyone claims “but you use that in Ground!” - currently there is no purpose to ever take anything BUT long-range guided ordinance. All those loads of unguided rockets/bombs are basically worthless filler there.
Problem is, when fighters have 20-50x higher shooting accuracy than in real life, giving bombers durability equivalent to real life reduces them to glass.
Therefore bombers need to be artificially much stronger as compensation or they will return to being flying target practice again like they were for the past decade.
Now should really big HE rounds hurt them? Yes, but should they leave them in pieces in the exact ratio of shots to dead bomber as reality? Probably not, unless we’re talking 50mm and above sized weapons that almost universally do not shoot quick.
and
Shows a contradiction which might be your main issue:
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A fighter player being fine with getting jumped by a bomber is not a fighter player. Lack of situational awareness and lack of speed and energy management is the only reason to get killed by a strafing bomber. I exclude here getting 3rd partied in a prolonged dogfight, but even that is debatable as your attacks should always consider the TTK (time-to-kill) whilst knowing or at least anticipating who can join.
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Specializing for fighter vs fighter combat is not an excuse to struggle vs bombers as the same skillset is needed - the main difference is just that attack patterns vs bombers became more demanding as scoring a few hits like in the past Is not sufficient anymore.
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There is no need to attack or kill bombers as you can play around them.
Besides that:
As long as you play turnfighters you won’t improve in fighter vs fighter combat as playing them is the definition of low skill game play. Using energy fighters or BnZ aircraft requires way more skill as the assessment of energy states is way more demanding.
If you play planes optimized for turnfighting and need HE to shorten your TTK you can’t complain that HE is not working vs bombers despite you know that you need AP to score pilot snipes to kill a bomber.
Oh boy, how did we get from the lack of punishability of gross bombers misplays to my liking turnfighters being low skill and needing to change ?
Thank you for the advice, but I don’t want to be a top fighter player or something. I’m not gonna choose what I play based on if it’s high skill or not. I just want to have fun. Boom and zoom isn’t as fun for me, nor do I enjoy how dedicated energy fighters usually handle. I play the slow, light ones because they’re fun, low skill or not. There’s nothing more to it…
I believe I mentioned that before, but no, before the update wasn’t good either indeed, they needed more durability to be remotely interesting to play. I’m not asking to snap a bomber in two in two shells. What I’m asking is for the ability to punish a misplay with meaningful damage, and eventually have a shot at a kill. Right now with 20mm HE belt you might aswell not shoot at bombers at all. You could plant every single round in the bomber and still it would have a good chance of flying away unbothered. Just being able to accumulate damage in a couple passes and/or few dozen hits would be enough. Why does it have to be an all or nothing ?
You deadass did not read the 50kg at 12.5 meters at surface level. At the service ceiling a B-17 flies at, an explosive like that becomes around 3 times less powerful due to multiple factors.
That’s why a Nike Ajax did not vaporize the bomber in testing. It only snapped the outer wing and deformed the fuselage.
You did - by acknowledging that you use HE as appropriate tool vs fighters despite you are aware of using AP is necessary vs bombers - whilst you also stated that you want to “specialize” vs fighters by using specialized aircraft optimized for this role.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s a free world and everybody can play what he wants and how they want. But if you post such comments it looks like that you are trapped in certain views without seeing that some of them contradict each other.
This is a classic example of you imho flat wrong thinking about bombers. There is no such thing as “misplay” by a bomber - the average bomber simply can’t engage or disengage at will due to their performance disadvantage regarding speed and climb.
So when there is a misplay it is always by the fighter as he has the advantage to determine when fight happen and in which conditions / tactical positions.
Again - if you lack required ammo belts and/or experience or patience to set up a perfect attack: Nobody forces you to pick up fights with a bomber. You can either play around them - or simply leave. And attacking the last guy in a bomber is no mission objective: So even if you have the required tools to kill a bomber with minimal risk - it is often way smarter to play around them if you can control the result of the match.
In order to show you an example (as you referred previously to a B-17 trying to cosplay as fighter) you can check this replay (link).
A B-17 played for 14 minutes 1 vs 3 trying to play gunship mode - and had zero chance to get anything done due to his lack of speed. Yes, i could have attacked him from 12 o’ clock high going for a pilot snipe with 3,400 API-T rounds - but my result would have been a mission score of max 1,000 points, somewhere in the middle of the scoreboard - instead i ended up at #1 of my team scoring 10k RP on my way to get 710k RP to unlock the ace qualification for this aircraft.
The majority of RP comes from game time, that’s why you should be happy about every bomber trying to play fighter.
Edit:
Had a similar match - Me 264 (which is way faster than a B-17) tried his luck too. No chance to get even remotely in gun range - 25 minute match, easy and relaxing (replay link).
I now see on a regular basis a bunch of bombers simply diving to the opponent team’s airfield and just circling there bombing while the airfield AA and several fighter planes pump them full of bullets for minutes.
Don’t tell me that’s in any way “historically accurate” or desirable.
The very idea of bombers flying low into the combat zone, let alone above an AA-defended airfield, is absolute nonsense.
lol, I love it, but some of them are a bit absurd. Mainly the light bombers, like Tu-2, which can just roam the battlefield shrugging off hits in GRB. No doubt they’ll tone it back a bit soon.
Wait, so the counter argument of bombers can easily and with little to no effort ruin games, is highly skilled fighter groups can do the same thing…
What kind of argument is that.
There is no counter argument - just read it again:
It is a comparison.
By changing the wording from “group of competent players in powerful bombers” to “bombers can easily and with little to no effort” vs “highly skilled fighter groups” you change the content of the initial post and my answer in order to create a counter argument.
Your remark is not dealing with both claims.
Flak wouldn’t exactly airburst like a VT round, but yes, it needs tweaking. The primary issue is that there aren’t enough modules for the flak to destroy, which also explains why fighters don’t take a whole lot of damage.
My primary issue here is bomber structural integrity. They don’t fall apart like people like to believe.
This argument perfectly embodies the “but this one is blue” meme.
Saying “Bombers don’t fall apart how people like to believe” isn’t the same as saying “Bombers don’t fall apart.” Yes, Bombers can fall apart, but the average fighter player seems to have it in their brain that they should split every bomber in half with a single pass of 20mm guns.
Even if we take the most generous number of German flak kills (~2800), it only accounts for 9% of the US heavy bomber fleet (~31,000).
With quite literally 5 seconds of searching I gave you 4x separate examples of just B-24’s falling apart…
In this game bombers can tank 5+ Aim-54 phoenix “hits” (try it in test flight). I did this yesterday and had to reload a full load of 6x missiles 3x times before I could get a single kill from a group of three B-29’s…its absurd, in reality a single ~130lb warhead screaming in at ~Mach 3 would simply delete a B-29/Tu-4.
Just stop pretending that the current bomber DM’s are in any way remotely close to realistic, they are not.
Your cute little patronizing blue circle represents the brainlets proclaiming that “this one time a B-17 survived being rammed”… not people like me calling out the blatant nonsense we actually have in game.
Photographs trump memes…
Edit:
Have a few B-17’s coming apart:
In ground battles, I see people bringing B-17s to 9.0. That should be absolutely ridiculous and do nothing, but those things just don’t die. 5 stingers later, I take a 1000lb bomb.
These bombers are just absurd
funny enough the best counter to bombers, are rocket spam.
you know that thing the US and other countries tried in the 1950s and realized it was a very stupid idea, because it actually rarely worked.
kinda weird that.
You don’t get it dewd it just makes sense that a bomber should be able to tank hundreds of HE rounds and/or multiple missile hits!!
Army Air Forces in World War II
And I gave you actual loss numbers. Flak was deadly, but it didn’t down that many bombers compared to how many were flying over Europe. It was far more lethal to lighter bombers than to the B-24 and B-17.
War Thunder does not simulate degradation on any airframe. Fighter aircraft in this same way are equally unrealistic; however, it should be noted that in testing, a Nike Ajax only blew off the wing of a B-17 at point-blank range while crumpling the fuselage. It did not fall apart as it did before this update.
They are not perfect, but significantly more so than they were before.
Don’t attack the messenger. I didn’t make you say what you did the way you did. I told you a historically documented fact, and you really did answer with “But here’s a handful of images that prove my point”.
Official government page on US European theatre bomber losses trumps Photographs used for confirmation bias.
Sharing these images means little because I never made the claim it didn’t happen. I made the claim it was rare, which it was.
I love this game and what they’ve done with the bombers. I feel they are too weak in the current meta, though, and need more survivability.
One minute of a game BR 3.3
You want confirmation bias?
For every bomber that made a heroic return to base with catastrophic damage there are another 15+ lying scattered across the European countryside that did not.
Now bear in mind not every instance will have been caught on film and that there simply wont be a comparable photographic record of RAF bombers coming apart because they generally flew at night. The fact I was able to produce a photographic record of so many separate instances with virtually no effort proves it isn’t the rare occurrence you want to believe.
I’m sorry, it ONLY blew the wing off at point blank?
The fact is we’re lucky if we can scratch the paint with direct hits with much larger warheads than any of the AA shells fielded in WWII. The Ajax test you referenced proves my point
