As you may already be aware, Gaijin has just announced that bomber survivability will be significantly increased based on historical documents and available data.
Looking at the bigger picture, this is a positive change for Simulator Battles. Most of us want the mode to provide a more realistic representation of aerial combat, and improving aircraft behavior and survivability based on historical evidence is certainly a step in that direction.
However, this change is also likely to make an already long-standing issue with bombers in Simulator Battles considerably more problematic.
For years, bomber mechanics have been a controversial topic within the Sim community, particularly because of the exploit commonly referred to as “bomber IFF” or “bomber RWR.”
For those unfamiliar with it, a player can quickly switch to the gunner view and back to the cockpit, causing the AI-controlled gunners to orient themselves toward the nearest enemy aircraft within their detection range. By doing this repeatedly, the bomber pilot can effectively determine both the direction of nearby enemies and whether an aircraft they are looking at is friendly or hostile.
In practice, this gives bomber players access to a form of situational awareness that no actual aircraft system is providing. It functions almost like an artificial RWR combined with IFF, even on aircraft that historically possessed neither capability.
With bombers now receiving a substantial survivability increase, I believe this is the appropriate time to finally address this exploit.
The proposed solution is not new — it has been suggested many times over the years:
In Simulator Battles, force bomber gunner control to use the existing first-person gunner view instead of allowing third-person aiming.
The first-person gunner option already exists in the game, so this would not require designing an entirely new mechanic. It would simply need to be enforced specifically for Simulator Battles.
Conceptually, the implementation would be as simple as:
If game mode = Simulator Battles
Force first-person gunner view = ON
This would preserve the ability of bomber players to manually operate their defensive armament while removing the unrealistic third-person situational awareness and the ability to use AI gunner movement as an improvised enemy-detection system.
If bomber survivability is going to be made more historically accurate, their defensive systems and situational-awareness limitations should ideally follow the same philosophy.