Even without more detailed damage model, the damage system is simply completely busted.
It recently came to my attention that large caliber AP rounds can one tap bombers from the rounds simply passing through the fuselage or wings.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, wing spars can easily be destroyed by 20mm AP or APDS rounds passing through, causing you to lose a wing from a 1-3 hits.
It’s probably the result of Gaijin increasing structure damage from AP rounds, or weakening structures when they implemented real shatter.
I mean stabilizers turn black after a single 12.7mm bullet hits them, two of its a large bomber.
You can now have your wings or tails easily shot off from 7.7mm MGs.
Maybe that’s something that should happen in Arcade mode but it makes no sense in Realistic or Sim.
Incendiary rounds of all calibers are completely useless, especially larger calibers.
Meanwhile are explosive rounds massively overperforming, while their fragmentation damage is really a joke.
Too few fragments, while those fragments then deal massive structural damage.
To the point where a German 75mm APHE with the same filler as a 20mm Mineshell will rip a wing or tail when it explodes 1m away from it.
There’s also no distinction of aircraft material.
Wooden structure or fabric covers should be much more vulnerable to explosive shells or incendiary shells with blast effect.
Well each gunner would calculate its own shot trajectory to ensure a hit, so that all could fire together as they currently do, but the actual trajectories of each gunner would end up a bit different. It’s pretty much an exact copy of the new naval aim system, just slapped on bombers.
accurate damage models are only fair. Ignore the crying that happened over abrams and leopard (despite T64 tanks getting autoloaders modelled ages ago)
All aircraft need new and improved damage models. with the models we have being 10+ years old at this point. All aircraft would benefit from increased fidelity in the damage models, but bombers, especially the heavy bombers more than any other. The fact that such huge parts of the airframe are considered a single part causes major issues
While I agree, keep in mind that bombers getting completely blown away by fighters is actually realistic… I remember seeing a video where they explained this, they showed videos of the RAF testing fighter cannons on a bomber and it was getting blown up by them.
Cannons with explosive bullets were actually devastating for the aircraft’s structure, which explains why bombers formations were so vulnerable to fighters intercepting them
Germans estimated it took on average 20 20mm Mineshells to down a 4-engined bomber and 5 30mm Mineshells.
And bringing a bomber down doesn’t mean it will fall out of the sky immediatly but that it simply will not be able to make some hour long trip back, due to the damage received.
20mm Mineshells have much higher blast damage than regular 20mm shells, so the structual damage would be in favor of Mineshells.
Blast damage scales expontantially but they lack any real fragmentation compared to normal explosive rounds.
So if we assume it takes 25-30 20mm Hispano HEFI shells or 40 ShVAK shells, that number would be substantially higher than what bombers can survive in the game.
Germany wanted 50-55mm cannons and rockets that could destroy a bomber in a single hit while in War Thunder a 37mm is enough to destroy a bombers wing or tail in a single shot, with substantially higher RoF than a much larger and heavier cannon could achive.
A 37mm hit into or near a fuel tank could be lethal but in WT that isn’t necesary. Even AP rounds will simply break a large bombers wing with repeated hits, which doesn’t make sense.
For one thing, neither do Arcade gunner do anything. It might’ve been better to let some civilians take over the bomber and let them be gunners. One thing though: If the fighter DOES get hit, the chances that the fighter gets down are much higher in RB, because even a little leak in fuel/water would cause them to not be able to accelerate as much, letting you get away.
Yes but stronger bombers would give more sl if you killed them like if you had to face a do 17 at like 1.7 it would be a super hard target to knock out so it should give 3x rp this could be decided by gun caliber and amount of guns but like if a me 262 encounters a b17 it should give normal rp because it was an easy kill with 4 mk108
All planes should have more detailed damage models. They could model internals and the aircraft structure with a lot more detail. With current damage models plane fuselages are modeled as three or four large pieces and each piece has a single durability value. In larger planes each piece is almost as large as an entire prop fighter, so we have things like tails detaching in a single cannon burst.
Not a fan of the idea of buffing gunners, though. They’re already deadly enough in sim.
I recommend to look for posts by this guy: @DerGrafVonZahl .
Even admitting that he comes often along as smart ass (and sees Sim pilots as pinnacle of human evolution) he posted a lot of rather good (to very good) analysis of why and when certain things were implemented.
One of the best examples for how durable bombers SHOULD be is the British Avro Shackleton (Rank IV BR 6.0). It can generally take a number of high-caliber hits before really falling apart.