Tailgunners don't like to fire

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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89

Well, I’m not exclusively just playing air RB to grind. The parts of the gameplay I want are just locked behind grind or not possible.

I don’t really like prop gameplay but I enjoyed some of the turboprops, they’re usually just unfun because they’re comically overpowered and I just don’t really enjoy that.

I want to play flying fortress gameplay, I would enjoy flying around “airfield AA” sometimes I wish that modern planes would include some designs like stuffing a CIWS into a large plane.

That’s just a way I’d want to play. It’s more fun and appealing to me than the traditional prop climb fest and energy state gameplay which is ruined by certain planes just having outright superior characteristics.

I have really easily noticed that Air is an insanely easy grind, I really don’t like how ground and helicopter are ridiculously slow by comparison.

It’s not like I’m turning up and ruining the fun for the air players, I’m a competent air player, but I can’t really enjoy it when the top gameplay skill is picking a good nation, then a good plane. Ground just doesn’t have an equivalent to, say, a plane which just outrates everyone it can fight but doesn’t really have any downsides.

To be honest I don’t really care how futile something is, I’m not writing here for a pragmatic or cynical reason.

Nothing would change for the better if nobody complains, the more people complain, the feedback is visible and developers can choose to ignore it or take it on board.

Bomber turrets should be better because right now they can only reliably destroy those who can’t aim at basic ranges?

It does seem that way. I want to like Air Sim, but it really seems you need a VR headset and HOTAS in order to be in any way basically competitive. Maybe if I’m suddenly rich.

90

You don’t.

There are certain Advantages but also disadvantages.

I started WT in 2013, with just ajoystick. With that Equipment i joined “Aviators of War” which was WT roleplay campaign with really good sim pilots. I was competetive there. I bought a TrackIR in 2016 iirc.

Track IR is better than VR, but not as immersive. Spotting with VR is tricky compared to TrackIR.

TrackIR was helpful i am not gonna lie but with the right setup you can use the joysticks coolie hat to similar effect but track ir will be more effective. But you need some time to get into the WT control setups since the default ones are terrible.

Hotas+pedals is really only useful for top tier. Because you need all those buttons. Pedals are somewhat worse than a joystick with a wrist turn axis. Because most people are more accurate with their hands than their feet. So a hotas doesn’t really give you an advantage. The one undeniable advantage is TrackIR…

That aside, of you tried sim you know you can’t take the same shots that you would take in AB and RB, it’s just not feaseble. So i hope you understand that giving bombers the same 1.5km deathray gunners caused a massive revolt… Which in the end won. Even though all participants were banned.

91

There has been a slew of things done that have rendered most bombers worthless to play in the game.

This nerf was one of the first few, including turning the damage models into cardboard. Both nerfs need to be undone, though in regard to the AI gunner ability a full reversion wouldn’t be ideal. I’m very confident a happy medium can be accomplished here, but Gaijin has simply written off bombers as to forevermore be nothing but fodder to the fighter jocks.

That’s why I recommend that nobody should waste their time bothering with bombers. There’s simply no ROI on them. Period.

2 Likes
92

Agreed.

Agreed with a few exceptions - as soon as tactial prop bombers have some air-to-air capabilities the can make the difference, at least around BR 4.0.

And i am not talking about those very few guys with insane gunner skills like Hitman or KomaZZ - a good flown B/T-18B, Brigand, SB2C or B7A2 are a pain to fight if the pilot knows what he is doing.

1 Like
93

No, it can’t be this simple. Since DMs and mechanics are shared a simple solution will not work.

Also bomber DMs are not too weak, it is mouse aim allowing to much accuracy resulting in higher effective damage.

In terms of rounds boombers are able to soak up they seemly to be roughly compliant with US research.

Just undoing the “nerfs” will just result in another revolt. Bombers are still OP in SB and buffing them will create another tense Situation. The sim Community has already shown that they are ready and willing to take action… So that’s not the solution.

Ab better solution is,

1.unbind the SB ai gunners from the RB Ai gunners then increase AI gunner effectiveness in RB and only RB,

2.remove mouse aim from SB gunner view.

The DM is sadly global, making it gamemode adjustable would be a step that needs to be taken first.

DMs are not gamemode specific, so adjusting them always has to take every mode in mind.

As said before SB was the catalyst, SB needs to work for any solution to be possible in RB. Since for gaijin and in terms of programming they are sadly linked.

Your fix will not work because of this.

94

I will admit outright that SB’s woes are of no concern of mine as I do not play SB. However, the unfair ruining of bombers is very much due to SB.

I understand your position, but on a fundamental level I disagree that bombers should stay near-completely unplayable just because they are hard to contend with in a game mode type that most of the playerbase simply does not bother with.

Bombers deserve a place in this game that doesn’t revolve around them being fodder. Simple as.

4 Likes
95

Sure, but it is of concern of gaijin. So what you think does not factor in. Ignoring the fact that gaijin has to juggle 3 modes that share some mechanics isn’t something a solution can ignore. If you kike it or not.

Nope it is due to gaijin thinking RB is more like SB than it is like AB. Which is wrong of course. There is nothing stopping gaijin from giving AIngunners in RB the same effectiveness as in AB without ruining SB.

But you can fix it without ruining sim. By just not thinking of simple nerfs and buffs. I made a map.above which would solve the issue.

96

@Pacifica are these kinds of comments allowed?

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97

Are these the same bombers which are more fragile than an F-5A/C/E?

You’ll see bombers get sawn into pieces by the same bursts that make fighters turned yellow.

The same manual aim with huge convergence, random bloom and arbitrary dispersion?

Bomber guns are about as accurate as stock 45mm guns fighters sometimes use.

Defensive armament is so insanely gimped even with manual aim, all to keep fighter mains from having to put effort in, so they can save their effort for energy trapping some worthless plane which somehow sits at the same BR.

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98

I don’t know of any research regarding vietnam era jets.

I know of research done regarding ww2 planes. And it doesn’t look good for them. They were indeed very fragile.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA800394

Here is the research done by the US after ww2.
The damage is not cumulative, so you need to keep that in mind.

As i said, the issue isn’t, that the bombers are too fragile. It’s that real pilots with proper controls, have a much harder time to hit anything, than people pointing and clicking with a mouse. Therefore the percentage of rounds hitting in a burst is far higher compared to real life.

So the problem is the effective firepower not the DM.

99

Not really…

I will remind members to keep things civilized!

Never any need whatsoever to insult others on our Forum…

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100

Although i agree with point 1 - number 2 is not really the core problem. Having a few friends which somehow enjoy the extremely boring set-up of 3h EC matches in Air SB, they provided me from time time replay links.

The mouse aim of SB gunner view is imho the minor part of the problem - the 3rd person view whilst in gunner mode is way more annoying as it gives them a clear spotting advantage vs cockpit view fighters.

So setting up ambushes or lightning attacks are way more difficult vs bombers than vs fighters, the mouse aim in itself just amplify this advantage - i mean if you can reliably hit at ranges >2 km with spraying 0.50 cal defensive HMGs and you have to close in to 400 meters to score kills the problem is obvious.

No idea if they solved this in the meantime as i simple refuse to play there exact due to this reason. It makes for me zero sense to fight hordes of B-25s & P-61s with thousands of air kills with very high K/Ds just based on this advantage. The same pilots suck in Air RB like everybody else.

So killing the 3rd person view whilst manning a turret should be the first step.

In any case - the discussion regarding Air SB is imho off-topic. Even if it is done with good intentions it distracts from RB. Thx for understanding.

For Air RB i would recommend 3 steps to deal with gunners/ai gunners:

  1. Warning of incoming enemies triggered by ai gunners at around 2-3 km like “fighters incoming fast, 5 o’clock low” - this should encourage oblivious bomber pilots to go into manual gunner mode.
  2. Gaijin has to reverse the hidden nerf of artificial gun spread for defensive guns, add realistic and useful gun belts (= more AP-I, less tracers) and has to solve this ancient problem of useless turret convergence.
  3. A slight increase of the range from the 0.21 / 0.66 km values (which are based on my own observations effective up 0.8 km) to 0.31 / 0.99 values (which should increase the effective range to up to 1.2 km) whilst becoming 100% deadly at ranges <300 meters if attacked from behind - combined with complete deactivation of ai turrets when getting killed.

Allow me some explanations:

  1. As you can see - i am not a “Death Star” advocate and i want to avoid that bombers become automated gun ships killing real players way too easy. But i acknowledge that something has to change especially regarding gunners & ai gunners.

  2. Any further restrictions which would create artificial “dead zone bubbles” around bombers are simply out of question. Gaijin will not sacrifice rookie fighter pilots to those dead zones, and those pilots don’t want to get killed by ai in a PvP based game.

  3. Reasonable fighter pilots see the need for a planned and correct set up for attacking a bomber with good turrets/guns. So there might be some kind of understanding and acceptance for such a change as soon as they realize that the same rules as for attacking ai planes apply: Fast approach in turret dead zones. No problem for a good pilot.

  4. If you play prop BRs you see the classic rookie flying straight to a base and getting killed whilst in bombardier view - either because they know it not better (=lack of tutorials) or because they simply don’t care.
    Frankly spoken: I see not a single reason why such guys deserve to be protected by ai gunners. Either they learn or they die.

  5. The warning of incoming fighters looks useless, but it encourages rookies to develop situational awareness and to use manual gunners. If they then do the right things like flying away from their attackers in order to maximise their firepower and to use manual gunners it would prevent way too easy kills. If they continue their path and get killed by fire from dead zones or attacks with high speed from the front - that’s life.

  6. The reversal of stealth nerfs to manual gunners, the usage of useful and accurate belts and this annoying turret convergence issue are self-explanatory.

  7. The limit of a 100% dead zone of 300 meters just for attacks direct from behind is aimed to kill ass sniffing rookies, prevent ramming attacks and shall prevent actually skilled bomber pilots to farm fighters with ai mechanics just by closing the distance whilst chasing a fighter.

  8. And as head-on attacks were a viable strategy irl: Creating an automated dead zone for frontal attacks would be unfair. Deactivating ai gunners when being killed but not dead (=tail shot off) shall avoid automated post mortem kills whilst floating to mother earth. I have zero problems with keeping ai gunners active for flat spinning (but not killed) bombers - as the guys attacking those bombers are basically kill “stealers” and try to benefit of the efforts of others.

I hope that some of you could consider this as viable suggestion!

And just to be clear: This deals with ai gunners only. Giving bombers back their role pre-May 2020 should be discussed in another thread.

1 Like
101

It depends, controlling a single gunner in first person view would be fine, tripod gunnery should be similar to standard mouse pointed guns.

The issue with mouse aim is rather the autostabilization that comes with it. If the plane manuvers it shouldn’t be autocorrected, but the correction should be done manually.

So with mouse aim i meant the gaijin control method of that name, not the act of pointing via mouse.

It has not been fixed. The ammo was limited, so the bombers no longer have infinite ammo.

The issue is that the mechanic are linked. You cannot ignore the other modes when looking for the solution since every change would effect them as well. So a solution would have to work on every mode.

In addition SB is the reason for the current situation.

Maybe the first steep would be to seperate the bomber mechanics per mode.

102

It breaks the immersion, it is overpowered, it ruins the fights of others, its not realistic in any way, it breaks the bomber gameplay into becoming a fighter, you’re actually getting kills for doing nothing except flying and all the ai gunners are doing the lifting for you while others actually have to aim their guns for a kill. There is no reason it should be like this and it won’t be like that, so cry to gaijin if you want to.

104

A Fighter is literally 100m behind me, and the Gunner isn’t doing a damn thing. This game is really irritating the s+++ out of me. It’s really fun, when my plane folds in half, after about 5 rounds penetrate my plane, SMH… All because, Fighter Pilots beached about it being too difficult to get free kills?

2 Likes
105

Yes, you hit it exactly right…
The rear gunner observes from a long distance, but shoots at a maximum of 210 meters, but your plane is already heading towards the ground, burning and without at least one wing…

Bombers themselves are already big, slow, clumsy, so we are also cutting down the gunners’ abilities, even if any fighter has an easy kill…

Recently, I flew an SB2C-1 and the rear gunner, even though I have expert gunner training, just drives around and is the first to be finished…

Balancing ala War Thunder and I don’t think anything will change much when you have ace training…

1 Like
106

The worst thing about the current state of plane gunners is that on certain fighters the gunners have a much higher engagement range than on bombers

Edit: dang it, just replied to a necro’d thread

107

That’s a Gaijin-style balance…
The pilot’s machine guns in the game, except for the Italian ones, can shoot/spray quite effectively in the game at about 1 km.
The real thing was around 400 meters, later with gyroscopes managed to hit at 750 meters, but otherwise it was more about more precise hits on the target, at the same distance 400-500 m.
There’s no point in talking about heavier guns in the game, they are “balanced” several times a year…

The guns of the gunners (approx. 7.7 mm), had an effect from the beginning of WWII at approx. 300-400 meters, later from a larger caliber, the effective distance was increased to 600 meters and the largest bombers in the game (B-29/Tu-4), thanks to the first systems that controlled fire, had an effective range of around 1000 meters…
And sometimes you find information that the B-52 had, thanks to the on-board computer, in Vietnam, hit a MiG-21 at 3500 meters, but there is no talk of a shootdown…

108

I don’t particularly care about the AI gunners being useless. However whats really annoying is how brittle every single bomber is. A single bullet from an interceptor should not cripple your bomber.

In an ideal world, the attacker would have to destroy the engines of the bomber and knock out turrets/gunners to effectively remove the bomber player from the game but instead they can simply randomly spray and hope one of their 12.7mm or 20mm tracers hit a bombers wing causing the plane to explode or spiral

1 Like
109

I would say that there are several reasons for this…

I don’t believe that Gaijin has physically tested the penetration of all calibers in the game, both aircraft, tanks and ships, it is probably based on some documents from the past…
I think that 7.7 mm machine guns at a distance of 300 meters are quite adequate, but the other larger calibers are a question of balancing the game…

Another thing is the mouse aiming/3rd person view/markers, the plane is very stable, it can be kept in continuous horizontal flight for a long time, there is a great overview of the flight situation, plus it is significantly more maneuverable…
If you have it, try to try the joystick in ARB, not only do you hit almost nothing through the 3rd person view, you have to get into the cockpit and then just a small movement of the target to the side and you have it outside the sight, so you have to fly at the target aircraft completely differently…
With the joystick, which is to some extent a real stick, you need to have a lot of experience to have more shots in one battle, it is often very good when there is one clean kill and some assistance and that’s how it was probably in real life too…

The bomber damage model is very simplified and at the beginning of the game they were quite durable, but then it happened that players explored the entire tech tree with them, I remember a discussion with one player who opened more than half of the Russian aviation tech tree with the Tu-2…

So this is also a matter of game balancing…

It is generally proven that the fuselage of a bomber aircraft was able to absorb a lot of hits, so real fighters tried (if possible at that speed) to aim at the engines, wings and the wing space between the engines, where the fuel tanks are (fire + explosion = wing break-off), this was also modeled in the game, but those bombers fell to the ground even faster …

Of course you can have a “golden hit” when you hit the tail control, but this control was soon doubled in real life too and that too it wasn’t easy…
Fighters were the ones who decided air battles and that’s what Gaijin is trying to do in the game… The only problem is that the bomber (except for the US big boxes for daytime raids on the Third Reich) benefited not so much from its onboard weapons, but from its invisibility until the last moment, night raids in bad weather when using the first radio-electronic systems for targeting bombs…
The damage model is not the biggest problem, I see the problem in enemy markers, clear and sunny weather in battles and balanced shooting of the onboard gunners (shooting range, shooting timing, etc.)

I’m sending a picture from the analysis of damage to four-engine bombers based on the result in 1942.

In movies (e.g. Battle Of Britain, Lords of the Skies, etc. ) is a relatively realistic depiction of a fighter attack on a bomber - an attack from an altitude and at a relatively high speed, after firing, escape to the sides or upwards, a long stay of the fighter at 6 o’clock is a road to hell…