I’m confident that a number of players have quit over the atrocious mission design of Air RB as it is right now who used to play when we had bigger maps for props.
I’m also confident they’d come back for air RB EC.
The question is are there enough returing players to make it worth it
It isnt an air superiority fighter. The guns are a defensive measure.
Waiting for a rain of .50cal fire to go through my engine or pilot’s face. Surely not a fuel tank.
Yes, its accurate because the hole isnt everything. Think of the energy that round delivers.
The wing of an aircraft is unarmored. Your .50 will go through it, and if not outright kill the aircraft via fuel fire, heavily damage it.
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Yes, it is accurate because the hole isnt everything. Think of the energy that round delivers.
Ripping off the tail requires far more energy then a 37 delivers. And the 37mm HEFI shell is fundamentally not designed to do that. It’s in the name. It’s designed to send a ton of incendiary fragments throughout the internals. It’s going to do a lot of physical damage, but nowhere near enough to rip the tail clean off
It’s also a Mineshell, while the Russian or US 37mm is a regular HE round.
Which doesn’t make it necessarely any better. As the target grows in size, explosive power becomes less important, since it just takes a lot more to deal enough structural damage to bring the target down.
Just because the Mineshell makes larger holes, doesn’t mean the bomber is going down. While the fragmentation from the HE round can damage systems outside the range of the Mineshell.
There’s like a sweetspot where a Mineshell is more effective against a specific size of target, after which it’s not going to be any better.
For a 4 engined bomber, a 50mm Mineshell had pretty good chance to bring it down in one shot, while 50mm HE round might have slightly lower chance, since the Mineshell had a high chance to cause an instant structural failure, while 55mm made any hit practically lethal.
It’s rather comperatively unlikely to bring down a B-17 with a 30mm Mineshell due to structural damage but with a 0.5-1m fuze delay and firing 30mm Incendiary rounds as well, the chance to cause a lethal fuel fire with a good hit was much higher and the same applies to 37mm HEI rounds.
30mm Mineshell damage (2) P-47 (forced to crash land)
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The armament of the B-29 is not better placed, and in practice, it doesn’t truly have 6 (or 13, if you want) effective machine guns. The tail turret can only cover up to -30 degrees below the horizontal; below that angle, only 4x12.7mm guns cover. However, this is still misleading, as the divergence in their trajectories means there is almost no overlap. At 500 m, the distance between a bullet fired from the rear turret and one from the forward turret is 20 m when you aiming at -90º, or 15 m at -45º.
At 700 meters, the situation worsens, with a separation of up to 35 meters at -45º.
To give you a visual idea, this is how far apart the paths of your bullets are. You have practically one less turret.
It’s clear that the firepower of the B-29 is actually inferior to that of the G8N1, so there is no way its armament can justify its permanence in such a high BR.
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I have done some reasearch ( played some bombers for a few days) and basaed on my experience (+ the fact that i would say that i can use defensive armament a but better than the average player due to exessive training) the only reason why I survived in bombers is 1.1.becasue the Enemy doesnt attack me (statistically useless) or 1.2. the enemies who did attack me failed to hit me and i killed them before they could ( either missing or not shooting at me before coming into my effective gun range but that happened only one). Every other engagement I was either 2.1. able to kill the enemy but i die due to fire or crashing or 2.2. I die but the enemy crashes later or 2.3. the enemy killed me and he survived.
Putting them into perspective how often these things happened in percentages:
1.1: 30%
1.2: 3%
2.1: 4%
2.2: 3%
2.3: 60%
(statistics have been rounded up or down for your viewiong convenience)
To top my research off i would like to add that the encounters are mostly based on the skill (or lack there of) of the fighter engaging the bomber anf the bomber is mostly at the mercy of the fighter. Also Tailsitting outside the bombers effective range is a suprisingly save spot unless you get to close, but the happened 1 time (in my entire time playing this game i might add)
To conclude my findings: the people who complain about bombers being OP just have massive skill issue and it shows.
And? Should defensive armaments always be much worse than their offensive contemporaries?
Well you’ll be waiting forever since the majority of the fighters the B-29 faces have bulletproof glass cockpits.
It literally will not at 700m+, nor do most aircraft that the B-29 faces have much fuel in their wings.
Exactly.
Any props uptiered into the B-29 will have no frontal protection. Many jets have no protection either (La-200 is another one, and i’m not gonna look through the whole early jet list to find out how many others don’t), and even the ones that do, like the MiG-9, you can still hit the pilot AND the engines easily.
Which here in War Thunder just means the fire will keep burning for longer. Fuel tank fires only go out if they have no fuel or if you’re a Ju 288.
At 500m it still has so much pen it easily goes through the wing spar. And it’s not like the B-29 is only firing one or two of these, you can easily get 3 turrets firing at anyone.
At 800m it now gets stopped by the wing spar, but still turns it orange. The wings are NOT “impenetrable”.
And the 8.0 jets are also lacking in protection. The Meteors’ 12.7mm of armor in front of the pilot will be easily penetrated at 500m (and since both aircraft will be moving, the distance at which you can penetrate it will be greater). None of the Vampire, Venom, Sea Hawk, Attacker FB, or Swift F1 jets have pilot armor. The R2Y2s don’t have armor. The Sabres don’t have armor. The Me163 is extremely fragile and its armor does not protect the fuel tanks.
I can keep going.
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The props/early jets that have no frontal armor (that the B-29 would face if it was put at a proper BR for it) would just make the B-29 actually usable, since its armament would be able to do more than hit tiny weakspots.
Not true, and plus there are fire suppression modifications.
Yes, I will correct myself: no critical components are damaged at 500m+, and even less are damaged at 700m+. As for how many bullets you can get onto the tiny area of the wing, it will likely not be multiple due to the already mentioned terrible dispersion.
Of which the lack of armor might be the sole benefit to these planes, even though they are all much, much faster with much, much better armaments.
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Fire supression modifications which will destroy the engine when used, and none exist for fuel tanks. For a single engine fighter, they pretty much guarantee you’ll die anyway.
a stronger damage model and better ai gunners is all i ask
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it’s the only advantage - and it’s not that big (especially in VR) of an advantage. I do think that you need to lose your stability when you’re spinning, it’s embarrassing that spinning bombers can just get kills because their aim point maintains the same point (you), coordinating all the gunners, who should be either G-LOC’d, stuck to the floor or bailing out out (and not shooting at you with perfect coordination).
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I just came out of a match in which a rookie (regarding play time in Air RB) in a B-26 killed 4 (!!!) even bigger rookies in fighters which thought tailsitting behind a B-26 is a smart move. We talk about fights at medium alt (3.5 to 5 km) - so at optimal alt for fighters.
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His last victim (P-51) shot out an engine and the left undercarriage (landing gear) whilst already on fire. The B-26 made it back to base…
I killed him late game attacking from his defensive blind spot (12 o’clock low) without any effort.
There is simply no urgent need to buff ai gunners or the damage model if a rather new player is able to defend himself with manual gunners. If you watch replays you see that most of the bombers get killed whilst being in bombardier view (at least from my pov). So it’s mostly about the timing of the bomb run…for everything else i refer to this post.
Bombers defend themselves by keeping distance from fighters. Usually as a long range bomber I turn away to keep the bandit(s) to more than 1km(or well out of max gun convergence) and shoot as they lose speed trying to climb up to me. If you’re a frontline bomber or a strike aircraft you have to just practice gunning more since you have no altitude or airspeed advantage.
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Another positive example of successful bomber game play at low tiers (BR 2.7 to 4.7) in Air RB:
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2 friendly bombers (a He 111 and a Ju 88) killed the enemy airfield with dropping 6 (He 111) and 4 (Ju 88) C 250 Flamm on the first run. 10 C 250 were exactly the required payload to kill the airfield.
How this could happen?
- Very small (and rather rare) old map (Frontline Korsun) which limits the chances of getting intercepted before a bomb drop.
- Extremely bad weather (dusk/dawn, storm, very thick clouds) rendered markers almost useless and the enemy interceptors lost track of the 2 bombers.
- Both bombers were smart enough to choose the best bomb loadout (8 and 4 C 250 Flamm bombs) which produce way higher base damage than standard GP bombs like the SC 250. The He 111 killed a base with 2 out of 8 C 250s, a third Ju 88 killed the other 2 bases before.
I saw a similar outcome yesterday (also whilst using C 250 Flamm) when a single Ju 88 finished alone the enemy airfield on the Frontline Mozdok map. Only difference - he needed 2 runs and got killed after his second drop by af aaa. All i had to do was to keep the last 2 enemy fighters busy and distracted so that he could land, rearm and drop a second time.
Matches like these show that determined bomber players can decide matches (if circumstances are perfect) - but gaijin has killed this opportunity with these plain stupid respawning bases on newer 4 bases maps at higher BRs.
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Heck, when I tried to suggest that gunners call out incoming fighters (as they did in pretty much EVERY air force, so far as I can tell) that suggestion wasn’t approved for review.
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Lower tier is nowadays more fun because you still have some old maps. Really Gaijin is soo lazy, many people did like the airfield objective. Gaijin just did not want to deal with it in any way and just remove them on all newer maps going forward :(
When it still works it are usually either the incendinary bombs or the naval mines that do the trick.
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Fighters exist because bombers exist. But Gaijin things the game is more realistic by letting fighters have a furball without any objective. Call of Duty in the air, just team deathmatch.
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Quite true, fighters were invented to intercept the early recon planes and thd earliest bombers in WW1.
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