The saddening situation bombers are in

[Real_K_Soze]

@Night_Trapper

This is not a dogma that this is how it should be played!

Fully agree - as with these (just a few) points:

@Night_Trapper

• takeoff from the airport
• airstart, horizontal low flight, use the bomber as a gunship
• airstart, immediate turn left or right, gradual climb to 6-7 km
• +10 km from the nearest enemy mark

…you present an almost unbeatable recipe for getting killed almost guaranteed for the majority of bomber players - without giving them the chance getting even remotely near to a base… at least in a 4-engine bomber - and (imho the most important part) to survive these approaches.

Why?

• Airfield take-off creates (depending on daytime and server) a 60 - 100% probability of getting team killed by a random moron.
  I see barely a bomber surviving such approaches. Even stuff like Bv238s (which will spawn slightly above & behind the airfield) gets murdered by team mates.

• Even considering that US 0.50 cals out-range almost everything - just a minority is able to use gunners and dodge incoming fire at the same time. Flying tree-top kills most of your vertical options to dodge whilst a diving fighter has usually so much excess speed that your return fire can’t be effective due to the small time window you have to shoot - but he has a very large target - a few 20 mm hits kills you.

• Turning left or right & gradual climb does not work in most cases - the contrails will reveal your position at least above 5,5 km (on Pacific maps usually 6,5) - and you will get spotted (dot & contrail) & out-climbed

The sole exception from the above might happen in case:

• if the enemy team is completely unskilled
• own interceptors push the enemy team (in front of you) low
• there are heavy clouds up to 10 km
• friendly strike aircraft lure enemies with IC spawn low
• friendly strike aircraft disrupt the climb phase of non-airspawn fighters
• you are in 6-8 vs 6-8 lobby
• you get escorted by a Brigand, B7A2 or T-18B

… and the bomber pilot is battle hardened and uses a B-17, Pe-8 or a Halifax and manages to get above 7 km. And most of this has to happen in the same match…

To be fair:

Some of your suggestions worked ages ago, but in these days they are long gone as the game changed completely.

Low level runs worked in the past as:

1. Fighter players actually climbed in order to get a better positioning for a fight with the enemy aircraft
2. There were no masses of strike aircraft like today
3. There were no (a few exceptions) ai planes compromising your position
4. There were no low alt contrails
5. The map design supported these runs like Operation Iskra

I played all 4 engine bombers (except Tu-4) quite successfully with a mix of side climbing or reverse climbing (180° degree turn after spawn) on an old and inactive account, but those were the days without contrails at low alt and there were no respawning bases or this “red square” marking on the map like today.

@Night_Trapper

but the problem is the players

This is actually correct - due to a deterioration of the average player skill combined with various decisions by gaijin killed bomber game play for heavy bombers.

I won’t repeat them in detail but only guys:

• on selfish grinding tours (just looking for zero skill SL & RP like most Ju 288 players)
• with an exception passion for bombers
• with exceptional gunner and flying skills
• with exceptional high tolerance levels regarding getting killed

…fly bombers today.

Based on what i see daily in prop Air RB the “grinders” have a share of 90-95%. And this is fully intended by gaijin - they don’t care about bomber game play.

And no half-most decent pilot is motivated to use them - without having the skill to make a difference and to support your team bombers are actually weakening their team as their game impact is (almost) zero.

There are some exceptions, but the best example of how much gaijin cares about bombers wast the last battlepass vehicle, the PBM-5. Zero chances to get to a base, way to slow for its BR, a free kill.

[Real_K_Soze]

@Ion_Protogen

Why would they not go for bombers?

Good point - as long as you have to kill a very small number of bombers compared to fighters in order to fulfil daily or special tasks, there is no reason not to go for them.

But to e fair: The fellow player is somehow correct, the average bomber pilot is even less skilled than the average fighter pilot…

[Real_K_Soze]

@SpeclistMain1

What really should happen is a mass lowering of bomber BRs so that their defensive armament matches the offensive armament of the fighters they face.

This was actually a serious thread.

You might re-read your above mentioned statement multiple times in order to realize how ridiculous this request is.

The last time that happened was 1940 - and just because the RAF was unable to put cannons in their fighters. GER, FR and the USSR had already 20 mm cannons in their fighters…and the USAAF planned to implement 37mm cannons…

Btw - try to name some bombers with 30/37/45 or 50 mm defensive guns…

@SpeclistMain1

Yeah, bombers IRL were designed with huge formations in mind, but we don’t have formations in game.

This won’t change anything.

This strategy (“the bomber will fight his way through”) failed miserably. Bomber formations were unable to defend themselves vs fighters.

Read some books man…

[Loofah]

I know it’s a bit off topic, but considering 37mm HE can punch through 15mm of steel - 50mm to Hornet’s armored windshield is one of the most hilarious shots you’ll ever get, because 50mm 1,8kg shell.going 900m/s can not defeat the windshield, and canopy is eternal and made of 5cm thick steel beams apparently, and with a tiny bit of luck plane takes no damage other than windshield going black. Just like in real life.
Damage is all over the place.
Damn Japanese destroyer’s 127mm 23kg HE shell going 910m/s has penetration of like what, 28mm. So in other words, it fails vs Pz.IV side because it has no momentum whatsoever.
IRL I can bet it would cave T-34’s upper side plate in and I wouldn’t be surprised if same applied to front just due to momentum alone.

I wonder if we’ll ever see damage that is remotely realistic.

[Night_Trapper]

As we wrote, everyone can try their bombing tactics, they can consider some of what I wrote to be nonsense and something might work…
The game has been running for over 10 years and there have been a lot of players who have played other flight games…
After some time, they said the direction the game is going is not what they imagined, new players will come and either want to learn or it will be a dull grind for 2 minutes and another battle…

But now to the maps…

• those maps have the character of a tactical battlefield, and therefore the big bombers are kind of outnumbered here, because you can’t completely miss them in an air game…
• in order to fly somewhere, you need speed, that’s why I use the first, max the second level of bombs … the others are heavy, you’re slow and you can’t climb much on these maps, when you reload you have a lot of fuel again
• the biggest advantage of bombers is not being seen - that is quite difficult… against bombers there are (markers, clear sunny maps, spotting system, they are too loaded with fuel, a lot of work with training the crew, who still shoot at a short distance … etc…)
• what came attack aircraft with a bomb load that has the ability to destroy the base … also it is against big bombers
• a lot of players are allergic to bombers because they are slow and take away space in the team from fighters…
• and so we could continue…

I would say bombers should be scaled to map size…
E.g…

• the ideal amount of fuel
• the load of bombs could be chosen by the player
• clouds, fog, snow, overcast, equal number of day/night battles
• the space of the combat zone itself distributed over a larger area of ​​the map, both symmetrically and asymmetrically…
• limited bombload - for fast planes with bombs…
• and there are other ideas here in the topic

It’s completely “amazing” when you read on the wt wiki about long-range naval bombers, i.e. also four-engined ones, that unfortunately, in this game, they cannot be used for what they were intended for…
In aviation it is an ordinary bomber and in naval, with ultra-precise AAA, it is also useless, especially when these machines attacked submarines, military convoys, coastal facilities, where the biggest enemy was a destroyer with a corvette … so what are they in the game for. .?
At the same time, it would be enough to build in several maps with islands and AI ships, a port … e.g. develop an old map of Norway…

A lot of things could be written about it…

[SpeclistMain1]

@Uncle J Wick@live

This strategy (“the bomber will fight his way through”) failed miserably. Bomber formations were unable to defend themselves vs fighters.

Versus the high number of interceptors in the early war that’s true, but that doesn’t change the fact that the bombers were meant to defend themselves. We don’t have formations in game (or escort fighters), so some sort of compensation needs to be enacted. Moving bombers down to where they can fight on equal footing is certainly a more serious suggestion than “basically nothing can change” (paraphrasing).

[PercussionCap]

@SpeclistMain1

Versus the high number of interceptors in the early war that’s true

They were always less in number than the bombers they were facing.

@SpeclistMain1

but that doesn’t change the fact that the bombers were meant to defend themselves

Meant to, but never did even when outnumbering their interceptors several times over. Losses were very high until good escorts showed up.

[SpeclistMain1]

@PercussionCap

They were always less in number than the bombers they were facing.

True, but the bomber to fighter ratio was much larger at the beginning of the war, and without any form of escort game function/feature bombers need to be able to defend themselves.

@PercussionCap

Meant to, but never did even when outnumbering their interceptors several times over. Losses were very high until good escorts showed up.

Again, without any form of escort (or formation) functionality in game the bombers need to be able to defend themselves on a one-to-one basis.

[Loofah]

But what’s even the point of playing an interxeptor then, if you have to set up for.half an hour only to get absolutely roflstomped by bomber gunners anyway?

I sometimes do bomber interception using Wyvern. It usually takes some serious clobbering to down a bomber. And then a spinning, tumbling Pe-8 somehow manages to snipe me.down from 1300m away. Extremely entertaining.

In current Air RB heavy bombers are mostly useless. Trying to make them viable without completely redesigning the game mode will simply make them extremely annoying to face.
I don’t do bomber interception in Ta-152H unless it’s really the only option, simply because it’s way too easy to die or get crippled.

[RunaDacino]

@Loofah

And then a spinning, tumbling Pe-8 somehow manages to snipe me.down from 1300m away. Extremely entertaining.

This is honestly something i feel does need serious fixing. If not in ARB, at least in air sim.

Not even deny kills, just massively increase spread if the bomber is spinning or similar. Right now it remains a perfectly stable turret even while falling to death and i have had quite a few cases with my banshee where a successful run on a tu-4 turned into my plane getting disabled as i was extending away while it was spinning helplessly.

[Loofah]

Bomber gunners are essentialy 3-plane stabilised. So as long as you are within a firing arc…
Upside down, pulling 7G? Who cares. They will keep shooting perfectly straight and tracking the target.

And with 20mm canmons being able to rip your tail off with 1 shell it gets ridiculous although I’ve been pelted by B-17 I thought I made dead enough more than once.

[Loofah]

I’d like to show you something maybe interesting.
The match was generally uneventful, at the beginning I had a chance to land a burst from directly vertical at B-17, only damaging him a bit - I don’t normally go out of my way to hunt bombers, but flying 1500m below me is too big of a bait for me to not take it. Then it got demolished by my team.
At the end of the game I engaged another B-17.
The bomber in the video received a good burst from his fellow A-26C (B-17 was the 1st one to shoot, but A26 stole his base, so good sportsmanship on boths sides). It turned his fuselage black and good portions of the wings orange/red I understand, he might have had 100 12,7mm holes in there (I mean, I counted 60, maybe more, but good portion of damn would have gone through and through) but god damn, the aerodynamic penalty to the wing from a few 12,7mm holes is interesting (the fuselage got hit by like 70% of the bullets)

Then it got hit repeatedly by my twin MG151/20 stealth belt and my MK108 cannon. How many 30mm? It’s honestly hard to tell. There are 3 “guaranteed” MK108 holes (1 in wing, 2 in fuselage one is small, but that’s how it sometimes works), and probably some that did not appear (in the tail we have Mk108 pattern shrapnel). The 1st burst I land generally doesn’t show MG151/20 holes but in slow motion it’s clearly visible that about a dozen shells hit, and most likely 3 MK108 30mm HEIT shells (bigger boom)

During 3rd pass according to slow mo I land 2 MK108 shells, 1 in the fuselage (no hole shows up) and 1 in the wing.

Anyway, while the plane goes black, engines are dead or dying, rudder is missing, I, as a fighter, can’t tell that, as I can’t get anywhere close or else I’m facing a great threat.
Furthermore, fires are nowhere near as dangerous to big planes as they are to fighters, and oftentimes bombers can burn for several minutes.

And yeah, this is the last guy. But imagine if I had any teammates around who would have shown up before my final pass - according to many forum members, that wouldn’t have been a killsteal, just a normal case of “you couldn’t finish it, so someone else took it, fair play”.

Bombers die from a single hit

Imagine further buffing B-17 damage model without taking into account that damage is all over the place, cannons are inconsistent and bomber gunners oftentimes simply can’t be avoided.
The damage in this game needs an overhaul. And Severe Damage mechanic needs fixing. If you turn half a plane black while taking out a few engines and setting it on fire - maybe it’s good idea to award you the kill even if someone else fires the final shot.
And mind you, I was firing stealth belt, so 1 in 5 APHE, 1 in 5 AP-I, and these are usually barely visible.

[Rowiek]

I think i have a solution for the bomber problem…

Give every person in the vehicle designated “bomber” its own bases. This to prevent base stealing by strike aircraft (like wyvern) and premium bombers like the Ju-288.

Every bomber has its own bases, when every bomber player has destroyed their bases, e.g. 3-4 bases per players, the airfield can get attacked.

Or, when X amount of bases have been destroyed, the enemy airfield can get attacked. While keeping the bases that havent been destroyed yet, available to the player so that person can still destroy a base.

Also, increase the spawn altitude of bombers to a minimal of 5000 meters.

[Loofah]

Well, it makes some sense that each bomber has its designated bombing target. A base, a bridge, field depot etc. so people don’t have to count on fair play (which is not guaranteed).

I wish each bo ber player had his own bomber squad, where they can control 1 bomber at a time. More targets, more value, and I think more fun in general. The entire game mode neede to be heavily adjusted, though.

But spawn at 5000m is a goddamn joke. A lot of fighters start to heavily lose performance past that point, and it would turn all faster bombers basically either unkillable or way more deadly than fighters when engaged

[Rowiek]

@Loofah

But spawn at 5000m is a goddamn joke. A lot of fighters start to heavily lose performance past that point, and it would turn all faster bombers basically either unkillable or way more deadly than fighters when engaged

Fighters are not supposed to attack bombers. Interceptors and air defence fighters do, and they have an air spawn.

[Loofah]

XD
So basically only 6.0-6.3 interceptors would have a chance, and even then only some of those as Ta-152H would most likely fail to get high enough before bomber is diving towards AF AAA.
G8N1 would probably reach 6700m by the time it reaches map middle with its hilarious ability to 1-shot anyone from 2km away.
My idea is, just give bomber players a separate game mode. Lets call it Space(bar) Warrior. You look at a blank screen at one point a “press spacebar in 60, 59, 58” etc. prompt appears. If you press spacebar the time it reaches 0, +/- 2s, you get a reward. That would perfectly simulate the skill level required for 5000m spawn B18B, without annoying everyone with unreachable bomber at 10km EVERY DAMN GAME.

[Rowiek]

i dont think its going to be that much of a problem though…

[PercussionCap]

@Rowiek

Interceptors and air defence fighters do, and they have an air spawn.

And those usually have even worse climb rates.

[SpeclistMain1]

@Loofah

I sometimes do bomber interception using Wyvern. It usually takes some serious clobbering to down a bomber. And then a spinning, tumbling Pe-8 somehow manages to snipe me.down from 1300m away. Extremely entertaining.

A Pe-8 versus Wyvern is definitely one of the fairer matchups currently, though, since the Pe-8 gets at least one 20mm to fire at you with.

[Real_K_Soze]

@SpeclistMain1

Versus the high number of interceptors in the early war that’s true, but that doesn’t change the fact that the bombers were meant to defend themselves.

@SpeclistMain1

Again, without any form of escort (or formation) functionality in game the bombers need to be able to defend themselves on a one-to-one basis.

Don’t get me wrong - i actually appreciate your dedication to bombers and bomber game play. But there is a difference between passion & dedication and requesting the impossible.

You simply can’t expect that a bomber can win a 1 vs 1 vs a fighter.

Irl there were just 2 effective defensive mechanisms for bombers without escorts:

1. Generating a significant altitude advantage and being unable to get intercepted - look up Ju 86 P - and / or out-fueling enemy fighters / interceptors by flying unpredictable routes.
2. Speed based on altitude advantage with the goal to outrun and subsequently out-fuel enemy short range interceptors - like Mosquito or Ju 288s or late attacks on the UK by He 177s approaching via Ireland. The 177s flew outside the radar range around Scotland to Ireland and converted their 9.000 meter altitude into speed and flew with 700 kmph above Britain.

Gaijin denies both strategies (with some exceptions) as they focus on PvP interactions and have no interest to support PvE actions without giving PvP players options to interact.

@Loofah

But spawn at 5000m is a goddamn joke. A lot of fighters start to heavily lose performance past that point, and it would turn all faster bombers basically either unkillable or way more deadly than fighters when engaged

I mean technically seen the proposal is not really that kind of strange when you think about it. The majority of heavy bombers US flew above 7 km - and fighting at 7 -8 km requires completely different approaches / tactics for fighters. The power loss of most fighters was the goal of coming in high - as planes like B-17s were thanks to their turbochargers quite fast up there.

Game play wise i agree as in the current set up it would create free SL for a lot of fast climbing bombers. So without substantial changes (including air spawns for all and most important spawn locations / distance to bases) this request makes no economic sense for gaijin.