I’ve actually read that this was done due to player complaints.
Originally, tail damage mostly led to severing of elevator cables rather than the tail getting literally cut off. This led to people dying all the same as… good luck flying without elevator controls!
But, it’s “boring” and not very cinematic to die while your plane just locks up and you faceplant uncontrollably. People also thought it was boring the plane they shot just fell out of the sky without a visual cue.
So, tail got cutoff damage treshold got reduced since it’s the same effect.
… Oddly, I noticed “Tail got cutoff” seems very rare in my F2H-2 and instead I get my elevator cables severed repeatedly. Super fun when it happens, you can try to salvage the situation using power, flaps and slips but given the enormous stall speed of jets compared to props… all my attempts to land without an elevator in sim led to a fiery death so far. Legit easier to just trim out a missing wing in a corsair than fly with severed elevator cables in a jet.
I think the balance in these level matches is just about right though.
Planes are an ever present threat to ground.
But they have to either bomb from way up high, where they are in accurate and bait for fighters, or come down low where AA is thick and just about every tank has a gun that can hit them and do real quantitative damage.
It’s really around 8-10 that it starts getting out of hand
Doing a dive bomb at an angle means AAA won’t really ever hit you as long as you’re not doing it towards AAA though. Most roof MGs cannot point above like 45 degrees or maybe sixty.
Corsairs even got airbrakes to make this maneuver safer - fly at ~1.5 km altitude, search for target, pitch up slightly into a very shallow loop as you roll over into a nearly 90 degree dive, cut throttle, deploy landing gear and release the bomb at 500 meters high then pull a lot of Gs to quickly return to 1.5 km.
Wings themselves, at least based on discussions with Morvran and my own observations (#Make Bombers Stronger 2024 November Update - #3 by RunaDacino) seem to be a consequence of simplified damage models. Meaning, wing has only a few massive damageable hitboxes so your bullets/shells hitting a wide area do the same damage as if they all concentrated into a pretty singular location. Notice how your damage doll tends to only have like… 3 sections for your wing barring control surfaces, spars and the like.
I routinely kill airplanes trying to dive bomb my teammates. It’s just a question of leading the target.
The bigger problem IMO is the cancer revenge cas pilots who intentionally suicide bomb to get revenge. Those are the only ones you can’t really get cuz they’ll come in at max speed.
Only one of those isn’t an open top, so one good rocket strike (which is extremely easy to do from straight up) will take them out. Even works against higher tier AAs if they’re also open top/you got a bigger rocket like a Tiny Tim.
So what is this plane with an unlimited load of rockets you speak of?
Another fun thing to do, pick a player (preferable someone in a squad or playing a cringe tank/nation like Japan), bomb them, hold tab, and when they respawn, check for any planes recently spawned. If there’s none, check for any tanks of their nation recently spawned and bomb them again.
90% of the time, they’ll spawn SPAA after you bomb them once, and certainly once you bomb em twice. The greatest feeling is killing their SPAA and watching em leave the match with 3 deaths and 1 assist.
Congrats, you have a UFO with rockets massive. American planes, especially the ones people love to complain about (e.g P-61) don’t have GJN UFO modules built in.
J2M3 is hardly a UFO. Spoken like someone who will turnfight anything in a P-47 and be surprised when they lose.
Sure it would, I got a very close hit, and the japanese rockets aren’t very big. Planes that carry HVARs often get many more than just two (usually EIGHT) and they’re faster to begin with - and said planes can also carry bombs at the same time, which I can’t do in any japanese plane.
You would sacrifice all your energy trying to get high enough to do it
brotha has no idea how thrust/weight ratio works
you would know cause you have more experience losing dogfights in P-47 than any of us
you severely overestimate the rockets of planes you don’t use. Not to mention, Wirbels, Kugels, and Osties have uncanny explosion resistance
you’re acting like you’re being forced to use planes with small payloads. Even then, Japanese planes get access to 20mm. The only American planes that get acess to autocannons AND decent payloads are either really far in the TT (F8F-1B, F4U-4B, Skyraider) or flies like absolute crap and is made of paper mache (P-61)
After dropping this payload, the 4.3 F4U-4 can then go on and duel Ta 152s and win (this is based on personal experience flying it in sim (altho there it’s 5.3 so it feels less stupid to have this much payload)).
The 4.0 BF109 (cannot create a custom loadout for it so these are your only options):
All I’m doing there is exchanging speed for altitude, a Corsair that will be flying MUCH faster than a draggy J2M (and has +1000hp as well) can do exactly what I did and the -4B at the same BR is extremely good at low speed.
You can do the exact same with HVARs and german 21cm rockets. Tiny Tims are easiest since they’re rocket propelled bombs.
In japan you don’t get a choice. USA gets fighters at that BR with much better bombloads than a J2M’s 2x 60kg (also shared by A7M2, N1K1-J, all A6Ms before the A6M5s) and AT BEST get a pair of 250kg bombs on a few select aircraft.
So does the F4U-4B at the same BR as the J2M3, except AN/M3s have a lot more penetration and rate of fire.
Take a guess at which one is american and which one is japanese.
.50cals are also not all that bad, and you get a lot more of them.
