I'm really looking forward to the He-177 :D

Damage model of the aircraft
 

Moin Sita/TD.

It would be nice if finally the damage model of the airplanes were reworked in collision in the air.
Countless times I had to experience when an enemy rammed or touched me, that my plane was damaged / destroyed and the opponent flew on as if nothing had happened.

Collisions damage should be based on the relative mass and speed of the planes involved - if it isn't already. Even so, a mid-air collision is going to be very bad for both planes involved.

Whether or not a plane survives a mid-air depends on the parts that hit. as well as forces involved, and the pilot's ability to recover from the collision. If you trade a propeller, landing gear, or vertical stabilizer for a wing, then you can sometimes get a kill from a mid-air collision while still having a plane that's in good enough shape that you can crash land or bail out.

The problem with collision modelling is IMHO that all colliding objects are treated as rigid and only the first colliding objects are destroyed, if no other objects touch each other. That way you get strange results like trading off a wing against a aileron or rudder. Or even worse....

Damage modelling used to be "eye for an eye" where you could hit another aircraft Taran style or chew them up with the prop and a few other close up events.

Collision damage was changed as Dog Fight servers complained of aircraft running out of ammo and deliberately ramming, to them deemed as "unfair".

Personally for me it ruined one of the best parts of the game and now you can be awarded -400 points for such an event happening you fault or not.

I was just thinking of this the other day as I was making an IL2 mission.

Do you think it's possible to get the taran style back into the sim?

Luckily, players' or team score has no function. So, even if it's distributed unfairly it can be simply shrugged off with a shrug. A computer is no king Solomon. In the case of friendly collisions, sometimes the server script chews off a player that's completely innocent! I once landed my FM-2 in the way of a friendly F4U that was taking off. I thought that by applying chocks, there could be no collision... and maybe I couldn't even do that in time. He snapped my wingtip off, but himself got no visible damage, and the server berated him instead of me :)

I'm hoping that 4.14 will update the DGEN campaigns. Quite a number of new maps and planes were added over the past several years, and yet they are not usable for DGEN.

I remember that DGEN used to be hard-coded, but didn't someone get the source code and made it editable?

I agree! It would be very nice if the new aircraft added over the last years would be added to the DGEN-Campaigns.

If this is true, it's sad that one segment of the community was able to get the game changed in a potentially unrealistic fashion.

It seems like it would have been simpler and fairer to just give server operators and single players the option to "disable realistic collisions." There could be three options - planes are insubstantial with respect to each other (but not ground objects or the ground), collisions automatically destroy both planes, or the current system where planes are very likely to be fatally damaged.