Long bursts more effective than multiple short ones?
 

I get the impression that in this game a long, on-target burst will do more damage than multiple short ones even if the sum of the short ones lands as many bullets as the long one. For example, I think I'm more likely to de-wing a plane if I hit it with 9 bullets at once on the wing, rather than three bullets at a time in three bursts on the same spot.

Am I right about this, or am I just imagining things? And if I'm right, is this realistic? Seems that two bullets on the spot ten seconds apart should do the same damage as two bullets on the same spot milliseconds apart.

probably a question for TD.

It depends on if they hit the same 3D part that was not yet totally destroyed and then if that part or the next in line is critical.

Long bursts should be more prone to jamming guns and are a great way to waste ammo. Try flying a Yak1 for a while.

Define long and short.

Against fighters I find that I will aim with intention of hitting, fire a short burst and if I see a hit then I will follow up with the same firing solution. If I miss then I reposition slightly, fire again and again look for a hit. It sounds like a lot but you can do this all in a second or two. Tap, check, tap, check until you connect and then you fire for a couple of seconds.

If you aren't killing the target in 2-3 seconds then you may not be connecting very well (especially with multi gun fighters like a P-47) and you need to re-aim for better effect.

The exception is bombers where you theoretically can be firing for a longer period of time and hitting frequently as bombers are less able to avoid and more able to take punishment.

That's about technique.

What you may be talking about is if there is anything different done to the damage in terms of game/sim world. So far as I know... no. If you hit then it counts the damage done to the piece that you hit. If you shoot in a short burst and then another short burst you may not hit the same area and therefore would need to do more damage to the target aircraft. A short but continuous stream is better because you're more likely to hit the same area with 2, 3, 4... or more, bullets and more likely to cause that part to fail which in IL-2 land means a fire, or structural detachment, etc.

There's also netcode to think about. You're likely to loose a few bullets every time you shoot. This is especially noticeable with slow firing 37mm cannons (as an example) where sometimes you'll hit with no effect. With a stream you're more likely to have your hits recorded. It may be a small percentage lost but it can happen.

So there's some intersection between technique and netcode to be wary of is basically what I'm saying :D

(Sorry for the essay)

I do play in the old Yaks a lot, that's where I made my observations. I get so paranoid about running out of ammo that I fire stingy short bursts even when practicing on unarmed DC-3s. It's when I relax and squeeze the trigger a little longer that I get better results.

Another example: if I keep hitting enemy fighters with short bursts then they might lose controls or engines or get a PK or be full of holes, but they'll be in one piece. But sometimes I can get them to explode if, and only if I put a medium to long burst into them.

Short: as short as possible, the quickest squeeze my finger can make.

Long: at least one second, one "scoobydoo" and a bit more.

I think this is what I'm talking about, this makes sense. Thanks.

In real life,when using explisive charge munitions 20mm shell e.g.
In this case a rapid fire burst may be more efective.

Short delay between shell ignitions at target maximizes shrapnel effect

If you hit the right part, usually just behind the stick, it doesn't take much though the seat back may take it all. Just in front of the stick is good too, and a bit in front of that.

If you're trying to burn through the tail from six then you will need a lot of hits as the tail gear mountings tend to be really tough. TU engine pods are similar as the gear is behind the engines.

Solution is to shoot deflection if you want to shoot from behind. Aim for the cockpit, nose, and wing root.

1/4 second is a good short burst.

I find being on an angle, so 30 degrees from horizontal, rather than flying horizontal when attacking a plane seems to give a better hit ratio.

don;t suppose there is any logic to this, but it works for me.

That's as good, maybe better than hits from the side. Do you fire from far enough out that you have to aim a bit low or does the lesser bullet drop help with lead?

I agree that is a question for the guys that wrote the code.

I have not noticed anything of the sort though. I have blown an A-20 in half with a lucky short burst from a kilometer away with a single 20mm cannon, and then I have seen ammo poured into close up targets and have had them intact enough to fly home and land.

On hard settings where you have to learn to make blind shots where the target is hidden by part of your aircraft while you are shooting, the only time you are going to be really accurate landing long shots would be head-on or from dead-six, which is going to change the damage compared to a shot taken while a target is taking fire laid down for it to fly through while it is crossing your path at an angle.

Even the amount of G forces the target is handling can make the difference on whether or not part of it breaks off while it is taking hits.

S!

Hitting the exact same spot twice with two short burst is more difficult than hitting it with a single longer burst IMHO. If I can fire from up close there seems to be no difference between two short bursts and a single longer one.
But any result can and will be skewd by your own perception - and randomization.

Can you land a whole long burst in the same spot except from dead 6?
I find tail-shooting to be a waste of ammo.

Well, except with wing guns from real close but most of those hits go around the tail itself.
P-51 started out like that. Get close and one long burst blew up many fighters.

The problem with firing a long burst is that you waste a lot of ammo if your siting is off, which generally the case with all of us.

The way I went about it, was to practise deflection shooting, using short bursts to site the target. Once you have the target 'sited', feel free to blast it, but here's another point.
With short burst, you start doing incremental damage, making it harder for the target to fly. This makes it easier to target in subsequent bursts, where once you have it nailed, you can pour as much lead into it as you're got.

Perfecting deflection shooting is great for high-G moves, as is this game the G-wing stress looks to be connected to shell damage, and wings and bits fall off much easier.
:)

This makes sense in theory but I think I asked about this once and was told that this is not modeled in the game.

Odd.. As I seen wings fly off so easily when I know I'm not on target - maybe too many lucky shots then.

As far as I know it was added around 4.10.
(When Stangs and Fockes began to lose their wings in high-G maneuvers)

Wing damage greatly affects wing strength for a while now.

Try flying with 50% or more FILTER on your pitch axis on stick settings if you've been breaking wings too often. See if it helps you accelerate any better.

I don't remember ever having read anywhere the principle on which it is based the damage model of IL-2, and, when they lack the basic information, you can imagine anything.

I mean, it matters of "bubbles" like in EAW or damage boxes, and how are they dimensioned?

Then, each of them how many states of damage does have? And transition from a state of damage to next is a matter of "points" given by incoming bullets?

I think that without these info (and more) we can't answer to your question. In principle, two bullets on same spot should give the very same effect, independently from their separation in time.

BTW, about hypothesized effect of bullets on a stressed structure, there's no official evidence. From 4.10 Guide: "Once damaged then its structural integrity is reduced so the ultimate load reduces as well." That's to say bullet hits reduce available G-load, but this latter admittedly does not affect resistance to bullet.

The damage model uses 100's of 3D parts, all with hit points as one value to express both strength and ability to take damage.

We know this because throughout we have been shown this as well as explained about with some questions answered. When FB came out we were shown engines with 20 different parts that could be hit and destroyed, that was just the engine of one plane modeled on the real engine of the real plane. The airframe, instruments and pilot/crews are all modeled down to pieces and with every major step the new planes modeled to higher detail and occasionally planes from older versions got upgraded models thus some planes became unbalanced as to vulnerability.

We know the structural strengths are and were tied to hit points, the base of the Gigant can take massive hit damage because it had to be beefed up to not collapse when the model landed.

I guess you had to be there and actually thinking at the time.

If you want to know about EAW hit bubbles I can probably dig up the source code I wrote for the EAW Tweaker I wrote in 1999 that allows a one-pass even adjustment to all the hit bubbles both hit points and size. That was out before the hand-adjustments by committee ECA that Charles Gunst did manage to keep good control of.
The Tweaker uses a C++ class object to handle both EAW cabinet and mod files, it even takes care of opening, checking and creating needed mod files as part of the object instantiation. It's practically a library.

EAW hit bubbles are nothing like as detailed as even the original IL-2. EAW hit bubbles only know 'hit' and 'how hard'. IL-2 DM knows the part hit, the angle of the hit and the hit energy down to relative velocity and explosive power attributed to the projectile.
But then a computer capable of running masses of planes in EAW might start to slow down with 4-8 planes in the original IL-2.

Ask around if you didn't see. There's still probably sites showing those IL-2 model details and you may have such pictures as part of one or more IL-2 discs or patches.

Thank you Max!

I mentioned EAW just as an example.

I was wondering how IL-2 damage model isn't object of mods, like I often saw for other sims. Also, I would be curious to know where it is; I found inside flight model ("buttons") a section like that which follows:

is this related to the damage model?

Returning to the original question, I think two bullets on same spot gives same effects (given they've same energy and angle of impact) no matter the time interval. Probably, effectiveness of long bursts is a matter of hit probability, higher according to number of bullets fired. So it is more probable, for a long burst, that two or more projectiles land on same spot, making more damage.

Do you agree?

Question is also how related. You can poke values and try to attribute changes to those and still miss effects down the road. You can also go into the woods and randomly eat leaves, flowers and berries not seeing mold spores on some.

Not completely. For one, hits that may be a hand span or less away from each other may hit different parts. For another between moving shooter, bullets and target the fire may walk while at other times it holds to an area for the next dozen or thirty hits but even those come from 6 or 8 different guns.
Yeah the chances go up then. The chances of bullets from different guns to hit the same part go up to.

Concentrated fire can work to hammer through both armor and thicker parts but the best results is when weaker critical parts get hit just once.

The pilot for instance. Also control cables which is rare but IL-2 models the effects of such damage. Or a fuel or oil line.

Those are all quicker kills than busting a spar let alone the structure of a tail wheel and the seat armor behind it. So I spend more shots fishing for a critical hit at angles to places where I know the weaker critical's live, hence deflection directly into the engine, wing root, cockpit.

I see. A WWI british ace said there was only one "paying" target on the whole plane and it was pilot's head. Likewise, a WWII US Navy report demonstrated how hits on engine and its fuel and oil circuits were main cause of aircraft loss.

Personally, I think aim is the core point: you can fire short or long bursts, but what really matters is how thy are aimed.

They should be less than 1 second (pref 1/4 -1/2 sec) bursts aimed with lead deflection shots that the target flies through. 20 hits to the wrong spot is worth less than a single critical hit.

I was flying a P40 vs 109G6s and I was getting kills by smoking their engines, putting holes in their wings, making them lose controls etc. The 109 pilots were doing their best to avoid my shots so I couldn't get more than a quarter-secon burst in at a time. Many of them took a lot of hits and still kept flying, I was content with letting them go to let them slowly "bleed to death" on their way back to base.

Near the end of the map I caught one pilot unaware, and got a long (one whole second) burst in from a nice angle right at convergence, and he blew up the way that Zeros or 30mm cannon victims sometimes blow up, not a typical 50cal kill vs a decently armored plane like the 109G6. This is what first made me think that perhaps long bursts may be more effective than short ones, even if the short bursts end up getting more hits overall.

Occasionally I get similar results in the lightly armed Yak-9: I can expend all my ammo on a 109, get lots of hits and cripple him by pecking away with short bursts, but a single long burst will make him go pop sometimes.

Those planes carried oxygen as well as fuel.

Fuel tanks could also ignite from multiple hits.

With bombers exploding from hits, this could happen from the bombload being ignited. Explosion would be spectacular... and dangerous.

Often happened vs nightfighters because of the angle of the Schräge Musik cannons.

In principle greybeard is about right, I think. There was an American training video made by Disney, to US Naval aviators in WW2. It's on youtube. And most importanltly it was narrated by the infamous John Thach. He is the tactical innovator behind the Thach Weave manouver.

Thach recommends in the video, to always aim for the frontal engine (vs an enemy fighter aircraft). Unless that is, you can confidently pop some bullets directly into the cockpit of the enemy.

The reasoning being, that once you have solid aiming point in the engine, first bullets, even if only a few of them, will hit the vulnerable engine. Any engine will lose performance, once damaged, I think.

Other bullets in the burst will sweep across the other vulnerable parts such as the cockpit. The only reliably effective cockpit armor vs heavy machine guns or cannons, is armor steel or titanium. Neither of which, exist to protect the pilot in the plexiglass canopy, out of which the pilot is observing the world around him.
Yes, the radial engine would act as sort of armor, blocking shots from the front, to the pilot. But engine might get knocked and lose power so it's not exactly a win-win scenario here...

Oftentimes there would be fuel stores just in the centerline fuselage, behind the cockpit. (such arrangement exist in me109 and fw190, also spitfires for the Allies)

Basically when you hit the engines with a good solid burst, you will have a chance of damaging any of the following three: engine, pilot, internal fuel tanks.

You can also damage the control surfaces more to rear, the tailplane, if it was a longer burst.

Although despite Thach's advice about aiming, it was also specifically very effective to aim for the wingroots of A6M zeroes, as they had vulnerable fuel stores there (of course every respectable IL-2 player knows this already!):cool:

The key thing here is grouping shots in the same spot on the target. So a long burst (2-3 seconds) is effective so long as you're hitting the target and you are hitting in the same relative area. I've seen people spray bullets all over their target and complain that plane X is too strong... but really its the technique. A dozen .50cal shots hitting both wing tips, main wing sections, a bit into the fuselage and a few into the tail might cause something significant to fail... but really not all that much. Put the same number of shots into the engine and you might see the plane explode completely.

Short or long burst... aimed effective gunnery will always be better than just spraying the entire target. Which is why your 109 target blew to pieces :D

Oxygen systems were generally low pressure and oxygen cylinders (or globes) were small. That meant that a hit to a pressurized O2 container would do some secondary damage, but not enough to blow the plane apart in the same way that an explosive hit to a partially full gas tank, bomb or ammo magazine would.

Fuel-air explosions could also be spectacular, but that required AvGas vapor plus O2 rich air, plus a spark. To prevent this, aircraft fuel tanks are (and were) blanketed with CO2 - usually cooled engine exhaust.

To get a fuel tank to blow up, you need a strong primary explosion to vaporize and heat the fuel while exposing it to air, or you need prior damage which allows air to get into the system or fuel to leak from the tank and vaporize.

So, in some cases, a "long" burst might be more effective at setting a plane's fuel systems on fire since the first hits tear open the fuel tank, letting air in and splashing the fuel around to vaporize it, then subsequent hits provide the spark or explosive heat needed for the vaporized fuel to explode rather than burn.

If there's leaked gasoline then I'd expect a big release of oxygen, hours worth to the pilot, to take the next spark to a full scale boom.

This is actually consistent with the game damage model.
A lot of hits in a short time may destroy something that will stay fine with the same amount of hits in different runs.

At least it works that way with ground objects, so maybe some damage boxes inside the plane behave in the same way.

If you have leaked fuel inside the plane then a big rush of oxygen and a spark is all you need for a fire or an explosion. There's enough oxygen in those tanks to last a pilot for hours, not minutes.

Russians ducted cooled exhaust gases into the fuel tanks to not have oxygen right over the fuel. The US has at least one that put CO2 in the tank. But no one was filling the wings and fuselage with exhaust or CO2.

I'd also like to know how except from dead six a long burst is supposed to hit the same part, especially when many spread-out guns are shooting?

Sure, you might keep it all 2 meters close but it's chance. Concentrate on the nose is not 'a part' that gets hit. It is many with some just 1 hit criticals, like carbuerettors, fuel lines, etc.

Most long bursts I've seen, over half the shots never hit. Get used to hosing, your choice of planes becomes limited.

True, but you'll notice in most cases O2 cylinders/globes were positioned well away from fuel tanks. I'm not saying that damage to an 02 cylinder and to a fuel tank couldn't set up a situation where you could get a big fuel explosion, but it was unlikely.

Typically, fuel explosions occurred when air got into a partially empty fuel tank, or when there was a leak in a fuel tank which was near an arcing electrical connector.

The latter case was a common problem with the B-24 Liberators or PB4Y Privateers where removable "Tokyo Tanks" in the bomb bay could leak, filling the bomb bay with AvGas vapor. Due to the number of electrical connections which also ran through the bomb bay, the fuel vapor sometimes ignited, and a number of B-24s were lost due to in-flight explosions.

The cooled exhaust gas trick was used by most nations. It's fair to say that after about 1940 most Western combat aircraft would have some variant of the system.

A number of bombers had additional fuel-protection systems such as CO2 fire extinguishers which could send compressed CO2 into fuel tanks.