Quote:
Originally Posted by JtD
I'm getting 0.5% accuracy from my veteran autopilot B-25J AI gunners and shot down every time by the attacking veteran A6M5b in an 8 vs. 8 encounter. What do you get?
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If I'm flying the airplane, about what you get. You can't provide the absolutely level, perfectly trimmed firing platform that an ai pilot does, and your gunners have no idea or warning about what you will do next (which is sort of like a RL gunner would be).
An ai bomber is in reality a single unit with near global situational awareness that it exploits mercilessly; attacking Player has the left wing lined up at 300m, so the microsecond his finger presses the trigger, roll slightly right. Player has set up sufficient lead to hit the ai's fuselage while climbing, but it's concealed from him by his cowling at the moment he must fire, therefore change direction and at the precise moment he enters the rear gunner's cone of fire as the aircraft rolls, shoot out his engine or knock off his wing with a burst of LMG. No delays for communication either way, they ignore the necessity for bombers to stay in formation, and of course the gunners are accurate at all angles at distances up to 750m, or twice the Player's convergence, whichever is greater.
A human player can't do that; in all honesty, no real life bomber crew had or could have had that level of awareness or communicated between each other that quickly and accurately, even after years together.
And the gunners never had that kind of accuracy at any angle or range.
Your 'Veteran' ai gunners are not remotely as hamstrung as the historical human beings they are supposedly simulating; if the record is any indication, bomber gunners were spectacularly ineffective throughout the war. The 8th Bomber Command would have
loved to have one bullet out of every two hundred fired actually hit a German fighter. I would expect that the LW 's losses to the bomber formations would have quadrupled at the very least.
cheers
horseback