Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[Woke Up Dead]

Originally Posted by majorfailure

Sometimes I think I'm playing a different game.
I've acquired quite some experience in shooting at allied heavys/medium bombers, and those are among the best armed/armored in this game IMHO.
I guess in about 40 missions I got shot out of the sky 8 times. Much? Yes.
But only two times when I got nailed (pilot dead) from below while turnig away and up (moving in all three planes of maneuvre) from the already dead bomber and from a landing B-17 about 400m below me on opposite course(thus the shooter had to lead a heck) that felt wrong. All the other times I got bored/greedy and decided to do a 6'o clock approach and forgot to break at 300m. So I'd say that my own poor choice of tactics fried my there.
Doing head-ons, side attacks, high attacks, even fast six o clock attacks with breaking of at ~250-300m regularly works for me.

I feel the same, with a few notable exceptions. Horseback keeps talking about the gunner on the 110, I agree that he definitely seems to be more effective than most other gunners. There are also gunners on a couple older, rarer Soviet planes that seem super-human. It's those light MGs with the high rate of fire on the smaller, nimbler bombers that give me the most grief, especially when they are twinned like in the 110. Safer tactics can be used against bigger, more stable bombers; and the heavier machine guns have slower rates of fire and don't trouble me as much.