Gunnery Fundamental, tips and advice

[Robo.]

Originally Posted by trademe900

The RAF fighters are not even worth flying with the default ammo loadout; it's really only good for wounding or injuring gunners. Forget about a 109 with that loadout, you will only suceed in perforating his cooling and as we know the planes in COD can go seemingly forever with streaming coolant, even at full power.

As it is not possible to chase down a 109 you only have split seconds to work with in turning deflection shots or high speed bounces. I load all guns with solely dewilde and armour piercing, with the dewilde having the greatest effect. There is something definitely wrong with the damage modelling at present however; if you load all guns entirely with dewilde the wings blow off he111's instantly in spectacularly unrealistic fashion. I tend to work around this bug by making half loadout armour piercing. With the loadout like this you are likely to both set fire to the enemy or disable it's control surfaces.

I have never caused structural damage to a plane with ball or any other ammo other than armour piercing so as far as i'm concerned only dewilde and armour piercing are of any use.

I fly the RAF fighters with default ammo (for they are historically accurate) and never encountered any of the problems you are describing. If you hit the 109 at convergence range, you will do lots of damage.

[SlipBall]

Originally Posted by Robo.

I fly the RAF fighters with default ammo (for they are historically accurate) and never encountered any of the problems you are describing. If you hit the 109 at convergence range, you will do lots of damage.

I wonder if those pilots had their ammo belts adjusted to their preference load very often back then. Statistically speaking, the Brit guns did very well, but was some tweaking done at times. Or was there a very ridged policy in place?

[Al Schlageter]

RAF pilots did not always fly the same a/c. Did the pilot have his guns adjusted to his convergence preference before every flight?

[SlipBall]

Originally Posted by Al Schlageter

RAF pilots did not always fly the same a/c. Did the pilot have his guns adjusted to his convergence preference before every flight?

Good question, maybe someone will have an answer...I know for certain that the Brit default convergence/load in game is just fine. I think, judging by my own experiences, the problem people have. Is not having the cross hairs square with the target. The more level you can get the hairs to the wings, the greater the hits. In the British aircraft I stopped leaning to the gunsight, because I found the jumping, bouncing a distraction. There is only a few seconds to make the shot, best to use that time to square up the hairs.

[lonewulf]

Could someone please explain the distinction between horizontal and vertical convergence. I really struggle to make any sense of this. In real world terms, how is it possible to set two different values for convergence? What am I missing here?

[5./JG27.Farber]

Originally Posted by lonewulf

Could someone please explain the distinction between horizontal and vertical convergence. I really struggle to make any sense of this. In real world terms, how is it possible to set two different values for convergence? What am I missing here?

VERTICAL:




HORIZONTAL^

[lonewulf]

I still struggle with this I'm afraid - despite the very interesting diagram. From what I can see from the above, we simply have two different points of convergence with this particular 109, one set for the MG 17s and one for the MG-FFs. The cannon are harmonized to converge at 200m and the MGs at 400m -or so. However, given the different trajectories of the two weapons the cannon convergence occurs well above the line of sight, so if you were aiming at something at 200m you would probably miss with your cannon and with your MGs. At 400m you would get quite a nice group with your MG 17s but your cannon would be way off. So, this brings me back to my original point about horizontal and vertical points of convergence. I don't really see why we would have the option to set both. If I was a WW2 fighter pilot I would expect my weapons to harmonized to climb through or fall through my line of sight at a particular known range, say 300m and in some cases I may set different points of convergence for my MGs and cannon (although I can't imagine why I would do that) - but why would I attempt to alter the vertical convergence? Each weapon can be set differently so presumably it would be possible to have each MG or cannon zeroed in on a different bit of sky, but what historical evidence is there that anyone did this, effectively the opposite approach to weapons harmonization?

[SlipBall]

Just think of the vertical setting as a necessity to achieve the down range distance. No different than your target rifle that you set the rear sight, so as to hit the bulls eye at a known distance. Heavy bullets needing more height setting than lighter ones, but I may be wrong in my understanding of this.