Ki-27 too durable & strange behavior

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Ice_Eagle

The AVG talked about a few hits at the root it's blowing the wing right off a KI-27. So that's like 50cal x 2 + 30cal x 4 so 30-80 hits/sec I'm guessing. Combine that with KI-27 evasive maneuver and snap goes the wing.

Remember, the Ki-27 also had unarmored fuel tanks located right at the wing root. So, wing failure might have been the result of a fuel tank explosion rather than collapse of the wing spar.

I encourage folks to set up a mission where you can aim guns from a stationary bomber (I like the B-25 because of its tricycle landing gear and low height) at a stationary Ki-27 set at a known range.

You will discover that just 1-2 .50 caliber bullets are enough to knock off most control surfaces, and that 3-5 bullets are sufficient to break many other parts of the airframe. There are road signs which stand up better against bullets!

[Ice_Eagle]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Remember, the Ki-27 also had unarmored fuel tanks located right at the wing root. So, wing failure might have been the result of a fuel tank explosion rather than collapse of the wing spar.

I encourage folks to set up a mission where you can aim guns from a stationary bomber (I like the B-25 because of its tricycle landing gear and low height) at a stationary Ki-27 set at a known range.

You will discover that just 1-2 .50 caliber bullets are enough to knock off most control surfaces, and that 3-5 bullets are sufficient to break many other parts of the airframe. There are road signs which stand up better against bullets!

Pump a solid 1-2 second burst into him @ 150 yards. boom & zoom on his starboard side. He shoulda been a fiery stain on the ground.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Remember, the Ki-27 also had unarmored fuel tanks located right at the wing root. So, wing failure might have been the result of a fuel tank explosion rather than collapse of the wing spar.

Actually, looking at my DM spreadsheet notes, I see that I recorded the Ki-27 as having fuel tanks where it was impossible to start a fuel leak, but incredibly easy to set on fire or explode. This includes the wing tanks.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

You will discover that just 1-2 .50 caliber bullets are enough to knock off most control surfaces, and that 3-5 bullets are sufficient to break many other parts of the airframe. There are road signs which stand up better against bullets!

Again, checking my DM notes, I was mistaken here. A problem with the Ki-27 is that you CAN'T knock off most of its control surfaces. Instead, it's easier to knock off the entire wing or stabilizer.

Also, it's impossible to break the rear fuselage using .50 caliber bullets, unlike for the Ki-43 or A6M2, and the damage modeling for the engine just seems "weird" - in some cases its easy to make the engine fail, in other cases, it's hard. This might be because there is some vital system just behind the engine that I wasn't able to detect by looking at cutaway drawings.

But, my point about the incredible in-game vulnerability of the early war Japanese planes to airframe damage still stands.

Yes, early war Japanese planes were very lightly built. But, a Japanese plane standing on the ground in-game will fall apart after a ridiculously small amount of damage scattered across a very large area.

For example, compare the number of .50 caliber bullet hits required to trigger damage textures or breaking parts in a plane like the Ki-27, Ki-43, A6M2, D3A2 or B5N1 - especially for large parts like the wings or fuselage - to a Google image search for "bullet holes in traffic signs". You'll notice that the traffic sign holds up much better!

In the case of the D3A1, the rear fuselage light damage textures actually show more bullet holes than it takes bullets to trigger them! And this for a Dive bomber presumably stressed to handle 6-9G encountered from pull-out from a steep dive!

I think that the fragility of these planes, and the relative fragility of all planes in the game to airframe damage, is an unrealistic simplification.

Realistically, it's airframe damage + stress which breaks an airframe. Each hole you make in the airframe, especially if you keep on making holes in one place, reduces the airframe's ability to avoid fatally flexing or collapsing when the plane pulls Gs or encounters wind resistance.

Current damage models don't seem to model this.

At the very least, planes sitting on the ground should be more resistant to airframe damage.

[RPS69]

Pursui...
One of hte biggest asset Oleg made at BOB when still in charge, was that there was a far better damage model in BOB that the best thing they can do on IL-2.
Damage boxes on il2 are BIG.
Normally they react under a given number of colliding bullets.
This is just a big compromise. On some planes results are better than others.
They can tweak them a bit, but they will be always far from perfect.

Really, at this point it would be nicce to see how the damage boxes were placed on the mos common models.

Maybe it is a bad idea that will make all of us dissapointed.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RPS69

Damage boxes on il2 are BIG.
Normally they react under a given number of colliding bullets.
This is just a big compromise. On some planes results are better than others.

There's nothing wrong with a simple "hit point" model for a given aircraft part to model airframe damage. I'd just like to see it standardized based on some sort of engineering or physics calculations. (One simple way to do it would be to calculate (mass - engine, fuel, oil, and armor)/volume) to get "density" and calculate Hit Points based on "density x cm of surface area" for a given part.)

I suspect that the only "problem" for more realistic modeling of airframe damage would be that all aircraft become much less vulnerable to airframe damage on its own.

If Damage Modeling, "hooks," and programming are done right, IL2 actually does a good job with critical hits. But, I'm not sure that all aircraft have things like wing main spars modeled, which is important. Even a very tough plane could lose its wing if there was sufficient damage to the wing spar.

I'll accept that vital systems like electrics, hydraulics, oxygen, communications, pumps, superchargers/turbochargers, and various oil/fuel lines aren't aren't modeled.

IL2 also seems to do a good job with having aircraft fall apart due to overspeed, and in the last release, planes allegedly take damage from excessive G maneuvers (although I've never broken a plane yet due to high Gs).

I'm not sure if airframe damage will lower a plane's ability to survive high G maneuvers or high speeds, however. But, that could be modeled easily enough.

It's also clear that fires only consume fuel and trigger some risk of explosion (which doesn't seem to be consistent from plane to plane).
They don't do damage to surrounding parts of the aircraft, which should be a big deal for wood and/or canvas planes, or for fuel tanks next to an engine or wing spar. But, fires adjacent to crew compartments will injure or kill crew, so it should be possible to model effects of cumulative fire damage to other parts of the plane using a variant of the fire damage to crew model.

[RPS69]

Then TD may publish this boxes, and the triggers asociated with them, and we may reach some agreement on what will be better.
Things are much more civil around here nowadays.

[Ice_Eagle]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

But, I'm not sure that all aircraft have things like wing main spars modeled, which is important.

A quick look at Ki-27's model shows a wing spar.

[RPS69]

Originally Posted by Ice_Eagle

A quick look at Ki-27's model shows a wing spar.

He was talking about a wing spar hit box, not the wing spar representation itself.

[taly001]

The Ki-27 bounces its tail skid on the ground under takeoff power when stationary - propellor wash on elevator? Maybe the fuselage damage model was made tough too prevent this snapping apart on ground. But the Ki-27 certainly can't take much damage in il2 air battles!

What confuses me more is that the Ki-27 is a super-stable gun platform? Almost laser gun like!

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Ice_Eagle

A quick look at Ki-27's model shows a wing spar.

Good. I lack the tools to view DM, hook placement, etc. so I have to guess about a number of things.

My experience is that actual physical models, including the model which includes "critical hit" areas, are OK for the planes included in Pacific Fighters, but that they sometimes suffer from errors in hook placement, and inconsistent or incorrect assumptions about engine and airframe durability. The planes which have the worst DM are the planes from the earliest games in the series, and the earliest fan-produced models. The Me-232 and Me-231, Ar-196, and PZL P.11 are probably the worst offenders, but there are problems with other planes.

My testing revealed a lot of cases where "hooks" (i.e., placement for origin point for things like smoke, fire, fuel leak effects) were improperly placed, were reversed, or were missing. In a few cases, it looks like coding errors "moved" vital systems within the plane so hits to what should be "empty" areas of the airplane result in damage.

Much more commonly, there are inconsistent or incorrect assumptions about how much damage a particular system can take. For example, the F4U, F6F and P-47 all used the same engine, but there are variations in how much damage it take to destroy each plane's engine. (I forget which plane is the most vulnerable in the group, I think it's the F6F.) As another example, the "fatal damage" textures for the TBF's wing show the wing missing less wing surface area than the plane was historically able to survive!

http://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/a...129573.jpg?v=1