yep: Tracers, WOP and Il-2 COD

[Blackdog_kt]

I think Mazex explained everything nicely.

I haven't done a huge amount of shooting, but i did serve a year as a conscript in the local air force (we have a mixed armed force, with the bulk being reservist troops, civilians who get into armed duty for some months, and the rest being professional soldiers of varying ranks).

When we practice fired our personal armament (G3s and LMGs) we didn't use tracers.
However, as i was trained to be a flak gunner i also had the chance to fire some 20mm rounds from a dual-barrel Rheinmetall gun.

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.

Now that i think of it, the only simulator to ever have that sound feature was B-17 the mighty 8th, in almost any other sim i've seen it seems that sound travels with the same speed as light.
It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

In that case, the effect was very similar to what Mazex said. The curved rail effect was not so easy to observe because the gun barrels were lifted about 60-70 degrees up in the sky, but the rest is pretty close. The moment i pressed the trigger and the tracer left the barrel, i saw a short streak of thin, yellow light. What surprised me was that the tracer look longer when it was close to me, but seemed to reduce in size within milliseconds, as it raced away. By the time it was past it's half-way point it was almost a dot, then came small puffs of smoke and after a couple of seconds you could hear the explosions.

Agree with that - in the first 100 meters or so it goes so fast that there is a bit of "streak" effect IRL too as the brain can not "keep up with reality" - and then from 100 meters (?) to X the eye can keep up and focus on what is very clearly a tiny glowing dot popping away...

I have an old black and white photo somewhere from an exercise where we had two companies firing "all we had" with M-240:s and G3:s loaded with ONLY tracers at night as our unit had not expended the ammunition budget that year so we had to waste as much money on ammo as possible over a weekend - and tracers are more expensive that ball ammo Otherwise we used to have a tracer as the last or second last bullet in our G3 magazines to give a visual indication that you where out of ammo and had to switch to a new magazine as there is no ammo counter in real life In the M-240:s we used to mix one tracer every 3-5 rounds. So at that exercise we had 100% tracers in ALL guns and fired a couple of times from a hill down at a gravel road 300 meters away which had remote controlled practice target of aluminium popping up along it. It was awesome as the air was so filled with tracers that it felt like you should be able to walk on the glowing air down to the road. A hard packed gravel road gives extreme amounts of ricochets so the medical team that was some kilometers away behind the hill and saw the fountain of ricochetting tracers going up in the air and thought we had gone berserk and all fired up in the air I then had a camera with black and white film and took a photo with two second open shutter in the pitch black night at the glowing 200 meter wide "tracer flood" from the hill to the gravel raod... You can imagine the look of that... It was 20 years ago though so where the heck is that photo now?

[Flanker35M]

S!

So from reading what Mazex & Co write the CoD tracers are "camera tracers" and not like the human eye. I wish they were smaller and thinner in CoD than shown in screens. IF I wanted something like that I play StarWars

[meplay]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

It would be very cool to have that corrected in CoD as well, so that when an explosion is far away we first see it but hear it a few seconds later.

yeah it would be good for say film makers, as if the camera was on top of a building quit far away, when a plane come into strafe a target, you can see the tracers but hear after