Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[Woke Up Dead]

My view of the toughness of the planes being discussed is a bit different from many of the posters here, maybe because I fly mostly online where I rarely attack bombers and their AI gunners. I find the P-47's wings to be extremely tough, same goes for the F4U. They can take a lot of damage and still maintain lift and stability, unlike Yak or 190 wings. Their engines can be damaged lightly, but I rarely see one knocked out completely (though when it does happen it's on the P-47, not the F4U). PKs are rare, and tails falling off are even rarer.

Could my different impression be caused by the difference in environment and targets? AI gunners on bombers will usually be looking directly into your engine, even if you don't attack from six o'clock. Unlike AI fighers, human opponents will usually avoid the head-on and will maneuver onto your six, where they will have a good look at your wings when you make a slight turn. If they shoot directly from your six, they may damage your controls (I lose elevators and rudders often in the F4U and P-47), but your engine will be the furthest target for them.

Agree about the Stuka toughness, the LMGs on the Hurricane IIB really do a number on its wing tanks. It is an old, slow, big plane that I imagine was armored more from the bottom than the top though. Also, its lack of toughness is offset by that rear gunner and its ability to turn with a Spitfire.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

Could my different impression be caused by the difference in environment and targets?

This is a good point. And, it's not just AI gunners, it's just the nature of defensive gunnery that you'll mostly be aiming at the front of incoming fighters - either aiming directly at them as they attack you, or taking leading shots them as they pass.

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

Agree about the Stuka toughness, the LMGs on the Hurricane IIB really do a number on its wing tanks.

??? I find that those massive rows of .303 machine guns on the Hurricane MkI, MkIIB and Spitfire I are some of the most useless weapons in the game, at least when it comes to attacking anything other than light fighters at close range.

Against anything but the lightest, most lightly armored aircraft, you basically need a PK, a critical hit or a fire to take down your foe. And, to have a hope of getting any of those things, you need to get close, aim carefully and shoot bursts of at least 3-5 seconds.

Of course, that's also historically accurate performance. There's a very good reason why the RAF switched to cannons.

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

Also, its lack of toughness is offset by that rear gunner and its ability to turn with a Spitfire.

At least for AI, I don't find that Stuka gunners are that tough, nor do Stukas really try to maneuver defensively, even when they're not in formation. They're pretty much sitting ducks unless they have escorts.

[horseback]

My understanding was that the "beginning of the end" for the IJN were the Battles of Midway and Guadacanal. I don't dispute that the the F6F and F4U sped the destruction of the IJN (and IJAAF in New Guinea), but arguably pilots flying the P-40, P-39/P-400 and F4F paved the way.

In particular, after Midway and Guadacanal, the Japanese supply chain was never as secure as it should have been, so Japanese planes and pilots never got the support they really needed. Japanese policy towards its pilots was also, quite frankly, brutal, which didn't help matters either. All that led to a loss of effectiveness.

But, then maybe that's too much revisionist history on my part.

What is indisputably is that by 1944, when the the F6F and F4U really sealed their reputations, the Japanese were desperate and there was just no comparison between pilot quality and technical support. But, I say that without meaning to detract from the reputation of either plane, or the men who flew them. I think that you're right that 1943 was the year that the tide really turned, and both the F6F and F4U helped to do do that.

The Guadalcanal campaign didn't end until late spring/early summer of 1943, after the first several squadrons of Corsairs had deployed. Combined with Midway, the cream of the IJN's fighter force were eliminated, but Rabaul remained a menace in the Solomons into the following spring of 1944, due in part to the IJA's addition to the mix there. In addition, the IJN's carrier forces were still formidable; they gave the USN a pretty good thumping at Santa Cruz in '43, which led to our being a lot more cautious until the new carriers got in-theater in late summer '43.

The arrival of the new fast carriers equipped with the significantly superior Hellcat, coupled with the land-based Corsairs along the Solomon chain is what tipped the scales.

I'll give plenty of credit to the P-40 and P-38 (which entered combat in New Guinea in November of 1942), but the P-39 was a disaster in the Southwest Pacific. Poor support, bad documentation and poorly prepared pilots and maintenance personnel rushed to the theater doomed it and ruined its reputation, regardless of its capabilities on paper. It was almost strictly a ground support aircraft in the Pacific the moment a viable alternative became available.

The P-40 and the Wildcats gave the USN and USAAF parity at best, and the P-38s were never available in adequate numbers anywhere until the middle of1944. The F6F and the F4U (which had its own production issues early on) were the keys to the turn around.

cheers

horseback

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

My view of the toughness of the planes being discussed is a bit different from many of the posters here, maybe because I fly mostly online where I rarely attack bombers and their AI gunners. I find the P-47's wings to be extremely tough, same goes for the F4U. They can take a lot of damage and still maintain lift and stability, unlike Yak or 190 wings. Their engines can be damaged lightly, but I rarely see one knocked out completely (though when it does happen it's on the P-47, not the F4U). PKs are rare, and tails falling off are even rarer.

Could my different impression be caused by the difference in environment and targets? AI gunners on bombers will usually be looking directly into your engine, even if you don't attack from six o'clock. Unlike AI fighers, human opponents will usually avoid the head-on and will maneuver onto your six, where they will have a good look at your wings when you make a slight turn. If they shoot directly from your six, they may damage your controls (I lose elevators and rudders often in the F4U and P-47), but your engine will be the furthest target for them.

Agree about the Stuka toughness, the LMGs on the Hurricane IIB really do a number on its wing tanks. It is an old, slow, big plane that I imagine was armored more from the bottom than the top though. Also, its lack of toughness is offset by that rear gunner and its ability to turn with a Spitfire.

'Looking into your engine' should be meaningless at ranges of more than 100m for the best aerial marksmen who ever lived; you're shooting from a platform moving in three dimensions at a target less than 2 meters square and also moving in three dimensions (not the same dimensions and directions as you are). In real terms, until the range was so short that relative motion was meaningless or your attacker was flying in close formation, hitting him was usually a matter of chance. At ranges over 100m, the average man can barely discern that there is a cowl, much less hit it under the conditions that would prevail in WWII.

Shooting accurately from a maneuvering aircraft, even a bomber in a gentle bank, was next to impossible. Ai gunnery from rear gunners and ground flak in this game has always been ridiculously accurate, probably more than modern automated systems today.

Unrealistic accuracy at unrealistic ranges + unrealistic DMs=unrealistic results.

cheers

horseback

[Woke Up Dead]

Originally Posted by horseback

'Looking into your engine' should be meaningless at ranges of more than 100m for the best aerial marksmen who ever lived; you're shooting from a platform moving in three dimensions at a target less than 2 meters square and also moving in three dimensions (not the same dimensions and directions as you are). In real terms, until the range was so short that relative motion was meaningless or your attacker was flying in close formation, hitting him was usually a matter of chance. At ranges over 100m, the average man can barely discern that there is a cowl, much less hit it under the conditions that would prevail in WWII.

Shooting accurately from a maneuvering aircraft, even a bomber in a gentle bank, was next to impossible. Ai gunnery from rear gunners and ground flak in this game has always been ridiculously accurate, probably more than modern automated systems today.

Unrealistic accuracy at unrealistic ranges + unrealistic DMs=unrealistic results.

cheers

horseback

I hear you, but your reply, and most of your subsequent replies in this thread make good arguments about unrealistic accuracy of AI gunners, not about the unrealistic fragility of the American engines. If you try attacking the same bombers with the same tactics in a different planes, you might conclude the R-2800 is just as tough or tougher. That's certainly the impression I get.

I would rank the fragility of engines according to their aircraft roughly like this, from most delicate to toughest:

- Bf-109
- Ki-61
- P-40
- P-51
- Hurricane
- Tempest
- Italian liquid-cooled planes
- P-38
- Spitfire
- MiG
- P-47
- F4U
- Yak
- LaGG
- F4F
- FW-190
- La 5/7
- P-39
- Japanese radial-powered fighters

[ElAurens]

I can attest to the P 40 one shot insta-stop.

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Woke Up Dead

I hear you, but your reply, and most of your subsequent replies in this thread make good arguments about unrealistic accuracy of AI gunners, not about the unrealistic fragility of the American engines. If you try attacking the same bombers with the same tactics in a different planes, you might conclude the R-2800 is just as tough or tougher. That's certainly the impression I get.

I would rank the fragility of engines according to their aircraft roughly like this, from most delicate to toughest:

- Bf-109
- Ki-61
- P-40
- P-51
- Hurricane
- Tempest
- Italian liquid-cooled planes
- P-38
- Spitfire
- MiG
- P-47
- F4U
- Yak
- LaGG
- F4F
- FW-190
- La 5/7
- P-39
- Japanese radial-powered fighters

Part of my argument, probably obscured by the more obvious gunnery flaws, is that some aircraft are disproportionately hit even more than that their DMs are overstated/flawed. I've flown the 109 and 190 regularly since the first year the sim was sold, and while the 109 has an inline engine, I've never felt that it took a disproportionate number of engine losses, certainly nothing like the P-40. My immediate impression is that the 190 loses its engine or takes engine damage quite a bit more often than the 109. It also gets hit more often, even though it was a bit faster and capable of rapid change in direction and it needs considerably less firing time to obtain the destruction of its target. Once hit though, it usually gives you reduced power for a good while rather than packing it in immediately the way an R-2800 or the P-40's Allison often will.

Admittedly, by this point I have about 10-20 times as many 'hours' in the 109/190 over the P-40 in all their respective versions, but the P-40 hours are still pretty significant. I have less time in the Mustang than the P-40, but it seems far more likely to lose its prop pitch than other aircraft that have a DM that includes loss of PP (how about the Zero for a comparison? It's props were license built Hamilton Standard models, and I've never lost PP in the few combats I've tried in it, and that spinner is -or should be- like the Mustang's, a big target). I haven't flown the Ki-61, the Tempest or the Italians in any appreciable combat situations, so I cannot offer an opinion on them.

I tried one short campaign in the early Hurri, but it was enormously frustrating not least because the campaign was developed for an earlier patch of the game, and some things just weren't possible that had been before the notorious 4.0x patches. It did seem to me to be in much the same class as the P-40, as far as the glass jaw.

The Hellcat in my opinion is far more likely to get hit than either the P-47 or the Corsair; in ratio of hits to engine losses, they appear to me to be about even --much too much damage much too often. Similarly, the Mustang is far more likely to get hit than a Spitfire, although the Spit seems to lose control surfaces or take a PK more easily.

Of the five though, the Hellcat is easily the greatest bullet magnet; it's like that one kid in your group of friends who was always caught or recognized when all of you were doing something you shouldn't.

Yaks and LaGGs seem to me to be about right; I have more hours in them and P-39s than the P-40, and the constant concern in Soviet fighters was overheating; hits to the engine make it overheat or die fairly quickly; the engines were always very closely cowled, so any hit to the engine covers almost invariably led to hitting the engine (oddly enough, even though hits to the engine tend to take it out, it rarely damages the MGs mounted above it).

This is also true of the 190, the Lavotchkins, the P-38, and the Ki-43, but not nearly so much in the case of the P-47, Hellcat, Mustang, Spitfire, Hurricane or P-40; these aircraft look remarkably abbreviated when the engine covers or cowls are removed for maintenance, even more so than the 109. I am also aware that the P-40 and the Mustang had some armor plating behind their spinners to protect the engine and pilot in a headon fire situation (which doesn't seem to be very effective in-game...)

The Soviets also don't seem to get hit as easily overall as some western types; they and the Airacobra seem to benefit from some sort of 'grace' that doesn't extend to the P-40, the Spit and later American types, which a few passes against a flight of He-111s (armed with multiple low-tech single 7.9mm popgun positions) would quickly illustrate.

The F4F is actually safer than the F6F against the Betty in my experience, despite being slower and less armored (and the early war examples of the F4F-3 lacked self-sealing tanks and pilot armor; first clashes in the Pacific featured boilerplate literally being hand installed on the hanger deck the night before a mission).

Fragility seems to me to be at least partly as much of a function of how likely you are to be hit; it would be interesting to do a comparison of attacking passes at bombers generally acknowledged as particularly dangerous in spite of being lightly armed, like the He-111 or the Betty. If you made multiple passes in each aircraft at roughly the same angles and speeds, you can observe which aircraft take disproportionate hits and or damage, and draw your own conclusions.

cheers

horseback

[Igo kyu]

I'm currently using 4.7, but I agree with everything Horseback says about over accurate bomber gunners, it always has been ridiculous, at least since the original Forgotten Battles.

The problem is, the only information the program has, is the exactly correct position, speed and heading of our fighters. That's available, with no work, somewhere that can be got at easily (if it wasn't, we wouldn't be in a flight sim). Generating approximations for those data, particularly accurate approximations of the data a human in the relative position of the gunner in of a bomber would have had, would be hard.

There's probably the processor grunt to do it now, but there wasn't back when IL*2 was originally written, so the code presumably wasn't writen that way. To get to a position where it could be done would presumably require a wholesale re-write, such that you might as well write a completely new simulation.

On another angle, most big air battles resulted in very small loss ratios even for the losers, the day the Stukas withdrew from the BoB, their losses were something like 20%. In IL*2 we often get most or even all of the bombers, I agree that the fighter losses should be lower than they are, but the bomber losses ought to be lower too.

[JtD]

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

I'm currently using 4.7, but I agree with everything Horseback says about over accurate bomber gunners, it always has been ridiculous, at least since the original Forgotten Battles.

4.7 and 4.11+ are like day and night. Gunners received a complete rework with 4.11 (think it was, maybe even 4.10) and since then, they just suck. Sometimes they get lucky, but mostly they suck.

[majorfailure]

The engine on the P-39 is not tough at all - if you get shot from behind and slightly off-angle. Against ground fire and defensive fire it is very well protected.

And vs. gunner accuracy -currently playing vs. US/British, and on the first few missions I bothered to make head on or high off angle attacks vs. B25G/J -until I got lazy and tried to shoot a few from behind and it worked like a charm. Just go in there from 6'o clock below/high with lots of speed, shoot, and break at the latest at 200m.

Though VS. B-24 or B-17 this does not work. But using high or beam or head on attacks with good speed one nearly does not get hit. I have seen a flight of AI B-17s chopped up by AI Bf109G6s from behind with no losses once or twice, but most of the time the AI Bf109s lose one or two. And they more or less park behind the B-17s.

I like the way gunners are now, the still pose a limited threat - you can't get totally careless, but its not as fustrating as 4.09 and before where they shot out your pilot/engine with 50% reliabilty from 300m+ no matter what angle and speed you had -and even regularly killed you on head on passes.

If anything is done to lower their accuracy even more we will arrive at ridiculos scenarios where a single AI Bf109G will shoot down a whole flight of B-17s.