|
|
|||||||
| IL-2 Sturmovik The famous combat flight simulator. |
 |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
|
|
|
#1
07-27-2013, 07:00 PM
|
|||
|
|||
RE: Jug's (or Hellcat or Corsair's) size relative to an La-5 would be essentially irrelevant to the human eye until you get within shooting range, at which point it will seem closer than it actually is and distort your aim, particularly if it is not a level 'dead six' (distance being crucial to being able to gauge any deflection shot). Being larger should actually make your chances of being hit smaller at any appreciable distance or angle.
LW along Channel Front in early-mid '43 had a terrible time adjusting to targets the size of the B-17 and P-47 after two years of shooting at Spits and Blenheim sized bombers in daylight. Their reflexes told them to shoot much sooner at the bigger targets, and they had to learn all over again to recognize what they were shooting at and to adjust their aims accordingly. Since AI know to the proverbial gnat's eyelash how far away you are and how fast you are moving, you're hosed. Literally. Since AI gunners can spin a turret and point a 15kg or more cannon to just the right spot to shoot into your engine cowling or cockpit in less time than it takes for Chuck Norris to deliver a spinning sidekick to your ribs, you're hosed again, even if you're crossing his cone of fire at an extreme angle at high speed a split second after flailing his aircraft with a two or three second burst of 4 or 3 x .50" (which in real life should have the guy stunned and frozen at his guns, if not wondering what that warm wet feeling in his pants was). Yeah, that's realistic. Let's fix the AI gunners. First, change the rules for AI aiming to a circle the diameter of the target wing span at any distance greater than 150m, and then to the fuselage area as the circled area as range and angle decreases. That's realistic. No more aiming at a moving point that is less than a fraction of a degree in width from 500m away (and hitting it-ever). Use your random number generator to scatter the shots evenly in that circle; hitting the middle should be a matter of chance--in fact, I could argue that a third of the shots should be outside the circle by a degree or two, depending upon actual range and relative speed. Machine guns and cannon shake in your hands. Real-life gunners did not have precise awareness of how far away their targets were, how fast they were moving, what direction they were moving or how big they were; they aimed at an imaginary circle around the largest part of the target and guesstimated where it would be when their bullets reached that point. Given the vibration of the guns they served and the constant motion of the platform they were in, that was the best they could do, and they hardly ever guessed right. Bombers in WWII were dependent upon putting up as many rounds as possible to dissuade fighter attacks, which meant large tight formations to bring as many guns to bear as possible in the hope that somebody would guess right. Second, assign a speed limit of X degrees per second of rotation for the gun installation type, with a hesitation and re-orientation period when the target is obscured by clouds, other aircraft or your own tail structure. There are mods already out there that slow the ai gunners down, and they work. I don't care if it will be applied to the mouse gunners or not; I find the whole defensive gun crew model of the sim to be oversimplified and unrealistic. Every time I tried it, I wanted to wash my hands afterwards. I'd rather play Call of Duty; at least those guns will simulate the effects of gunshake and pull. Third, any time that the gunner's aircraft is not flying fairly straight and level, his accuracy should be dropped by at least 33% and decrease more in proportion with G-force/angle or being hit by enemy fire. My aircraft bounces and jerks when it is hit by heavy fire so AI Joe's airplane should too, and Joe should be trying to keep his seat or stay on his feet while that idiot in the front seat is flipping the aircraft around. In those situations, the gun becomes a handle or something to hide behind, not a weapon. It gets a bit old when you're pounding the living daylights out of an Me-110 (specifically the wingroot/cockpit area) and hear a thump and see the HUD message "Machine Gun Disabled", "Fuel Leak" and/or hear the prop run away. If Hans in the back seat isn't in the process of being converted to hamburger, he ought to have the decency and good sense to be crapping his drawers instead of drawing a bead on a component of my aircraft a foot (30cm) wide and two hundred and fifty meters away and moving at a relative speed of 100kph to him. DMs become a bit less important for the off-liner if certain parts of the AI are brought within human limits. Bestowing the effectiveness of eight or ten rear gunners on one aircraft is no longer necessary or justifiable; we can put a ton of aircraft and objects into a mission without limiting our FPS these days, so one rear gunner doesn't need to stand in for a wholes squadron's worth of the poor buggers. cheers horseback |
|
#3
07-27-2013, 10:49 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
An ai bomber is in reality a single unit with near global situational awareness that it exploits mercilessly; attacking Player has the left wing lined up at 300m, so the microsecond his finger presses the trigger, roll slightly right. Player has set up sufficient lead to hit the ai's fuselage while climbing, but it's concealed from him by his cowling at the moment he must fire, therefore change direction and at the precise moment he enters the rear gunner's cone of fire as the aircraft rolls, shoot out his engine or knock off his wing with a burst of LMG. No delays for communication either way, they ignore the necessity for bombers to stay in formation, and of course the gunners are accurate at all angles at distances up to 750m, or twice the Player's convergence, whichever is greater. A human player can't do that; in all honesty, no real life bomber crew had or could have had that level of awareness or communicated between each other that quickly and accurately, even after years together. And the gunners never had that kind of accuracy at any angle or range. Your 'Veteran' ai gunners are not remotely as hamstrung as the historical human beings they are supposedly simulating; if the record is any indication, bomber gunners were spectacularly ineffective throughout the war. The 8th Bomber Command would have loved to have one bullet out of every two hundred fired actually hit a German fighter. I would expect that the LW 's losses to the bomber formations would have quadrupled at the very least. cheers horseback |
|
#5
07-28-2013, 03:35 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Lol
your complaining about ai gunnery not being realistic tell me what part of your aircraft's guns are realistic your using to try shoot them down ? No overheating no jamming no freezing etc etc etc................. The ai gunnery is what it is, learn how to attack bombers with the games limitations. I prefer the head on attack, or across the wings high speed pass using a technique with the gunsight to extreme left or right of the screen to make it impossible for me to attack from the rear quarters, leaving the sight in these positions stops you getting in behind the bombers forcing you to attack at an angle from the side, sounds strange but it works. 
|
|
#6
07-28-2013, 09:15 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
Compared to aiming with a mouse while riding on rails, I'd say it's a bit more complicated gunnery model, wouldn't you? Against an ai with exact knowledge of my aircraft's distance and vector, plus all the computing power of a modern computer (mine, without my bloody permission!), unless I randomly change directions every two seconds or so, I'm screwed at least half the time if the bugger is rated 'Ace' or 'Veteran' as soon as I get within 500 meters. When flying offline campaigns, using the tactics that were actually successful against individual, or even small groups of bombers or Me 110s or 210s is suicidal. It's a perversion of history, and it can be fixed, at least for the offline user. Slow the gunner's rate of rotating their guns. Limit their effective range to the historical levels of 150m maximum; you can increase an attacker's probability of being hit beyond that as a function of how many defending aircraft are in range. Make the aiming point a circle the diameter of the greatest visible dimension from the angle viewed; that is how human beings aim something as imprecise as a machine gun at targets that far away and coming at them rapidly. Factor in gunshake and aircraft motion. That, more than anything else, is what made hitting anything more than a couple of degrees wide so difficult with 'controllable' short bursts. Call of Duty can do it; DT should be able to as well. And we are still left to deal with the improbable fragility of the R-2800 engine and the aircraft it powered. cheers horseback |
|
#7
07-28-2013, 09:54 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
|
|
#8
07-29-2013, 10:58 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
 Quote:
Planes : Ju88 and P47D Distance: 200m Test method: Both planes are on the airfield, P47 engine running. Player is in Ju88 rear gunner position. P47 is behind Ju88 with front of the engine exposed to the gunner like in typical 6 o'clock attack. Result: Bullets Fired: 1200 Bullets Hit Air: 1047 P47 engine still running although at 90% and with some components damaged. And as many times before FACTS>>>FEELINGS , P47 is one tough MOFO and for every FG guy's story about one ping kill there is a JG guy with the story about P47 soaking dozens of 30mm hits and flying away.
__________________
|
|
#9
07-28-2013, 08:27 PM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
There were two major raids on Schweinfurt in 1943: August 17th and October 14th, both considered disasters for 8th Bomber Command. The raid in August cost 60 bombers (with 10 crewmen each) lost over the Continent with another 150 or so damaged and over 40 scrapped after returning and carrying several dead and wounded crewmen. German losses along the entire Western front for the entire day: 27 aircraft (against official claims of 148 by the bombers' gunners), and another 10-13 lost in a series of sharp encounters against the 56th FG and other P-47 groups using pressurized belly tanks for nearly the first time. Some sources indicate that the actual German losses were even lower (17 was the lowest figure for the day I have read). The October disaster is generally remembered as "Black Thursday"; another 60 bombers lost, 7 more scrapped upon return, plus another 142 ‘damaged’ for German losses of 38 fighters, seven of which can be credited to the only Allied FG to successfully make rendezvous, the 353rd. Every history of the bombing campaigns of WWII makes it clear that even the fastest, highest flying heavy bombers could not defend themselves against single and twin engined fighters; even at the end of the war, US bomber formations caught without escorts took heavy casualties at the hands of relatively inexperienced German fighter formations, even 'lightly armed' ones. As I recall, both raids experienced losses in the 10% plus range, which means that there were at least 500 bombers in the skies on those days, each mounting 10 .50" heavy machine guns manned by some supposedly very well trained gunners most of whom were American farmboys raised with rifle and shotgun to supplement the family diet; it's not like they didn't know how to shoot, or lead a moving target. It's just unbelievably hard to hit a moving airplane from another moving airplane in any direction other than straight ahead or directly behind; vary the angle left, right, up or down and your firing solution becomes incredibly complicated. cheers horseback |
|
#10
07-29-2013, 11:11 PM
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Quote:
Quote:
Even better would be if a critical failure with visual IFF meant that allied planes might accidentally attack you! That was a common problem for Mustang pilots, as well as Soviet fighter pilots operating near U.S. planes. And, of course, certain planes would be easier to identify that others, for example the P-38 was specifically used on some occasions because its appearance was so distinctive. Quote:
Quote:
1) Reduce accuracy by some percentage for manually-turned guns vs. turrets to simulate vibration from the airplane and guns. 2) Reduce accuracy by some percentage if the angle of the gun is at more than something like 15-20 degrees from the the plane's fuselage, to simulate slipstream effects. 3) Reduce accuracy by some percentage as the plane's speed gets much above 150 mph, to reflect wind buffeting. Quote:
The game already models this. Other than that, your points about hesitation and reorientation are valid. Currently, one of the nice things about fighter AI in 4.12 is that they will pause for a moment before choosing another target, whether to check 6 or just to determine that they're actually pointing themselves at a bogie. Quote:
And, yes, CoD seems to get a lot of the details of running a heavy bomber right. Intercoms, oxygen supplies, effects of wounds at high altitudes, loosening jammed bombs, intercom communications, switching fuel tanks or moving ammo around the plane, and maps that let you fly from London to Berlin and back, maybe not in CoD, but certainly not in IL2. |
|
|
|
Hybrid Mode
