Barnacles

@Arthur-A said pretty much what I've found @Buzzsaw. Like I said earlier, I have found the SP campaign to be very nice, and broadly the AI has some excellent characteristics. But if you just tweaked the AI so it didn't do a weird rapid oscillation about the roll axis, (which as far as I can see a human player cannot get anywhere near replicating) that would be a massive improvement IMO.

This issue was solved I believe. You get 1,7 ATA up to just about 5k with ram air, and just below without, as it is modelled currently

Whilst recognising that there has been a lot of effort put into the nice SP campaigns that came with Tobruk, it is a shame that SP has issues regarding AI. The engine has so much potential for SP and co-op. Please, tweak the AI so it's like 1946.

So have the Hurricanes, Sopwith camels or x wings in those missions then. There's your compromise. I don't, but relatively it's personally a better experience for some without a 'zoo'. I'm just debating where the balance lies. I'm sure the server can cater for all tastes by varying its strictness wrt. plane availability on various maps.

What makes it a "late war setting" if you have those anachronistic planes then? Surely it's just a fantasy 'what if' map? I'm not saying that's not a valid things to desire or have, but if you're going to use the argument 'player X likes Y plane, and it's not better than Z, so put it in' you might just as well have just everything.

That would explain a lot, but when they issued this DM they said to "ignore the visuals, as they weren't necessarily tied". IIRC But TBF I'm totally with you on that theory until someone in the know confirms otherwise

Thanks ever so much. I would add that my test wasn't an outlier. I only recorded one sample exactly but I did another few single hits and they were all below 100kmh speed loss and around. 115 kmh for the tempest. I'd like to have a bigger sample though because I am genuinely surprised how little variation there is.

I've gone into a spin from being hit by 13mm he in a p47 in game.

I fail to see, even if you make a maximum allowance for the things that you mentioned above ( jaggedness, asymmetric losses, depth of hole etc. )And err on the side of high loss, that you'd end up with justification for most 20mm hits causing the same speed loss as lowering your landing gear. Just because I don't think the surface area etc is even close between the two. If they were of course a jagged, asymmetric hole would be way more draggy.I'd yield that you may be able to justify that worst case scenario damage might, but that's a stretch. And even then, many of your points don't apply because my test was in the tail, so lift loss did not apply But your points are nonetheless very valid, so thank you

"probably fatal due to loss of control" Doesn't really affect my point. It's still going to impart an increase in frontal area/increase the coefficient of drag of the wing. It may well cause airframe loss of control due to loss of lift, but so might say lowering only one of your landing gears in certain flight regimes. My point is, *you can argue* that because the area of the hole and the increase in frontal area is approx. the same as lowered landing gear/open doors, the decrease in speed owing to extra drag should be of the same order ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL ie assuming you could control the plane, which you probably couldn't. Yes you rightly point out that's an assumption so thanks for that.

This is a thirty millimetre hit. I'd say something like this should be causing that order of speed loss. Is it correct to say then that in game all 20mms are hitting like 30mm, in terms of aero damage at least?

I'm starting to think the 50 cal AP speed loss isn't too far off, but the HE rounds are over modelled and my initial thoughts were affected by the big disparity in game between HE and AP. In game, if you deliberately rip your gear doors off, and fly with your bomb bay doors open, in the pe2 S.35 you lose about 30kmh from your top speed. If you get hit by 1 x 151/20 HE you lose the same. Now the bomb bay alone looks like around 3 square meters at least. How big does the game think the holes made by HE rounds are? Also a tempest goes 600kmh clean at 2000m at full power. Lowering the landing gear slows you to 463kmh. In my test 1 x 20mm HE to the tail slows you down to 474kmh, (This value doesn't vary wildly in game, so HE and gear lowered speed losses are almost the same) Now I'm sure you can find an example of a plane damaged by 20mm he where the damage is going to without doubt cause speed loss, maybe so severe (panel loss) where it might be of the same order as lowering the landing gear, but there is no way that this should be the routine consequence of getting 1 x 20mm hit every single time (which I've pretty much found through testing) I know it was an effective weapon. BUT every time I've tested it, HE 151/20 causes massive speed loss comparable to things like much bigger holes, or something obviously more significant.

I always thought that the philosophy of using mine shells was to increase the skin damage of hits against aircraft, therefore it'd be better to have the shells detonate on impact anyway. Also 20mm mineshells could cause larger pieces of damage than the holes in the picture above, but that's one of my earlier points; the game acts like every mine shell does the massive damage you see sometimes, with massive speed loss always, not smaller handling effect commensurate with the photo's above.

I couldn't find anything that size that used a delay fuse. Some larger artillery shells did. Maybe there were some air to air shells with special delay fuses, where did you hear that?

There is a guncam of a p51 shooting a 190 where a wing panel can be seen ripped of the plane, without an internal explosion from ammo/gas bottles. This is certainly not typical and may be extremely rare, but it just goes to show there should be a range of skin damage, from small hole = negligible speed loss to panel off = moderate speed loss. When compared to HE rounds, the mg131/UB HE rounds seems to cause the same effect on aircraft handling as many many more AP hits. As for a 20mm hit you very rarely see less that 70kmh speed loss, and that's the same order as deploying flaps/ losing your landing gear covers. REMEBER this is the LOWEST effect you'll see from HE 20mm. It is of course credible, as 20mm mineshells were capable of doing extensive skin damage, but they also had a range of damage, which I think has been proven to be a hole whose size could not credibly cause the same order of speed loss as an airbrake.