Machine gun damage effect on wings

[Heckpupper]

VIDEO OF THE TESTS   TAC VIEW SCREENSHOTS

 

As shown in the video I have conducted a few tests to see how rifle caliber rounds affect aircraft. The idea was to see what effect on aerodynamics and flight characteristics the bullet holes are going to have, and whether or not small caliber rounds can do critical damage to structures of the wing. 

 

What I certainly didn't expect, was to see wings falling away, after what seemed just a few dozen rounds. After the first such accident I tried most single engine aircraft available in-game, just to see that results are pretty much the same in each case. 

 

As far as I know rifle caliber rounds do not have enough power to cause critical structural damage to wings or wing roots. I'm not quite sure how damage modeling system works in BoX but I think that tuning down the destructive power of the small caliber machine guns might be a good idea.

 

Hope that someone looks into that, thanks!

Best regards.

 

 

[LuftAsher]

This just isn't really logical. More sustained fire at a higher caliber (.50s maybe) I could understand. But this sort of damage from 7.7s doesn't seem right to me at all. I hope this will be addressed. The DM in BoX is pretty awesome to look at, but I feel like things are a little too fragile across the board sometimes. 

[JaffaCake]

Haven't it already been known that DM is basically a bunch of healthbars that is depleted by firing at it?

[ACG_Secu]

1 hour ago, JaffaCake said:

a bunch of healthbars that is depleted by firing at it?

 

Maybe, but these healthbars should be depleted less by rifle caliber, and why not never reach the "broken wing level" without beeing depleted by canon rounds.

 

Cheers

 

[Ehret]

1 hour ago, No_501Secu1 said:

 

Maybe, but these healthbars should be depleted less by rifle caliber, and why not never reach the "broken wing level" without beeing depleted by canon rounds.

 

You need around 18 rifle caliber rounds to approximate the raw destructive power of the Hispano 20mm. The combined RoF of MGs used is 40 rounds/s and multiple bursts from close distance were made so it's possible that hundreds of full KE 7.92mm connected. Dozen(s) 20mm should have a similar destructiveness, thus, results showed in the video don't seem overly erroneous, IMHO.

[ACG_KaiLae]

3 hours ago, JaffaCake said:

Haven't it already been known that DM is basically a bunch of healthbars that is depleted by firing at it?

 

Not by any information that I know. 

[Mauf]

I guess as with so many things when dealing with modelling: It's complicated.

 

Technically, even the 7.92mm bullet should be able to eventually "saw" through the spars and break the wing. Saw is a very loose term, I would guess "inflicting enough fatigue to an area of the spar to finally make it collapse under the G stress of flight" is more accurate. Problem is: under normal conditions you shouldn't really get enough concentration on a narrow enough area of the wing spar to sufficiently weaken it structurally (note dispersion, spread, defensive maneuvers,etc). So for all practical purposes: 8mms chopping wings off should be a very rare thing. Now we have a sim and as sims do, they have to make compromises. So in a sense (with the hitbox healthbar modelling), the shooting the wing off is not entirely unrealistic but too easy in the game. Now for the flipside: How often do you have a target that holds still for you to continuously place shots at a very specific area? So for a practical application, the current modelling is okayish (outside of weird edge-cases).

 

Same applies to the HE modelling for explosive shells right now. It's not realistic. The alternatives are either so complicated they're not applicable (with the current tech) or cause a host of weird effects that aren't realistic either.

 

P.S.: Good to see more ACG folks in BOX, hope you guys have a good time:D

[-=PHX=-SuperEtendard]

Do you have a mission log showing how many rounds impacted? These guns have rather high rate of fire, but you aren't hitting all of the rounds. 

 

It would be interesting to see how the other rifle mgs compare (ShKAS, Breda 7.7mm, Browning .30 cal and .303s)

Edited April 12, 2018 by -=PHX=-SuperEtendard

[FTC_Kildren]

1 hour ago, Mauf said:

I guess as with so many things when dealing with modelling: It's complicated.

 

Technically, even the 7.92mm bullet should be able to eventually "saw" through the spars and break the wing. Saw is a very loose term, I would guess "inflicting enough fatigue to an area of the spar to finally make it collapse under the G stress of flight" is more accurate. Problem is: under normal conditions you shouldn't really get enough concentration on a narrow enough area of the wing spar to sufficiently weaken it structurally (note dispersion, spread, defensive maneuvers,etc). So for all practical purposes: 8mms chopping wings off should be a very rare thing. Now we have a sim and as sims do, they have to make compromises. So in a sense (with the hitbox healthbar modelling), the shooting the wing off is not entirely unrealistic but too easy in the game. Now for the flipside: How often do you have a target that holds still for you to continuously place shots at a very specific area? So for a practical application, the current modelling is okayish (outside of weird edge-cases).

 

Same applies to the HE modelling for explosive shells right now. It's not realistic. The alternatives are either so complicated they're not applicable (with the current tech) or cause a host of weird effects that aren't realistic either.

 

P.S.: Good to see more ACG folks in BOX, hope you guys have a good time:D

 

We have been here the whole time  but were starting the process of moving the campaign over to BoX

[Pupo]

Great test and interesting results. I'll try to make some time to reproduce them in the next couple of weeks.

 

 

1 hour ago, -=PHX=-SuperEtendard said:

Do you have a mission log showing how many rounds impacted? These guns have rather high rate of fire, but you aren't hitting all of the rounds. 

 

It would be interesting to see how the other rifle mgs compare (ShKAS, Breda 7.7mm, Browning .30 cal and .303s)

 

Take a look at the Tacview screenshots in the OP. There you can see how many round were fired / how many rounds hit.

 

 

[ACG_HotLunch]

My pitchfork is ready, aye ready!

[-=PHX=-SuperEtendard]

52 minutes ago, Pupo said:

 

Take a look at the Tacview screenshots in the OP. There you can see how many round were fired / how many rounds hit.

 

 

Oh, I'm on the phone and the images don't show in a high enough resolution to read the text.

[JG1_Shadepiece]

Really interesting thread we have started here. I would absolutely love to have the damage model looked at, and ideally updated. I hace often felt that universally every fighter in the game was far too easy to destroy, and I believe that this is the right direction to go in order to prove that. It'd be incredible if we could have the most in-depth damage models ever, but I'd definitely settle for one that feels a little more true to RL.

[FTC_Spectre]

5 hours ago, Ehret said:

 

You need around 18 rifle caliber rounds to approximate the raw destructive power of the Hispano 20mm. The combined RoF of MGs used is 40 rounds/s and multiple bursts from close distance were made so it's possible that hundreds of full KE 7.92mm connected. Dozen(s) 20mm should have a similar destructiveness, thus, results showed in the video don't seem overly erroneous, IMHO.

 You need to take into account however that 7.92mm rounds will never equate to the same force of a 20mm round just because you fired more of the former, as you would need to continuously hit the same area and gradually take out more and more area since if you had a laser accurate machine gun like we do in BoX, you would be putting rounds through the same hole.  This test clearly shows that the destructive force of the machine guns are grossly inaccurate and cause significant damage contrary to what they would accomplish in a real life scenario.  Simply saying "Well if you fire enough machine gun rounds it equals one cannon round" is completely missing the point and oversimplifying the issue. 

[Mauf]

3 hours ago, No.501_Spectre said:

 You need to take into account however that 7.92mm rounds will never equate to the same force of a 20mm round just because you fired more of the former, as you would need to continuously hit the same area and gradually take out more and more area since if you had a laser accurate machine gun like we do in BoX, you would be putting rounds through the same hole.  This test clearly shows that the destructive force of the machine guns are grossly inaccurate and cause significant damage contrary to what they would accomplish in a real life scenario.  Simply saying "Well if you fire enough machine gun rounds it equals one cannon round" is completely missing the point and oversimplifying the issue. 

 

The problem is actually modelling things in a realistic way and not run into insane amounts of modelling work and computational overhead that would bring the simulation to its knees. Healthbar systems are a preferred method simply because they're easy on resources and flexible in application. Though it would still be a crutch of sorts, I would love to try a system like Secu suggests where 8mms can only decrease the structure healthbars to a certain point (>25% perhaps?) and everything below that point can only be drained by a higher caliber (with the current HE shrapnell model actually getting an exception to give it its ability to simulate the structure damage of an explosive charge). Functional components are exempt of course and can be fully destroyed as usual. That way, effects like increasing drag from structure damage by 8mms can still occur but you won't see wings flying off from it.

Edited April 12, 2018 by Mauf

[ACG_Smokejumper]

I do not see a huge problem. I would love to see more sophistication in the damage model though.

[Ehret]

7 hours ago, No.501_Spectre said:

Simply saying "Well if you fire enough machine gun rounds it equals one cannon round" is completely missing the point and oversimplifying the issue. 

 

The 7.92mm round can penetrate 5mm of steel from close distance. Airplanes are lightly build - even armor plates are not much thicker than that, usually. It will be tedious, but not impossible, to do a major structural damage with 7.92mm and this is what the video shows.

Edited April 13, 2018 by Ehret

[Heckpupper]

53 minutes ago, Ehret said:

 

The 7.92mm round can penetrate 5mm of steel from close distance. Airplanes are lightly build - even armor plates are not much thicker than that, usually. It will be tedious, but not impossible, to do a major structural damage with 7.92mm and this is what the video shows.

 

That's not exactly true. The bullet itself can obviously penetrate the wing all the way through, the question is whether or not can it do enough damage to the structural components to actually compromise the integrity of the wing itself. If it was as easy as it is in the video, it would happen often during opening stages of the war, e.g during Battle of France/Britain where majority of RAF aircraft were equipped with .303 MGs only. As we know, it was not the case - in fact, during those months not a single RAF pilot claimed to have shot a wing off the e/a (despite having 4 times the MGs compared to two MG17s used in the video). 

 

What's makes it all even more interesting are the TacView read outs. According to TV the MiG-3, Lagg3 and Yak-1 have lost their wings to 3,5 and 10 rounds respectively. If TV doesn't lie (and it was right about the amount of rounds fired) then something feels really off. What you're saying has some truth to it (enough rounds can propably do enough structural damage, enough being the key word though) but if current ruggedness of the a/c or MG damage output is somewhat close to RL no aircraft designers would even bother to put cannons on aircraft.

[Ehret]

Just now, 4./JG26_Onebad said:

What's makes it all even more interesting are the TacView read outs. According to TV the MiG-3, Lagg3 and Yak-1 have lost their wings to 3,5 and 10 rounds respectively. If TV doesn't lie (and it was right about the amount of rounds fired) then something feels really off. What you're saying has some truth to it (enough rounds can propably do enough structural damage, enough being the key word though) but if current ruggedness of the a/c or MG damage output is somewhat close to RL no aircraft designers would even bother to put cannons on aircraft.

 

Only 10 7.92mm hits per single target in the video? I concluded that hundred(s) of rounds must have struck - if this wasn't the case then something weird is going on, indeed.

[=EXPEND=13SchwarzeHand]

2 hours ago, 4./JG26_Onebad said:

 

That's not exactly true. The bullet itself can obviously penetrate the wing all the way through, the question is whether or not can it do enough damage to the structural components to actually compromise the integrity of the wing itself. If it was as easy as it is in the video, it would happen often during opening stages of the war, e.g during Battle of France/Britain where majority of RAF aircraft were equipped with .303 MGs only. As we know, it was not the case - in fact, during those months not a single RAF pilot claimed to have shot a wing off the e/a (despite having 4 times the MGs compared to two MG17s used in the video). 

 

What's makes it all even more interesting are the TacView read outs. According to TV the MiG-3, Lagg3 and Yak-1 have lost their wings to 3,5 and 10 rounds respectively. If TV doesn't lie (and it was right about the amount of rounds fired) then something feels really off. What you're saying has some truth to it (enough rounds can propably do enough structural damage, enough being the key word though) but if current ruggedness of the a/c or MG damage output is somewhat close to RL no aircraft designers would even bother to put cannons on aircraft.

 

3,5 hits sounds reallly off tbh

tac view doesn’t work 100% yet. Devs said that many times.

I cannot believe that you only hit the wing that many times. Look at the rate of fire of the mg 42. I cannot recall the exact number, but the number of hits

that you stated just do not sound reasonable. Btw I do not think many spitfires with inexperienced pilots at the beginning of

the Battle of Britain got as much time on target as you did in the video. If you get enough hits in one area, the material weakens and even if you do not sever it fully, remember there are great forces acting in the wing that will tear the wing off once it has been damaged enough by bullets.

OTOH AP shells still do too much structural damage. Been discussed many times before. I think that is exactly what can be seen in the video. Wings falling off where there should be just holes in the wing, but this is an AP issue in general and not related to MG.

Edited April 13, 2018 by =EXPEND=SchwarzeDreizehn