My Jug rant

[[F.Circus]sith1144]

On 8/9/2022 at 9:53 PM, -332FG-Zephyr096 said:

If the P-51 had regularly taken hundreds of rounds to shoot down a BF109 while only needing to get struck by a few rounds of 13mm in return to be shot down in real life, no way would it have been the main air-to-air fighter used by USAF for the latter half of the war. If you do not hit a vital part of the plane, like the gas tank/engine/pilot, you will have absolutely no effect on target.

The .50 cal is probably about as effective in-game as the .303 was IRL. 

It did take hundreds of rounds. Go open some of these encounter reports at random; theres very few indeed that fired less than 200 rounds per aircraft claimed destroyed http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/mustang/combat-reports.html

 

If you specifically mean hits, rather than overall rounds expended, it's the game you got wrong. The vast majority of P-51 vs 109 shootdowns in the game, almost 75%, take fewer than 50 hits. https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/79518-one-year-later-the-relative-effectiveness-of-the-50-in-multiplayer/

[-332FG-Zephyr096]

On 8/18/2022 at 9:32 AM, [F.Circus]sith1144 said:

It did take hundreds of rounds. Go open some of these encounter reports at random; theres very few indeed that fired less than 200 rounds per aircraft claimed destroyed http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/mustang/combat-reports.html

 

If you specifically mean hits, rather than overall rounds expended, it's the game you got wrong. The vast majority of P-51 vs 109 shootdowns in the game, almost 75%, take fewer than 50 hits. https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/79518-one-year-later-the-relative-effectiveness-of-the-50-in-multiplayer/

When I said "hundreds of rounds" I meant "hundreds of hits." With the accuracy percentage of real-world combat, needing 100s of hits to get a kill would mean expending most of the plane's ammunition on a single target. If we extrapolate that to in-game experiences, 25% of the time an American pilot fought a 110 or other twin-engine plane they'd be going through probably 75% or more of their ammunition to down a single aircraft.

Also, absolutely, I am not going to argue against your data.

My point was more that it is all too common for a singe-engine plane to take 100+ rounds of .50 cal to kill and not even seem to be damaged by it as far as combat effectiveness. I'm not saying it takes hundreds of hits every time, nor am I saying that it never takes a reasonable number of hits. My gripe is that the combat effectiveness is rarely impacted by .50 hits until a "golden bullet" either kills the engine or the pilot.

Also looking at the twin-engine aircraft, for all 3 it takes over 100 rounds to kill 25% of the time, which to me is way too high. The hundreds of hits outliers should be much, MUCH rarer I would think.

 

Edited August 19, 2022 by -332FG-Zephyr096