are gunners hits counted in damage model?

[III/JG52_Otto_-I-]

I feel that from several patches ago, the rear gunners are very inefficient, they are doing almost nothing. 
Gunners are useful today compared with two years ago, when the Pe-2, A-20, were almost qualified snipers. Even the Bf-110 gunner two years ago were capable to damage severely an enemy fighter in game, if it remains in pursuit at 6 o´clock more than few seconds.
today is like a joke, because the gunner of Bf-110 start shooting after enemy kill my pilot-doll.
 

this evening in Combat Box server i´ve noticed, that my gunner even hit the enemy with 7 bullets MG17, but none inflicted enemy damage was recorded.  

This raises the question of whether all the bullets fired are active and causing damage, or only a few of them are active, or the weapons of the gunners don't shoot active bullets.

Edited November 19, 2024 by III/JG52_Otto_-I-

[kraut1]

5 hours ago, III/JG52_Otto_-I- said:

I feel that from several patches ago, the rear gunners are very inefficient, they are doing almost nothing. 
Gunners are useful today compared with two years ago, when the Pe-2, A-20, were almost qualified snipers. Even the Bf-110 gunner two years ago were capable to damage severely an enemy fighter in game, if it remains in pursuit at 6 o´clock more than few seconds.
today is like a joke, because the gunner of Bf-110 start shooting after enemy kill my pilot-doll.
 

this evening in Combat Box server i´ve noticed, that my gunner even hit the enemy with 7 bullets MG17, but none inflicted enemy damage was recorded.  

This raises the question of whether all the bullets fired are active and causing damage, or only a few of them are active, or the weapons of the gunners don't shoot active bullets.

In this video of a SP Mission you can see an IL2 gunner hitting my FW (02:20):

ailevel normal, visible damage (main damage by IL2 debris)

Worst gunner ai was from my point of view ca. 1 year ago, now it is a bit better.

MG17: a light MG in rifle calibre, will be stopped by armor plates, bullet proof windscreen, only effective if you hit coolers, water cooled engines, the pilot.

But I have to admit that I have no experience with multiplayer.

 

[Stonehouse]

Stock gunners can fire out to 3x normal range while they exceed a set amount of ammo. However particularly low skill gunners fire very wildly (error is calculated for each of the 3 dimensions and each value is multiplied by range for the rounds fired. So, if you had an error of 0.1 calculated for the Y co-ordinate axis and the target was 1000m distant you have a 100m error in that axis). The burst lengths are also one size fits all and are a random value between 1 and 1.5 secs with a random wait time between 1 and 2 secs between bursts. So, they tend to overheat their guns which leads to greater dispersion on top of their wild shooting plus they quickly run out of ammo. There are quite a lot of other factors involved. I believe they do fire damaging rounds (not fake ones) but just don't connect that often with a penetrating hit that travels through something important..........I believe the damage model could be thought of as a collection of bubbles of different sizes arranged appropriately within an aircraft shaped container. A bubble might be a pilot or a gun or an engine or a propeller blade or an armor sheet or a control surface or something else the devs have specifically defined. I think the space in between bubbles contributes to energy loss for the round penetrating the aircraft shaped structure but not damage. My thought is this is meant to represent energy loss due to going through noncritical surfaces and structures within the aircraft so that if the round hits a bubble after travelling X meters through the aircraft it will have less energy when the armor values for the bubble are checked to see if the round will penetrate and be allowed to cause damage. The bubbles also contribute to energy loss too so passing through several bubbles (such as armor sheets) slows the round down reducing its penetration power.  So even if the round hits, then particularly for AP ammo you need to figure out whether the round can penetrate the material at the hit location at the range the round has travelled with whatever speed it has at time of checking penetration. If it doesn't penetrate then I believe it doesn't cause damage. 

 

HE is different. Each shell explodes generating a set number of fragments plus the explosive damage. The fragments can each possibly penetrate and damage something and the explosive damage obviously also can exceed a protection value and cause damage. 

 

Not really a solution for a public MP server unless the server admin wants to run server-side mods but for MP with friends and offline you could try the AI Gunnery mod which attempts to address much of what you are talking about regarding gunner fire discipline and accuracy. If there was a way to allow the server to run mods while preventing the clients to also do so then there may be a solution for public servers, I just am not aware of any way to do so.

 

In the AI Gunnery mod I introduced different burst lengths and wait times based on ammo supply as well as rejigging a lot of the parameters feeding into the gunner error calculation along with altering how AI fighter pilots fight (for instance currently for instance an stock Ace fighter pilot will begin to fire at 800m from their target with high accuracy - I think this may possibly be the reason behind gunners being allowed to fire out to 3x normal range. If they did not do so, then in the stock game the bombers are pretty easy kills for anything above a novice pilot. In stock novice pilots wait until they are within 400m, average is 500m, high is 600m. AI Gunnery works to change these values to something that seems to me to be more realistic)

 

There is a lot of info and theory about the gunner error calc here https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/78388-ai-gunnery-mod/

 

Edited November 19, 2024 by Stonehouse