OutOnTheOP

As far as I know, yes, The F7F was used as a night fighter in Korea. Too late for WW2, and retired well before Vietnam. Unsure about service by other than US. Sexy, sexy plane, though.

A-26/ B-26 Invader for sure. Served in WW2, Korea, AND Vietnam. It's fast as many fighters, as agile as some, can be used as a medium bomber, CAS with excellent strafing and rocket capability, was used as a night fighter... it has very broad appeal. For those with an MSFS fixation, it can even be used as an executive transport or water bomber ;)

Digging a bit deep there. Every article *also* includes an awful lot of "allegedly" and "reportedly". Don't be too eager to buy into it.

Why do people not notice that this is merely an allegation by an EX- airman, who may well have been relieved for incompetence, or simply didn't make the cut on force drawdown, and may therefore just have a grudge against certain leadership? Also, what's with the emotional attachment to the A-10? An AH-64 can put just as many rounds of 30mm on a target, only they can do it more accurately and the shells have a larger busting charger for greater explosive effect. The A-10 cannot survive in a near peer conflict, and is a bit extraneous for COIN

The Pima air museum in Tucson is excellent. B-36, B-29, about the only F-107 in the world, Shackleton, an exceptionally well preserved Ki-43 Oscar, and about a million others. There's a Wikipedia entry that has the full list. It's also right near the Davis Monthan AFB bone yard. And there's a museum- converted IBM site (Titan missile) from the 60s about a half hour to the south... but I guess it might be farther east than you're looking for

A way around the convergence issues of controlling multiple turrets on the same aircraft, sure. They are always in the same relative position to each other. But to control ship 2's guns from ship 1... I don't see how. The convergence angle would have to be dynamically computed as the bombers moved relative to each other. ... which would be pretty sloppy, still. I can see nominating targets for other aircraft, but even if the option was there I suspect it would be task saturation for the player. Easier just to let the AI do it's thing controlling the other ship's defensive fire

The idea has merit; it would be fantastic to have a flight of aircraft the player controlled, and have the player switch to another aircraft in the flight if shoot down, rather than respawning on the airfield. It's even a good idea for fighters. That said, I don't think a player could effectively control the guns on anything but his own aircraft; it is basically a HUGE convergence issue. Also, the DCS crowd tend to prefer immaculate detail; they would want gun positions individually modeled. But for a B-29, that's EXACTLY how the real gun director system works.

Agree. In fact, I'm rather surprised that the servers don't have WAY more AI fighters on them: the massive, swirling 20-on-20 furball is just so WW2. ... It would also help keep players from getting bored, as there would actually be targets they could find, and it would make for interesting "maintain your situational awareness and conserve your energy so you don't get bounced while target fixated" tactical problems

Yes and no. On the one hand, there remain plenty of targets vulnerable to high - caliber rifle for that are resistant to .30 caliber class weapons: such as up- armored utility vehicles and cargo trucks, most recon vehicles, and some APC (to include M113 and BTR). On the other hand, AT rifles are heavy abd bulky; it's more practical to use a disposable AT rocket for the same job; half the size and a fifth the weight

Ok; but first show me proof that the P-51D regularly broke wings. You aren't likely to find either. First, because any pilots that did it probably didn't live to report it, and second, because control forces required to exceed wing stress limits were pretty high - certainly on the Bf109. You are, in essence, complaining because you have been gifted with a gorilla- strength pilot in DCS Bf109. The down side is that he's strong enough to pull the wings off, but at the same time, you have been given the ability to pull maneuvers that a real pilot would have been incapable of in real life because of high stick forces. TL; DR: learn to fly the envelope, instead of whining about your magically 'roided out beefcake of a pilot.

Excluding map objects, I would prioritize: 1) AI heavy or medium bombers 2) medium AAA (37-40mm) 3) horse-drawn wagons 4) dug-in infantry and towed artillery positions 5) steam trains 6) Opel Blitz and Dodge 2 1/2 ton trucks 7) M2/ M3 and SdKfz251 halftracks 8 ) M4 Sherman/ Pzkw Mark IV tanks My logic is that we first need objects that fill roles or behaviors that cannot be filled by an existing surrogate (like medium AAA or turret-armed bombers), then next priority should be to the most common targets for our aircraft (IE, trucks are much more likely targets than tanks)

Arrrgh. It's "for all intents and purposes". Huge pet peeve of mine. That said, I agree with everything else in your post.

Closer to two and a half kilometers for the longest... but it's accuracy, not kinetic energy, that prevents longer shots. Curious if this GT bloke had ever actually *shot* a gun, because I have it on good authority that even .30 will ruin your whole day to 1000m and beyond. Bounce off, indeed :lol:

That's only 3.5 mils at 100 meters for the Mk108... which, incidentally, probably opens up to well beyond 5 mils at 1000 meters, given that they would go transonic well before then. The MG151/20 wing mount is a whopping 10 mils at a mere 100 meters, if your data is correct. Huh, guess that means my comment about the GAU-8 being more accuratate was... oh, man, what's the word... the antonym of "wrong"...? Gee, it's at the tip of my tongue!

I think he means the blade antenna?

Now, that's just ignorant. The GAU-8 is, and was designed explicitly as, one of the more accurate aerial guns out there. There are HUNTING RIFLES out there that barely hold 5 mils of accuracy beyond 700-800 meters.

You must have missed the part where I specifically excluded incompetent opponents. Against a competent opponent, it won't work. Luckily for us, there are plenty of incompetent pilots online. But in the real world, when someone is on your six, you are buying time, hoping that either your friends show up to deal with him, or the guy behind you makes a major blunder. There's no magic move that will get you from defensive to offensive unless they screw up. Every major air force out there agrees on this point. Exactly.

...which is exactly the point. I think we all need to admit that if there's someone on your six, in firing position, with anywhere close to the same energy state as you, you are NOT getting rid of him unless he's quite incompetent, or your aircraft has overwhelming speed/climb/acceleration advantages. At this point, there's little you can do to get him off your tail, so all you're doing is trying to get him to overshoot... not so that you can get on him (it won't happen), but to buy yourself time: that 30 seconds it takes him to go up and come back down the other side of his yo-yo is 30 seconds closer to home, or thirty more seconds for your wingman to come shoot him off your tail. On more than a few occasions, I've managed to fly myself home 20 minutes or more while under attack, merely by making them miss their high-speed pass and overshoot and extend, again, and again, and again. Is it optimal? No. But the reality of DCS is that quite often, an airplane will materialize on your tail before you even know it's in the area, because the spotting range is so short. And once they're back there, dead astern, in gun range, co-energy (or more), you just have to try to survive and hope they screw up. It happens to me every few sorties, even though I consider myself reasonably good at spotting aircraft in DCS; my wingmen on TS often can't find targets for a minute or two even when I direct them onto them, and express surprise I ever saw it to begin with. That said, the snap roll isn't the optimal maneuver to force those overshoots, as it DOES bleed entirely too much energy (and often a fair bit of altitude, to boot, given that situations in which it is appropriate, you're already fairly slow), but in certain cases- usually when they enemy is driving his nose right up your rudder- it can indeed force a quick overshoot and save your bacon.

My impression was that the frame-rate hit was not due to the tracers (or even to tracking the trajectory of all those non-tracer bullets), but rather due to the ejected shell casings; 1 per shot fired, spawned as a full 3D, textured object with it's own individual trajectory. HUGE hit on performance... And meaningless. Unless you're looking at an airplane from F2 view (IE, making a neat video for YouTube), you never see them. I have seen another aircraft's shell casings only ONCE in all the time I have played; he was slightly above and ahead, chasing the same target as I. Ejected casings as the cause of the performance issue would also be consistent with having a performance hit for ANOTHER plane firing, but not yours: unless you are looking backward and down, you never see your own, they are out-of-frame. You'll notice also that if another plane fires a long burst, it will slow down while you're looking, but speed back up if you look away (even if they're still firing). The ejected shells need to be an option, preferably host-side on multiplayer. Turning them off would greatly boost performance, and have a negligible (probably completely imperceptible) impact on how good the game looks. That's because modern fighters do not jettison their casings overboard; they are returned to the ammunition bin after firing.

That's what I was starting to suspect, thanks The natural follow-on question then is "do the modern ships use their high-caliber guns against air targets in DCS?" They certainly should; the modern (and WW2) 76-150mm deck gun is almost always a dual-purpose high-rate-of-fire weapon intended for close-in air defense. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any indication that DCS supports airburst fuzes (or any fuze besides contact), so I rather doubt it.

Not what I'm trying to do. I want to add units that still move and shoot, but which do not have their full ammunition available. Among other things, this would let me use a Perry-class frigate as a stand-in for a WW2 destroyer: if you remove the Standard SAM, it has a 76mm auto-gun and 20mm CIWS. While both are more accurate and faster-firing than their WW2 counterparts, the WW2 vessels had some 5-20 times as many weapons mounted, so I figure it evens out.

Depends on the aircraft, no? You'll find that wings coming off are not too terribly uncommon, when one samples only the radial-engined FW190. The ammo stowage in the wing roots was somewhat prone to catastrophic detonation. Probably why they moved the bins into the fuselage in the Dora... The next question is, how many of the exploding ones had external tanks on?

Against what? The P-51D, or the FW190D9? I've found the FW pilot quite hard to kill; I regularly, in turn fights, put a sustained burst right on the cockpit for 2-3 seconds without killing the pilot; often from ranges so close that I have to deliberately offset to put one wing's gun impact on the discrete aimpoint (so I can see quite well where I'm hitting!) Either the canopy is made of diamondtanium, or the "impact flash" effect does not accurately reflect where the projectiles are actually striking.

A valid point; flying the P-51D, I have had my pilot killed only VERY rarely, and even then, almost always by ZU23s, rather than FW190 fire. That said, everything I have seen indicates that the 20mm HE/ Minengeschoss rounds are less likely to kill (though significantly more likely to wound) a pilot, due to their fuze function and lesser depth of penetration. I recall seeing stats from either the USAAC or Air Ministry that indicated that MOST air kills were due to loss of control, generally from wounding of the pilot... which is just about the RAREST form of kill in DCS now. As to wings breaking... it's strange; the Mustang wings break WAY too easily from G, and do not seem to break easily to gunfire. However, my experience at shooting up P-51D with the FW190 is that I quite frequently shoot the entire tail section off in a 1/4-1/2 second burst, and the engine lights up just as quickly if you have a shooting angle to hit it. Now, that said, on the opposite end of the spectrum is the F-86F, which I have found can be killed by a mere 12 rounds of .50 fairly reliably (from another F-86F), which seems a bit low to me... particularly as jet fuel is much less volatile than aviation gas.

It's kind of hard to tell how many hits they take... or for that matter, exactly when they die, from gun camera footage. After all, you could well put a .50 right through the pilot's forehead, but the plane just keeps flying forward, maybe in a lazy roll. It's not like it's always obvious. Also, the gun camera footage does NOT have sound... so any sound effects that indicate how long the gun is firing were added "for effect" in some documentary program (or propaganda program), and do not indicate the actual length of burst. Many allied aircraft do have a small flag that displays at margin when firing, though. ...and just as frequently as "bullet sponge" FWs in real camera footage (which still take a LOT less than the DCS ones seem to), are ones that take a quarter second burst and explode quite spectacularly; either from a hit to the ammo bins, or fuel tanks (generally more a problem with the belly tanks than the internals- though the IM-11 barium nitrate/ magnesium filler in an M8 API burns at some 4000 degrees fahrenheit, as I recall... and tends to ignite on the SECOND surface penetrated, when the surfaces are thin aircraft aluminum, steel drums, or the like... and the barium nitrate is a strong oxidizer, so it doesn't actually require air to enter the self-sealing tanks, because it provides the oxidizer all on it's own). As to the "complex ballistics" of .50, you're right, you can't model every bit of deflection or bullet yaw due to impacting skin, structural members, and all the other bits and pieces... however, if you do some looking online, you will find that studies into the use of perforated steel, steel wire mesh, and other lightweight standoff armours (IE, designed to induce yaw to reduce penetration of the main armour belt) indicated that even against hardened steel armour inclined at 20-30 degrees, a fully-yawed (90 degrees sideways) .50 will perforate a plate up to 10mm at ranges of 200m. That's pretty much worst-case for the .50 penetration, but it will still through-and-through the armour plate. Either way, when I shoot a 3-second burst with sparkly hits all over the plexiglass CANOPY of a Dora, or hit just below the canopy railing, it is inexcusable that the simulation does not give a pilot kill.