reported CBU 87/103 Damage issues.

[NineLine]

33 minutes ago, nighthawk2174 said:

Not really

Is that the official bug report I am taking to the team? Sorry guy but you know what I need, and this thread is going off the rails. "What do you think about the AGM-154A damage?"

 

 

33 minutes ago, nighthawk2174 said:

Sure but suppression is suppression not being shredded into small bits.  Where this would occur is at a range where the crew has a chance of not getting hit and dying.  This is highly dependent on both the frag size/weight and its inital velocity and the density of frag.  Higher weights are more lethal and penetrate more armor with less velocity needed, density of frag increases the chance of being hit lethally, and higher velocity increaes the lethal range and armor pen.  Based on the document Tipis posted for the blu-97 that very lethal area is 40m circle radially from the bomblet.  With it being very dangerous probably out to 80m based on the explosive weight and frag weight.  Currently an infantryman 40m away from a bomblet will not die nor the exposed crew on many of the WWII AAA pieces.  Additionally the frag should have just about the same lethal range against stuff such as trucks and even longer ranges against very sensitive items such as radars and missiles.   Currently they have to be very close to the bomblet the frag should be tearing up targets withing 10m however from Tipis's tests they are not.

Tracks? I just showed that infantry men in the area of a cluster attack don't fair well, please show were they don't, and again, keep in mind that DM needs improvements, you are mixing issues. You want the weapons to magically make the DM better.

[nighthawk2174]

21 minutes ago, NineLine said:

Is that the official bug report I am taking to the team? Sorry guy but you know what I need, and this thread is going off the rails. "What do you think about the AGM-154A damage?"

Unfortunately I can't make tracks for at least another 5 hours but maybe Tipis or someone else can using the mission Tipis posted (you could as well).  Addtioinally in realtion to the name of the thread I think its quite poorly represented.  Both in the range from the explosive there is damage and the effects of the damage especially against infantry and trucks and in particular sensitive targets such SAM radars and missiles.  And lacks soft-kill effects against heavier targets such as crew bail, chance of fire, track/weapon damage.  Even just a dice roll for these instead of you must do x amount of hp damage would probably work beter.

21 minutes ago, NineLine said:

 

Tracks? I just showed that infantry men in the area of a cluster attack don't fair well, please show were they don't, and again, keep in mind that DM needs improvements, you are mixing issues. You want the weapons to magically make the DM better.

From Tipis's post if you look at it he dropped an 87 right in the middle of the formation (using active pause to ensure a central hit) where each solider is 10m apart vertically. And well considering there are supposed to be over 200 bomblets hitting within the box... its easy to tell something is off.  Lets say we drop a theoretical single bomblet on the head of the middle guy.  Based on the souces from earlier there should be a 20m lethal zone where pretty much everyone is dead.  With a 40m zone with a high chance of death or sever injury.  And a chance of injury extending maybe up to 80m (depends on the exact fragment weight and inital velocity of the blu-97).  Well there are areas with only one infarnty unit dead and no units injured around it.  Others with just injuries.  And a mix of the two.  

[Tippis]

37 minutes ago, NineLine said:

I just showed that infantry men in the area of a cluster attack don't fair well, please show were they don't, and again, keep in mind that DM needs improvements, you are mixing issues. You want the weapons to magically make the DM better.

What were the parameters for that attack? How many bomblets over how large an area, using which settings for the dispersal? Unless and until we know that, we can't conclude from you showed that the BLU-97 works well against infantry.

 

I showed that infantry in the area of a cluster attack fare shockingly well, at least compared to how the maths says they should be doing. Even more so with units that should be highly vulnerable to the BLU-97 (and yes, this includes antiquated tanks such as the T-55). The reason I say that, in sharp contrast to what you're saying, is that I know the parameters, I have a larger-N sample size to draw on, and I also have some semblance of real-world calculations to compare against. Now, I may certainly  have missed something in that whole comparison, but if I did then… well… I did, and someone else will have to point out what's wrong with it.

 

I can't really speak for nighthawk, but I don't think anyone wants weapons to magically alter the DM. Rather, as previously suggested, the damage states need to be adjusted to make more sense, and then maybe there should be some damage tweaks to make up for the missing frag effect. Neither of those two adjustments on its own can do the job of both of them — it has to be a combination. And of the two, if we were to prioritise, a damage state adjustment would go much farther towards yielding sensible effects across the entire cross-section of units and weapons. Damage multipliers per unit type might be a way to short-circuit that, but that would be an awful lot of look-up tables you'd have to do, and it would be a weird post-hit application rather than something that is done on the weapons end.

 

37 minutes ago, NineLine said:

Sorry guy but you know what I need, and this thread is going off the rails. "What do you think about the AGM-154A damage?"

The thing about “the AGM-154A damage” is that it's not actually about the AGM-154A. The JSOW-A doesn't do any damage — the bomblets do, and in three different ways. So that's what the discussion is really about, irrespective of what the title says. And the way to adjust the damage from those bomblets is not just a matter of fiddling with its explosive mass, because that's also not where the problem really lies. Well… not entirely, at least.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Tippis

[NineLine]

5 minutes ago, Tippis said:

The thing about “the AGM-154A damage” is that it's not actually about the AGM-154A

The thread was started by someone questioning the damage in Wags video using the AGM-154A. Are you saying that the JSOW-A part doesn't matter and it should act exactly the same as the CBU-87? Because I don't think I agree with that.

[nighthawk2174]

4 minutes ago, NineLine said:

The thread was started by someone questioning the damage in Wags video using the AGM-154A. Are you saying that the JSOW-A part doesn't matter and it should act exactly the same as the CBU-87? Because I don't think I agree with that.

More or less it should it uses the exact same sub-muntions just fewer of them.  So its part of this and can be used just as well as the JSOW to discuss the problem.  If you want too you can amend the title to a discussion on the effects of the BLU-97 submuntions as that's what its really been about this whole time.  It was just inspired by the JSOW-A which just so happens to use the same sub-munitions as the 87.

Edited July 12, 2021 by nighthawk2174

[Tippis]

19 minutes ago, NineLine said:

The thread was started by someone questioning the damage in Wags video using the AGM-154A. Are you saying that the JSOW-A part doesn't matter and it should act exactly the same as the CBU-87? Because I don't think I agree with that.

No, I'm saying that the bomblets in the JSOW-A should act exactly like the bomblets in the CBU-87, because they're the exact same.

 

The total effect of the respective delivery systems is a function of how many of those bomblets are released over a given area, and the two systems can go about manipulate that density in various ways. So we have to ignore that difference and assume like for like (otherwise, we could say that the JSOW-A doesn't matter when we try to examine the JSOW-A, because we didn't use like-for-like parameters). With equivalent density, we should see equivalent effect on the ground in the affected zone. If there's a problem with the damage application, it's in the bomblets, because neither the JSOW-A nor the CBU-87 does any damage in and of itself. As it happens, due to various quirks in the mission editor and the available aircraft, the CBU-87 is a much quicker and more efficient way of testing the damage output of the BLU-97.

 

Now, granted, there may indeed be a difference in the two delivery systems even in an equal-density situation, but in that case, we would have discovered an absolutely massive bug where bomblets change their explosive parameters depending on what bucket of metal and/or plastics they've been shoved into. But that would be a completely different kettle of fish on top of the problems with the BLU-97 damage output. And to even be able to identify whether such a problem exists or not, we need to establish some kind of baseline or benchmark for the BLU-97 where, again, due to the aforementioned quirks (and also availability of some semblance of real-world data) the CBU-87 is a good platform for creating that data.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Tippis

[Xavven]

F-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Loose.trkF-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Tight.trk

 

@NineLine I don't want to steal Tippis' thunder so I am not making tracks from his missions. Instead I've made my own mission with an F-16 armed with two (but only dropping one) CBU-87 attacking six BMP-2 and four BTR-80 in a tight and a loose formation. Due to some unknown drift I had to move the steerpoint slighly north of center of the target so that the bomblet coverage was a little bit more centered over the group. I am dropping in CCRP on the steerpoint going 340 knots, straight and level, with altitude hold and steerpoint heading hold to reduce sources of human error.

 

My results are not similar to the damage shown in Wags' July 11 video at the end where he attacks a column of BMP-2 and BTR-80 with a JSOW-A, causing 4 of them to be destroyed. I am getting a few of them yellow and red but none destroyed.

 

I realize I'm dropping a CBU-87 with default settings from 3000 ft straight and level, not a JSOW-A, but I don't have a JSOW-A because I don't own the Hornet module. If I'm not mistaken, I can't change HOF or spin rate in the F-16 module.

[NineLine]

Thanks I will look at your tracks. I need to check as well, but I think the health bar doesn't show amour damage, but shows damage after the armor is breached. 

[NineLine]

38 minutes ago, Xavven said:

F-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Loose.trk 183.04 kB · 1 download F-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Tight.trk 160.84 kB · 1 download

 

@NineLine I don't want to steal Tippis' thunder so I am not making tracks from his missions. Instead I've made my own mission with an F-16 armed with two (but only dropping one) CBU-87 attacking six BMP-2 and four BTR-80 in a tight and a loose formation. Due to some unknown drift I had to move the steerpoint slighly north of center of the target so that the bomblet coverage was a little bit more centered over the group. I am dropping in CCRP on the steerpoint going 340 knots, straight and level, with altitude hold and steerpoint heading hold to reduce sources of human error.

 

My results are not similar to the damage shown in Wags' July 11 video at the end where he attacks a column of BMP-2 and BTR-80 with a JSOW-A, causing 4 of them to be destroyed. I am getting a few of them yellow and red but none destroyed.

 

I realize I'm dropping a CBU-87 with default settings from 3000 ft straight and level, not a JSOW-A, but I don't have a JSOW-A because I don't own the Hornet module. If I'm not mistaken, I can't change HOF or spin rate in the F-16 module.

Thanks after running some tests I think this is something I can take to the team, I will compare with current jSOW A damage and see what it looks like. Thanks.

[Tippis]

For reference:

JSOW-A, dropped at 2,000m AGL, at 10.3km distance to TOO target (designated WP1) using 1800' alt, 0° heading, 0m/s vel, against ye olde BRDM-2 group.

 

145 BLU-97/B dispersed over what looks like a 240×40m area against 92 units, yielded 24 hits/damage events (16% of BLUs); 4 crippled units (4%), 2 incapacitated units (2%), and 17(!) dead units (18%). All except one were single hits (one dead unit was hit twice). The random factor lets a single bomblet do anything from cripple to kill a BRDM-2 (skewing heavily towards killing them outright).

 

This should be compared against the performance of the CBU-87 shown earlier:

Here, 5% of BLUs hit; 4% incapacitated units, and 0.3% dead units. But more to the point, for those BLU-97/Bs, one hit incapacitated, and two hits were needed to kill. No exceptions.

 

In other words, while it is reasonable to expect the JSOW-A to kill better because it has a more concentrated pattern and thus denser bomblet dispersal, what's unexpected is that from a game-mechanical standpoint, fewer “hits” are needed to kill the same unit using (ostensibly) the same bomblet.

Edited July 12, 2021 by Tippis

[NineLine]

2 hours ago, Xavven said:

F-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Loose.trk 183.04 kB · 4 downloads F-16 CBU-87 vs BMP-2 and BTR-80 - Tight.trk 160.84 kB · 3 downloads

 

@NineLine I don't want to steal Tippis' thunder so I am not making tracks from his missions. Instead I've made my own mission with an F-16 armed with two (but only dropping one) CBU-87 attacking six BMP-2 and four BTR-80 in a tight and a loose formation. Due to some unknown drift I had to move the steerpoint slighly north of center of the target so that the bomblet coverage was a little bit more centered over the group. I am dropping in CCRP on the steerpoint going 340 knots, straight and level, with altitude hold and steerpoint heading hold to reduce sources of human error.

 

My results are not similar to the damage shown in Wags' July 11 video at the end where he attacks a column of BMP-2 and BTR-80 with a JSOW-A, causing 4 of them to be destroyed. I am getting a few of them yellow and red but none destroyed.

 

I realize I'm dropping a CBU-87 with default settings from 3000 ft straight and level, not a JSOW-A, but I don't have a JSOW-A because I don't own the Hornet module. If I'm not mistaken, I can't change HOF or spin rate in the F-16 module.

Ok, thanks for the tracks after discussing with Wags and running some more tests compared to the JSOW, it certainly seems like something is off with the 87/103s So I have reported these with my own tracks and yours, thanks!