Recurring patterns in the new DM

[Reflected]

So we've all been able to test the new DM for years, and it's lightyears ahead of what we had before. 

However, it could use a bit of tweaking. I found that a given aircraft type goes down the same way in the vast majority of the cases. I mean about 80% of the time. It feels very repetitive.

Here are some examples:

109: Always starts with a radiator leak or two, then it's set on fire. I hardly ever see anything else, no broken off wing ever.

190: It takes the whole 9 yards, looks like swiss cheese, maybe drops a gear, then slowly goes down or limps home. I get a fuel fire if I'm lucky.

B-17 and JU-88 - fire comes out of the wings just after a few rounds. Eventually they trail 3-4-5 fires and go down in a slow descending turn. 100% of the cases. No smoke, no stopped engines, no broken off wing. Always fire.

P-51: They usually break in half behind the cockpit

My problem is that when I attack a given type I can know for sure what will happen, and other scenarios almost never play out. I doubt my bullets always land at the same spot, so maybe each type has one part of the damage system that's much weaker than the others, so it's always that one that activates first?

Anybody else experiencing the same?

Edited August 2, 2024 by Reflected

[peachmonkey]

23 minutes ago, Reflected said:

So we've all been able to test the new DM for years, and it's lightyears ahead of what we had before. 

However, it could use a bit of tweaking. I found that a given aircraft type goes down the same way in the vast majority of the cases. I mean about 80% of the time. It feels very repetitive.

Here are some examples:

109: Always starts with a radiator leak or two, then it's set on fire. I hardly ever see anything else, no broken off wing ever.

190: It takes the whole 9 yards, looks like swiss cheese, maybe drops a gear, then slowly goes down or limps home. I get a fuel fire if I'm lucky.

B-17 and JU-88 - fire comes out of the wings just after a few rounds. Eventually they trail 3-4-5 fires and go down in a slow descending turn. 100% of the cases. No smoke, no stopped engines, no broken off wing. Always fire.

P-51: They usually break in half behind the cockpit

My problem is that when I attack a given type I can know for sure what will happen, and other scenarios almost never play out. I doubt my bullets always land at the same spot, so maybe each type has one part of the damage system that's much weaker than the others, so it's always that one that activates first?

Anybody else experiencing the same?

 

I get stopped engines in B17 quite frequently, and my attack is usually a very fast slashing one from side to side.

If I set on their six then yes, it's usually a fire next to the root of the wing. If I focus on one engine I can usually set it on fire/black smoke, which is the most cinematic one of them all.

I break their wings off quite frequently as well, but that usually involves me crashing into them otherwise wings always stay on.

[PawlaczGMD]

51 minutes ago, Reflected said:

So we've all been able to test the new DM for years, and it's lightyears ahead of what we had before. 

However, it could use a bit of tweaking. I found that a given aircraft type goes down the same way in the vast majority of the cases. I mean about 80% of the time. It feels very repetitive.

Here are some examples:

109: Always starts with a radiator leak or two, then it's set on fire. I hardly ever see anything else, no broken off wing ever.

190: It takes the whole 9 yards, looks like swiss cheese, maybe drops a gear, then slowly goes down or limps home. I get a fuel fire if I'm lucky.

B-17 and JU-88 - fire comes out of the wings just after a few rounds. Eventually they trail 3-4-5 fires and go down in a slow descending turn. 100% of the cases. No smoke, no stopped engines, no broken off wing. Always fire.

P-51: They usually break in half behind the cockpit

My problem is that when I attack a given type I can know for sure what will happen, and other scenarios almost never play out. I doubt my bullets always land at the same spot, so maybe each type has one part of the damage system that's much weaker than the others, so it's always that one that activates first?

Anybody else experiencing the same?

 

I agree with the observations- although some of the failures make sense.

109: radiators are the easiest to hit due to convergence. 

190: no radiator or oil cooler. They are very tough, you need hits on the engine or pilot. But sometimes it feels like you're doing literally nothing.

Ju-88: Here I agree it is very suspicious. Very easy to start and repetitive fires. Seems overly scripted to me.

P-51: Yes, they like to lose a tail, which I never see on other aircraft. 

 

It would be good to know how fire chance is calculated.

[Skewgear]

There is a full range of damage effects modelled, it's just that sitting 150yds away at dead 6 before opening fire, as the vast majority of players do, means you'll only see a few of them!

Try this: get in a Spitfire, go find a player in an Fw190, and bounce him from a few thousand feet above and starting no more than a quarter of a mile behind if you're in trail. If you aim it right you'll deal visible catastrophic damage to the engine and blast the cover off the nose cannon bay.

Find an Me109 and stalk him until you're exactly 250yds behind. Open fire. A solid 1.5-2 second burst at gun harmonisation range means the tail will fall off.

Take a German fighter and in single player try attacking the front of a B-17 and side slashing attacks. You'll see very large chunks fall off including the entire tail fin and the nose plexiglass, if you hit it right. You can also blast engines partly off their mountings.

Attack a Spitfire from dead 6 with the Me109K's 30mm cannon only. You can shoot away the tail surfaces, totally separating rudder and elevators from the aircraft. Aim for the left radiator and you'll likely puncture the oil cooler, setting off an inevitable engine seizure within 2-3 minutes.

Attack a P-51 head on with an Fw190 and you’ll utterly ruin the engine and its associated fuel, oil and cooling systems, and smash the canopy while splattering it in oil. Do it from above or below and you blast holes through the wings.

This is all stuff I've seen while moderating Project Overlord from the admin-only game master slot which has all views enabled. What I also see is that 95% of players will manoeuvre until they're in pure pursuit/dead 6, close well within gun harmonisation range, and then wonder why all their shots hit the target's wings.

Something I think has been lost over the decades is that WW2 fighter pilots were trained to avoid attacks from dead six, certainly not in the RAF from mid-war onwards anyway. If you adopt the RAF method of deliberately lining up deflection shots from 10-30 degrees out, suddenly everything starts looking a lot more like gun camera films - and your kill ratio goes up too!

[Gunfreak]

9 hours ago, Reflected said:

So we've all been able to test the new DM for years, and it's lightyears ahead of what we had before. 

However, it could use a bit of tweaking. I found that a given aircraft type goes down the same way in the vast majority of the cases. I mean about 80% of the time. It feels very repetitive.

Here are some examples:

109: Always starts with a radiator leak or two, then it's set on fire. I hardly ever see anything else, no broken off wing ever.

190: It takes the whole 9 yards, looks like swiss cheese, maybe drops a gear, then slowly goes down or limps home. I get a fuel fire if I'm lucky.

B-17 and JU-88 - fire comes out of the wings just after a few rounds. Eventually they trail 3-4-5 fires and go down in a slow descending turn. 100% of the cases. No smoke, no stopped engines, no broken off wing. Always fire.

P-51: They usually break in half behind the cockpit

My problem is that when I attack a given type I can know for sure what will happen, and other scenarios almost never play out. I doubt my bullets always land at the same spot, so maybe each type has one part of the damage system that's much weaker than the others, so it's always that one that activates first?

Anybody else experiencing the same?

 

Wings don't fall of as there really isn't any wing damage modeling except for ailerons falling off. In reality if you fire of a few 20mm into the wing of German aircraft, they wing would Not stay off. A single 20mm Hispano round delivers around 90 000 joules in kinetic and chemical energy. Compare that to around 3000 joules from a rifle caliber bullet. DCS also doesn't stimulate wing ammo detonating.

 

In the book tail end Charlie. A p47 gave a short burst with its .50 cals and the wing of a 109 or 190(can't remember which) fell of instantly. That just can't happen in DCS.

 

 

[grafspee]

5 minutes ago, Gunfreak said:

Wings don't fall of as there really isn't any wing damage modeling except for ailerons falling off. In reality if you fire of a few 20mm into the wing of German aircraft, they wing would Not stay off. A single 20mm Hispano round delivers around 90 000 joules in kinetic and chemical energy. Compare that to around 3000 joules from a rifle caliber bullet. DCS also doesn't stimulate wing ammo detonating.

 

In the book tail end Charlie. A p47 gave a short burst with its .50 cals and the wing of a 109 or 190(can't remember which) fell of instantly. That just can't happen in DCS.

 

 

Ammo detonation is thing which ED is developing so it will come to game someday.

[Gunfreak]

4 minutes ago, grafspee said:

Ammo detonation is thing which ED is developing so it will come to game someday.

Not sure they are developing it. Or planing on developing it some time in the future. They have said they want to add it. But i don't think they have actually started on the process.

[Doughguy]

as it was stated.  shoot to the 6 and same things will happen over and over.

Ive torn off enough spits wings or damaged p47s and p51s so their engine cowlings came off.
it all depends on the angle you attack your oppo.

[Reflected]

You'd assume, but I don't shoot from dead 6, always with a deflection. And in 2 years I shot off the wings of a German airplane maybe once.

[Nealius]

Wing fires on the B-17 is odd considering the self-sealing fuel tanks. I've removed one from a B-17 wing myself (well, me and like 8 other people because it's heavy af).

[PawlaczGMD]

9 hours ago, Skewgear said:

What I also see is that 95% of players will manoeuvre until they're in pure pursuit/dead 6, close well within gun harmonisation range, and then wonder why all their shots hit the target's wings.

 The guns are harmonized at a range well beyond deflection shooting even in a moderate turn - If the bandit is turning, he will be well below the canopy glass at harmonization range. Only the very best can hit that shot and only with a lot of luck. So it's not a surprise that 95% of players need to get in closer. You can only do convergence shots if you ambush the target, i.e. non-maneuvering target, or the target is running away and you are able to catch up.

Meanwhile, most real gun cam footage shows the bandit flying straight and level, or in a very gentle turn by DCS standards.

Frankly, DCS combat is likely far from reality. People are probably more aware, they always expect an enemy, they don't suffer from psychological factors, and have tools like ERW bots, spotting dots, etc. It would be very useful to be able to change harmonization to a shorter one, as most valid shots will be at half the default harmonization range at best.

So you are correct that a lot of the issues might be because the players are shooting onto the wings because of being "too close", but that's hard to avoid  unless you're going for a head-on. But I still think the full range of damage is not represented on all planes in DCS. I never see a wing come off unless due to overspeed. Tail comes off only on the P-51. Otherwise, only control surfaces get destroyed. There are no fuel or ammo explosions. The German 30mm is much more likely to do such structural damage, but the British 20mm really isn't. If someone told me the .303 is doing 0 damage due to some bug I'd believe it. Spitfires will as you say hit the wings with a solid burst and they never break. At least that's my experience.

And I don't want to bash the DM, I think it is really good actually, but is it perfect? We argue that it isn't. But I agree that you've made a good point about how players will attack in a very repetitive way, so the damage looks repetitive also.

[Emacs]

No matter if WWII or modern jet, the animation where both wingtips are on fire and the plane is spiralling to the ground may be spectacular to look at, but it feels like this one is done way too often.

And that's not even asking what could cause both wingtips - and only those - catch fire on any WWII fighter.

[Bowie]

Well...

Having shot down literally hundreds of Bf-109's and Fw-190's flying the P-51D of late, have a reasonably educated opinion.

That is - the DCS/DM is pretty well done.

 

WWII fighters - are mostly hollow boxes, with a few critical and sensitive components here and there.

Start by running the User install/Config/Views/SnapViews/[13]/"ViewAngle to 40.000000.

This will give you a pretty good IRL view of both gunsight and target.

With the wings or fuselage spanning half the 70-MIL gunsight ring, a fighter will be at convergence range (~1,000 ft).

With this view setting, you will be able to see your hits at that range and closer.

A 1/4 second burst - is ~ 20 rounds, in a pattern the size of a trash can lid.

Put that into the engine cowling, and the result will be a burst water jacket/abort, or a fire and a kill.

Put it into the cockpit, and the pilot is dead.

Shoot left or right, and you hit the radiators.

 

The problem is, the default ViewAngle provides an "arcade" panoramic view of the entire cockpit and windscreen, and reduces the size of both the gunsight and target.

So, when you see the target in range, it is usually well inside of that, usually spanning the entire 70-MIL ring, and then gets closer from there.

Put the pipper on the engine cowling or cockpit, and the result is a miss, or perforated mostly empty wing panels.

Missing left or right produces mostly empty outer wing panels or empennage hits, and maybe one wing's guns on target.

 

Routinely get Four or Five "kills" in a mission, and returned with 60%+ ammo (check the "Rearm/Refuel" board), once with 87% remaining.

For Four "kills", that's an average of Three, 1/4 second 20 round bursts each.

Have also emptied the guns on a hard-turning Fw-190 in close and "churning butter" with the stick.

 

Marksmanship.

Trim the airplane, get the range right with the 70-MIL ring gunsight, learn what the correct lead looks like (it will be more with this IRL view), be precise in aim, and use short bursts.

 

Bowie

 

 

 

 

[motoadve]

Tail coming off animation on P51s and A20s looks super arcade, have you ever seen this in real WWII footage? This is immersion breaking, also the pilot modelling, negative Gs positive Gs one after the other are impossible, and looks very unrealistic, like a paper plane. Bombers are a bit too easy to shoot down IMHO.

For the rest I like the damage model.

[Reflected]

Okay, I did a lot of WW2 shooting recently and I concluded that my initial hypothesis wasn't entirely correct. I do get a variety of kills. There are only 2 items that still bug me:

- The P-51's fuselage breaks in half way too often

- I can never tear the wing off a 109 or 190 using 50 cals or 20mm.

[motoadve]

15 minutes ago, Reflected said:

- The P-51's fuselage breaks in half way too often

And looks horrible

 

16 minutes ago, Reflected said:

- I can never tear the wing off a 109 or 190 using 50 cals or 20mm.

I did , but only once to a 190 flying the P51 in quick mission Channel map FW190 Furball Quick Mission

[Bowie]

On 10/3/2024 at 5:05 PM, Reflected said:

Okay, I did a lot of WW2 shooting recently and I concluded that my initial hypothesis wasn't entirely correct. I do get a variety of kills. There are only 2 items that still bug me:

- The P-51's fuselage breaks in half way too often

- I can never tear the wing off a 109 or 190 using 50 cals or 20mm.

Found that when the Bf 109K-4 was reconfigured to a Bf 109G-6, by replacing the 30mm Mk 108 cannon with the 20mm MG 151/20 by modifying...

"Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta\CoreMods\WWII Units\Weapons\Weapons.lua file"

The "P-51's fuselage breaks in half way" problem all but went away.

The 30mm stuff is a bomb.

Weapons - (Bf 109G-6).lua

 

Bowie