Bug(?) - tracers go up

It's hard to describe but the tracer smoke trails gain altitude during firing.

Here's a video of me in level flight - watch what the trails do; it's like they're walking up a staircase. Only if I was in a gentle dive would I expect this behaviour. I also go into a climb and the tracers still go up!

Maybe this is intentional to avoid the cockpit being swamped in smoky GFX artefacts?

Yeah, far from great, and more of a bug than feature in my opinion. Actually, 1.5.7 smoke tracers were better in this regard, just barely visible. Well, at least they display continuously, unlike cannon smoke tracers in Spit, which flicker and/or disappear at will :D.

Still something to tweak a lot by ED.

back before 1.5 the tracers did something like this in the Sabre but I think it was actually a disconnect between the actual positions of the guns and the place that the ammo spawned in at when you fired.

just checked, it now does it again in 1.5.8 and does it in 2.2 in the air but fine on the ground.

The smoke tracers go up because your bullets are converging like a 1000 yards in front of you and therefore follow the ballestic trajectory in an arc to that point. When you fly level you will pass under that arc.

mmm, nope...

Not in the Sabre anyway. The guns are bore-sighted at 0 degrees to the centreline and the fuselage reference line of the a/c and drop about nine feet before intersecting at about 2200 feet with the sight line of the gun sight in front of the a/c if I remember correctly.

The trajectory of the guns on the Mustang would never take the rounds above the cockpit level during flight, except for some outliers. Those would take you 3 seconds to catch up to the point that you would pass under the arc of those tracers at 300 mph TAS. The smoke trails in the video above start out above the cockpit and behind the leading edge of the wings. you can see the tracer rounds flying on a relatively normal trajectory with the smoke trails far above them.

Well if the vertical convergence was set up to 1000 yards most shots would indeed go above the Mustangs cockpit at its peak. But your right it would take like 3 secs to catch up to the peak of the arc. So probably some bug in the end.

IIRC "our" Mustang has convergence of about 300 yds anyway.

They're clearly working on new tracers for 2.x.x., but something's iffy here.

Convergence means the the paths of the bullets cross one another. It has nothing to do with the guns being aimed high compared straight ahead.

If the guns were simply bore-sighted level with the aircraft's flight path, as soon as each bullet leaves the barrel, it starts to drop, and you would never hit a target, unless less you aimed WAY, WAY, WAY above of it.

So the guns are sighted above the horizon, and the bullets raise for a time, before starting to fall again.

If the bullets leave a trail of smoke, and you are flying straight and level, your head will basically fly through these smoke trails at the point your view crosses the flight path of the bullets.

I can post a diagram from home when I get there.

Edit: found the thread: Convergance and gun options, Post #36