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P51- insufficient shot damage


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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Regardless of track, it is true (and has been for a long time now) that in most planes in DCS, a few rounds are enough to sever a wing or at least set fire to the engines of your enemy. In the P-51, I can land half a magazine onto a FW-109 for instance, before it becomes more or less unflyable. Seems a bit odd.

I'll try and find a track if that is what's needed to convince anyone.


Edited by MarcT-NL
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29 minutes ago, MarcT-NL said:

Regardless of track, it is true (and has been for a long time now) that in most planes in DCS, a few rounds are enough to sever a wing or at least set fire to the engines of your enemy. In the P-51, I can land half a magazine onto a FW-109 for instance, before it becomes more or less unflyable. Seems a bit odd.

I'll try and find a track if that is what's needed to convince anyone.

 

 

Fw-109? 😄

 

Which one now, Fw-190 or Bf-109?

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It was a very secret ww2-plane !  🙂

 

No, but either one. Problem is with the P-51 I think. It's bullets just don't do much damage it seems, while a few rounds from the enemy is enough to put it out of commission. Maybe it is my imagination. Maybe it is as it is supposed to be, but no matter how good a dogfighter you are. You just don't have enough bullets to take out 2 enemies...

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4 hours ago, MarcT-NL said:

It was a very secret ww2-plane !  🙂

 

No, but either one. Problem is with the P-51 I think. It's bullets just don't do much damage it seems, while a few rounds from the enemy is enough to put it out of commission. Maybe it is my imagination. Maybe it is as it is supposed to be, but no matter how good a dogfighter you are. You just don't have enough bullets to take out 2 enemies...

I bet that ED is working hard on DM improvements. So lets wait for patch

 

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You have to think about the P51s mission, protecting bombers from enemy fighters. It didn’t need to be a heavy hitter, just carry plenty of ammo and dissuade an attack or cause enough damage to convince the opposing pilot to bail out. 
 

That said 50cal AP was really quite anaemic by 1944. RAF fighters were hitting with 20mm rounds containing 6g of RDX, the fast firing Hispano meant if you hit with one you’d probably hit with more. German 13mm was explosive so hitting with much more energy than US 50cal, the reality is that the P51 was under gunned even compared to the 1944 109.

 

The weight of the US home armaments lobby shouldn’t be underestimated. Brownings supporters were a powerful force.

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  • 1 month later...

I have noticed the same, I have set a mission with a P-51D against lowest skill Fw 190 A-8, and I just keep hitting him and hitting him from behind from a very close range, and he just keeps flying and flying. Then he sets on fire, and still keeps flying and flying. Until finally goes down.

 

But when I tried a Bf 109 K-4 against a P-51D, just few hits from its 13mm machine guns set the P-51D on fire immediatelly and he went straight down.

 

Maybe if those German 13mm were explosive ammo, and American .50 cal was not explosive, maybe that would make the difference, but I still feel that the P-51D's bullets are underpowered.

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I always felt (and still feel) the mustang's guns are weak in DCS.  I've shot almost a whole load into a enemy plane at close range at times and the darn thing still flies.  I've listened to countless p51 pilot interviews and none of them reported this.  Also, the gun camera footage I've seen seems to indicate the guns are too weak.

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8 hours ago, Silent Film said:

I have set a mission with a P-51D against lowest skill Fw 190 A-8, and I just keep hitting him and hitting him from behind from a very close range, and he just keeps flying and flying. Then he sets on fire, and still keeps flying and flying. Until finally goes down.

 

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Like I said, I have tried it once again today, and it seemed better. Although, I have never had such good results like in that video.

 

But sometimes, it was so annoying, like Fw 190 A-8 just wouldn't die. If I encounter with that situation once again, I will post a video replay.

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Yesterday, I have tried to test it once again, and maybe I have actually come to something.

 

I had a short dogfight with Dora, and after it was destroyed, it just kept on flying, but backwards, very strange. It is obviously some bug or glitch.

 

Maybe something similar was happening sometimes before, but the program wouldn't tell the aircraft was destroyed, and it just kept flying forwards, no matter how much I kept hitting it.

 

Amazing P-51D-25 Mustang vs. Fw 190 D-9 Dora (DCS) - YouTube

 

(Didn't know how to post a You Tube video and that the thumbnail can be seen.)

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On 5/6/2021 at 12:47 PM, Silent Film said:

I have seen a real Mustang pilot interview in which he said that those six .50 machine guns would cut Bf 109s wing like a saw, and I definitely can't see that in DCS.

Exactly!  DCS makes you want to always fly with unlimited ammo because it takes so much ammo to take down a plane that is only a few yards in front of you. I've heard many ww2 and Korean pilots say how it only took a 2-3 second burst to bring down an enemy plane.  

On 5/6/2021 at 1:14 PM, NineLine said:

 

At least that plane eventually went down. I've shot numerous planes with a lot more ammo at the same or closer ranger and the things keep going like they were barely touched.

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16 hours ago, MADLOU1 said:

 

At least that plane eventually went down. I've shot numerous planes with a lot more ammo at the same or closer ranger and the things keep going like they were barely touched.

 

Keep in mind the difference between these cases. The Saber and Mustang carried similar weapons, but there are some important differences. 

 

Number one that comes to mind is bullet dispersion. The Mustang's guns were two groups of three, with each group (SWAG math) around 15 feet apart from one another. This creates an interesting problem if you want to hit a focused area with all six guns, and it gets really complicated at different ranges, bank angles, pitch angles, and so on.

 

Look at a WWII fighter's gun harmonization diagram, and you see that usually the guns don't all cross paths except at one point, usually around 1100 feet in front. Any closer than that, and your striking power gets gut pretty quick. Chances are good that if you're up that close, you're hitting with only three of those guns, max, while the rest shoot wide. Too far of a shot, and you get the same effect but after the convergence point, and with less kinetic energy in each round as they loose speed and start to drop and tumble. 

 

The F-86, like the P-38, had all its guns in one cluster, pretty much eliminating this problem. If you hit with one, you usually hit with all six, making the guns far more effective across a broader range, from close in all the way out to max effective range for the M3. 

 

Two, is that the F-86 was shooting a jet-powered target, with its engine in the back. If you're on his tail, line up the sight, and hit with all six guns, they'll rip right into the engine itself more easily than the P-51 shooting, in the above example, the FW-190 with its engine in the front, which was covered by the entire aircraft and some armor plate. Attacking from above or below may help this a bit, though, but then you have a higher aspect angle, so the aim problem becomes harder. 

 

Another difference is that the F-86's weapon was similar, but not identical. It carried the M3, versus the M2, which is lighter, has a higher rate of fire, with more accuracy, so total projectile mass on any target hit would be usually higher than you'd see in your average P-51 shot. 

 

This does not mean there's no problem with DCS's AI with regard to BFM, in particular the MiG-15 is quite a challenge sometimes. However, without track files or even TacView, it's hard to say what a actually is going on. 

 

I like TacView a lot, you can actually see the bullet dispersion in real time. Often I think I had a good shot, but the baddie flies away merrily, but on watching TacView I see that I scored hits, but the target was flying in the outside edge of my dispersion cone, and only got hit by maybe 10% of the rounds that I fired that burst. He was too far, too close, too far from the center of the cone, you name it, and I'm hitting with one or two guns (17% or 33%) of what I *could* be hitting him with. 

 

That focal point, 1100 feet in front, at which all six guns are likely to hit, is a very small volume of space when you consider the speeds and angles involved in a dogfight. It's hard enough to get into elbow position, and doing so at a specific range is a real feat of skill. Snap shots? Good luck! You might hit with a lucky round in a vital area, but it's unlikely. That, and in a traditional dogfight against a front-engine aircraft, chances are high that you're not directly hitting the engine from a rear quarter tracking shot, may be causing what you see. And, hey, the FW-190 is built like a work truck. 

 

Sometimes, usually around 1100 feet, I'll find that the Mustang's guns will rip apart a FW-190 in far under a second. More often, if the range, aspect and whatnot are off just a bit, I have to hose the target down a lot more for the same effect, which also causes the guns to heat up and lose accuracy...it goes on and on, doesn't it? 


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On 5/9/2021 at 11:48 AM, MADLOU1 said:

Exactly!  DCS makes you want to always fly with unlimited ammo because it takes so much ammo to take down a plane that is only a few yards in front of you. I've heard many ww2 and Korean pilots say how it only took a 2-3 second burst to bring down an enemy plane.  

At least that plane eventually went down. I've shot numerous planes with a lot more ammo at the same or closer ranger and the things keep going like they were barely touched.

I need to see tracks, certainly not my experience. 

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Damage seems to depend on where you hit. The Fw-190 is vulnerable from below-rear shots. It tends to catch fire or explode. If you don't hit it there it can take more punishment, but the P-51 is very capable of killing the Fw-190's engine.

 

If there is anything I think damage to control surfaces needs more effect. Shooting the tips of both wings for example should cause the AI to lose roll control, right now it doesn't seem to have much effect.

Fw190boom.trk Fw190damage1.trk Fw190damage2.trk Fw190noboom.trk

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