Bomb aiming tips

[Lace]

Given the absence of any sight or aiming computer, does anyone have any hints or rules-of-thumb for bomb aiming in the Mossie?  So far I’ve had mixed success eyeballing it on shallow dive and level deliveries, but I think it is more luck than skill. The manual and training missions seem a little lacking in this regard. 

[No1sonuk]

Use The Force, Lace...    

[Nealius]

I use the TLAR method. That Looks About Right.

 

In more seriousness, Circle of Action technique plus a healthy dose of quesswork considering my speed and angle, similar to when you're trying to make that trash-can shot from your office chair or shooting pool.

Edited September 25, 2021 by Nealius

[statrekmike]

Yeah. We really need some bombing tables of some kind. I don't mind eyeballing it but the whole point of DCS for me is to learn to do it right. 

[No1sonuk]

Maybe the one who hit the Amiens prison wall in the screenshots thread should do a tutorial.
Unless that was a one-off fluke. 

[Nealius]

I don't think bombing tables were a thing on account of warbird sites not having MIL adjustments. That science didn't get standard until the 1950s or 60s, I don't think. 

[Hornetjock]

I heard a guy say that pickle just as the target goes out of view on the pull out. Then the only variable would be the height at which you drop - that is pure judgement. I haven't got it yet...

[fjacobsen]

Bombing in most WW2 aircraft are kind of guesswork.

You simply need to practice and find a procedure that works the best for You.

 

As long as we haven´t delay fuzes, bombing is best conducted while diving.

Find a dive angle and start speed that suits You, then through practice, find the altitude at wich to drop with the right looke through the sight.

 

For me a 20-30° dive starting at appr. 250 mph is a good starting point.

Aiming the target between the middle  and the lower edge of the sight.

Then the last few seconds, let the target move towards the bottom edge of the sight and release the bombs just as the target disappear below the sight.

 

I hope we will get delayed fuzes as soon as possible, since that is the best way to make precision bombing with the Mosquito.

 

Still though....

Talking precision bombing in WW2 aircraft is something of a misnomer.

Even the JU-87 Stuka wasn´t that precise and also required alot of skill, practice and luck.

Edited September 26, 2021 by fjacobsen

[GregP]

Iain Christie just did another in his iron bombing series:

He basically uses the bottom of the reticle as a general aiming point and it seems to work pretty well.

[statrekmike]

8 hours ago, fjacobsen said:

Bombing in most WW2 aircraft are kind of guesswork.

You simply need to practice and find a procedure that works the best for You.

 

As long as we haven´t delay fuzes, bombing is best conducted while diving.

Find a dive angle and start speed that suits You, then through practice, find the altitude at wich to drop with the right looke through the sight.

 

For me a 20-30° dive starting at appr. 250 mph is a good starting point.

Aiming the target between the middle  and the lower edge of the sight.

Then the last few seconds, let the target move towards the bottom edge of the sight and release the bombs just as the target disappear below the sight.

 

I hope we will get delayed fuzes as soon as possible, since that is the best way to make precision bombing with the Mosquito.

 

Still though....

Talking precision bombing in WW2 aircraft is something of a misnomer.

Even the HU-87 Stuka wasn´t that precise and also required alot of skill, practice and luck.

 

 

  Even in WWII, there were procedures in place for various types of bombing profiles in various types of aircraft. If there were not procedures, training would have been nearly impossible and nobody would have been effective. If you go out and look, you can find diagrams and even entire training manuals from the time that outlined various bombing techniques and typically included starting altitudes, speeds, dive angles, and even descriptions of the release point picture the pilot should look for. 

 

  Had various types of bombing been approached entirely as a kind of guesswork, there would have been no way to effectively train pilots and very few successful ground attack missions in general.

 

  As far as precision bombing goes. Nobody is asking for that. It should go without saying that precision bombing in WWII was highly, highly conditional and seldom actually happened. 

 

  What we are looking for here is a document or a set of tables that outlines the various bombing profiles because it is frankly outright impossible that such a thing doesn't exist. I know there is this romanticized ideal that WWII pilots did everything by the seat of their pants but they got trained. They had to have procedures to practice in the first place. Bombing targets was too important to leave entirely to the the romantic whims of chance and seat of the pants flying.

[Hawkeye91]

2 hours ago, statrekmike said:

 

 

  Even in WWII, there were procedures in place for various types of bombing profiles in various types of aircraft. If there were not procedures, training would have been nearly impossible and nobody would have been effective. If you go out and look, you can find diagrams and even entire training manuals from the time that outlined various bombing techniques and typically included starting altitudes, speeds, dive angles, and even descriptions of the release point picture the pilot should look for. 

 

  Had various types of bombing been approached entirely as a kind of guesswork, there would have been no way to effectively train pilots and very few successful ground attack missions in general.

 

  As far as precision bombing goes. Nobody is asking for that. It should go without saying that precision bombing in WWII was highly, highly conditional and seldom actually happened. 

 

  What we are looking for here is a document or a set of tables that outlines the various bombing profiles because it is frankly outright impossible that such a thing doesn't exist. I know there is this romanticized ideal that WWII pilots did everything by the seat of their pants but they got trained. They had to have procedures to practice in the first place. Bombing targets was too important to leave entirely to the the romantic whims of chance and seat of the pants flying.

Check out this website. It’s a treasure trove of WWII manuals. There’s a few manuals related to bombing under training manuals.

 

https://aircorpslibrary.com/

 

it is pay for access but only $6 USD a month.

Edited September 26, 2021 by Hawkeye91

[Gunfreak]

The spitifres apparently dives straigh on target from 12 000 feet, pull up at 3000 count to 3 then release. 

[Nealius]

Without MIL adjusting sites the procedures themselves are mostly guesswork with a start altitude/speed and a release altitude/speed with ambiguous techniques like the above 3-count or “release when target passes the cowling.” There’s still going to be personal technique involved, which is mentioned in passing in the (slightly propaganda) documentary Thunderbolt. 

 

Edited September 27, 2021 by Nealius

[Holbeach]

On 9/25/2021 at 10:49 PM, No1sonuk said:

Maybe the one who hit the Amiens prison wall in the screenshots thread should do a tutorial.
Unless that was a one-off fluke. 

 

No fluke. Practice.

 

At low level, (30'), sights are irrellevent, but reference points are required, which are gleaned from recce flights beforehand.

 

In this case, because we have no timers, I'm using Toss Bombing instead. This will throw the bombs ahead and allow me to escape the blast.

 

Fly alongside the road, (keep it on the left) at treetop height and high speed. Pull up on your reference point, (cross tree line).

Release at 10 degs. using wiper blades on background as reference.

Watch replays and take screenies, for study, then repeat untill you can consistantly hit the wall.

 

The real mission, dropped at 30' and skidded the bombs along the ground, which was the most accurate way to do it.

 

I read an interview with an A4 pilot. "How do you attack Viet Cong posts with retarded bombs and Iron sights at such low levels?"

"You can't use sights. You just get a feel for it."

 

Release Point..

 

..

 

Edited September 27, 2021 by Holbeach

[DD_Fenrir]

16 hours ago, Gunfreak said:

The spitfires apparently dives straight on target from 12 000 feet, pull up at 3000 count to 3 then release. 

 

12,000 feet seems a bit high to me; most references I have state 6,000-8,000ft, with a dive angle of 45 to 60 degrees.

[statrekmike]

8 hours ago, Holbeach said:

 

No fluke. Practice.

 

At low level, (30'), sights are irrellevent, but reference points are required, which are gleaned from recce flights beforehand.

 

In this case, because we have no timers, I'm using Toss Bombing instead. This will throw the bombs ahead and allow me to escape the blast.

 

Fly alongside the road, (keep it on the left) at treetop height and high speed. Pull up on your reference point, (cross tree line).

Release at 10 degs. using wiper blades on background as reference.

Watch replays and take screenies, for study, then repeat untill you can consistantly hit the wall.

 

The real mission, dropped at 30' and skidded the bombs along the ground, which was the most accurate way to do it.

 

I read an interview with an A4 pilot. "How do you attack Viet Cong posts with retarded bombs and Iron sights at such low levels?"

"You can't use sights. You just get a feel for it."

 

Release Point..

 

..

 

 

 

  In regards to the A-4 pilot interview. One of the things I have come to learn over years of reading combat pilot memoirs, interviews, and even the interview content one often finds in the often vague, not entirely accurate 'Discovery Wings' and 'Dogfights!' style television "documentaries", is that pilots are not always going to get into detail about how they did something and in some cases, they may not really even think about the various procedures they carefully practiced and will instead kinda simplify it for the audience as a sort of "intuitive" process. It isn't that they are lying or anything like that. It is just that we (as enthusiasts) sometimes forget that we are far, far more into remembering precise procedures than they are (especially long after retirement). 

  

  I have a hard time believing that Mosquito FB Crews were not given pretty specific sets of starting altitudes, starting speeds, dive angles, dive speeds, and release altitudes via a chart and a lot of practice. Likewise. I have a hard time believing that said crews were not trained to use specific reference points in the cockpit. Does this mean that every pilot pulled out the checklist before each bombing run? No. It means that they were given a starting point to build skills up on. This is what we really need here. I can put a bomb on target with the Mosquito but a big part of why I play DCS is because it encourages me to actually learn the "by the book" way of doing things purely because doing so helps make each aircraft feel distinct. 

 

  Hopefully ED manages to scrape together some charts/tables and put them in the manual because just kinda going on guesswork feels kinda wrong to me. Even when I put a bomb on target, I don't feel like I actually learned anything. 

[DD_Fenrir]

RAF Fighter Pilots went on practice dive-bombing camps where the entire squadron would spend two weeks trying to finesse their dive bombing techniques. Even then procedure could differ between theatres or even squadrons as they figured out things for themselves.

 

One fellow interviewed for a television documentary in the Mosquito several years ago told of flying up railway tracks to skip 500lb bombs into tunnels (!). When asked how he trained for that kind of thing his exact words were “you can’t; you just went out and did it!”

 

That said I’d imagine low level bombing being the raisin d’aitre of the FB.VI that some general low level practice was required, but that also attacks tended to be made in sections with a bomb-when-the-leader does procedure so after a while you got a feel for the arc and travel of your bombs from general sight picture alone.

 

Also don’t forget that currently we are unable to make the very low level releases that so typified the FB.VI ops as we don’t have the relevant fuses, so some of your bombing passes are having to be made from unprototypical altitudes and are artificially harder.

 

My first run at the Amiens prison wall at ~20ft altitude and release by gut feel couldn’t have gone better if I had tried - I landed the bombs smack into the base of the wall. I fragged myself into a cloud of balsa at the same time of course but that was kind of inevitable. From 500 ft my accuracy was far far less…

[fjacobsen]

@Stratrekmike...By calling it "guesswork" I didn´t mean purely guesswork.

 

Offcourse senior pilots would feed newcomers with tactics and guides.

The guides that where teached surely came from experiments and practice.

 

But in the end the right moment to release the bombs most probably  was just when it felt right.

And still it wasn´t super precision bombing.

The slightest misjudgement of altitude, speed, diveangle and release "picture", would mean that the bomb(s) would miss by a big margin.

 

The most precise method was divebombing - the steeper the more precise it would be - theoretically.

 

Skipbombing is not precision bombing as such. You release the bombe with the dropline towards the target.

The bomb will skip on the surface - be it flat ground or wate,r and will hit and explode on the first obstacle it meets, which hopefully is the intended target.

A delay is offcourse necessary for the aircraft to clear the bomb explosion.

[peachmonkey]

with current fuses in millisecond range it's pretty difficult to get a decent bomb run and NOT get a bomb damage splash. So you resort to:

1) dropping from a minimum of 400-500 meters with a steep dive angle

2) doing a 'toss', i.e. a skipping bomb move, when you fly horizontally, then do a hard pull up and press the bomb release trigger at the same time. If you ever drag raced you'd be looking at your reaction times here..

 

Once ED introduces a custom fuse delay (to avoid the splash damage) it will become a lot easier as you can drop bombs from 50m pretty accurately after 1-2 days of training.

[DD_Fenrir]

13 minutes ago, peachmonkey said:

… drop bombs from 50m…

That high? 

[TacticalOni]

I have kind of an odd angle in on this but I actually watched some dudes doing CAS in War Thunder (the pinnacle of historical aviation, I know) but essentially after watching dozens of dive profiles I've kind of got down how to get into a dive from a variety of altitudes and hitting the pickle on the pull-up, basically as soon as the target passes under the nose, and that puts them roughly where I want them roughly every time. 
roughly. 
I'm sure there's more to it but getting the finesse and the eye for it will count more than tables and other references for me. 

[Porkchopper]

On 9/25/2021 at 4:49 PM, No1sonuk said:

Maybe the one who hit the Amiens prison wall in the screenshots thread should do a tutorial.
Unless that was a one-off fluke. 

The crews that did this raid "skipped" the bombs off the ground into the walls from treetop-level height. They barely cleared the high walls during their pullouts.

On 9/27/2021 at 12:56 PM, statrekmike said:

and in some cases, they may not really even think about the various procedures they carefully practiced and will instead kinda simplify it for the audience as a sort of "intuitive" process

I think it's a lot like asking a pro baseball player HOW they hit a home run. They're going to find it very difficult to explain.

[Porkchopper]

Does anyone have any details on the different types of bombs the moss can currently carry? IE, which one should be used for a specific target type?

[DD_Fenrir]

For general information:

 

[bart]

14 hours ago, DD_Fenrir said:

For general information:

 

 

What book is this extract from if you don't mind me asking?