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Rocket effectivness


Neon67

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Hi all

 

From my experience in a10c and ka50 , i really find that rockets don t do enought splash damage . You really have to hit the truck body in order to kill him, almost the same for infantry. Rockets don t have the same amount of explosive as a bomb, but when it hit 1 to 2 meters from the truck/infantry , this one should really be severly damaged. don t you think ?

 

What is your opinion about the matter? Should ED fix the rocket family ?

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Splash damage is modelled both for bombs and rockets, fragmentation is not.

 

 

I know world war 2 online had the same problems with performance and bombs, they got really accurate results with their statistical fragmentation model which basically did a quick look up from a table to check how many fragments had a chance to hit before actually start calculating individual fragments.

 

It might be an option to look at that.

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For all intents and purposes, splash damage is the "simulation" of blast effects, fragmentation being one of those.

 

The problem is not the splash damage, but the vehicle damage model. Vechiles are either alive or dead, there is no mobility kill for example. Besides without knowing of the top of my head the size of the ffar warhead, short of a direct hit or very near hit, it probably would not outright destroy a soft skin vehicle, but may disable it or kill the driver.

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Actually I think it is the same with bombs, because of the aforementioned fragmentation issue.

 

Both bombs and rockets have a bit of splash damage based on the explosion itself. Both don't have fragments flying around.

If you detonate a Mk82 bomb 30m away from a truck that will have a really bad day IRL.

 

The reason for the bombs not seeming much too weak is that their direct damage was increased a bit to make up for the lack of fragmentation damage IIRC.

 

I really hope ED implements some sort of simulation for the fragmentation damage in the future.

And if they do I'd love to see air fuses as well.

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In order to simulate fragmentation, would it not work just to increase the splash area ? Even if in real life the truck wouldnt be completly destroyed , it should however be severly damaged, which from hi above would look like almost the same ?

 

 

But truck still beiing alive is one small problem, the biggest issue is against infantry


Edited by Neon67
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Here's how some engines do it (I actually don't know how the DCS engine exactly does it and I also think ED won't tell me :D ), and maybe that's one reason wy that doesn't work.

 

The direct splash damage (the damage by the explosion itself) may just be one amount of damage, and then maybe two or three different fractions of that are applied to all targets dependent on their position in "rings" (or linear/logarithmic/whatever scaling) around the impact point - actually spheres I guess but I'll stay 2D here for the sake of clarity.

 

So the problem is that if you just make it bigger to hit targets in a bigger area you also make the bomb stronger for the close targets. And that's bad of course.

 

Things about fragmentation that are important and may not be possible that way:

- doesn't do much damage on heavy targets like bunkers and tanks

- does lots of damage on soft targets, even if they are fairly far away

- wide and high targets have a greater chance of being hit (so a soldier standing must be further away in order not to be hit)

- can be blocked (also true for the explosion itself, but a bit different, that's what revetments are for)

 

Also I think in the DCS engine every bullet and so on is an object, and if that is also true for fragments it would cause significant FPS drops.

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- does lots of damage on soft targets, even if they are fairly far away

 

Define fairly far. Fragments are usually rather small, that means that not only is their density subject to the inverse square law, but they'll also loose energy quickly due to their low mass vs. air resistance, coupled with their less than aerodynamic shape.

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I went into one of the weapons config files and doubled the damage parameter (I think it's called warhead weight) for all rockets, bombs, and artillery shells, and I think they perform much more realistically now in terms of damaging things they explode next to, but obviously this is a stopgap solution.

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Define fairly far. Fragments are usually rather small, that means that not only is their density subject to the inverse square law, but they'll also loose energy quickly due to their low mass vs. air resistance, coupled with their less than aerodynamic shape.

 

You can find it here, for example, in this document, Appendix F (page 105):

 

http://publicintelligence.net/restricted-u-s-military-multi-service-joint-application-of-firepower-jfire-manual/

 

And with tons of damage I mean that a person hit by a single fragment will quite likely die, even hundreds of meters away.

 

Example: A hand grenade has such a dense fragment cloud that you still have a 80% chance of being hit when being 15 meters away from the explosion. And a hand grenade is tiny, even compared to small bombs. I did a "fact check" including sources on that once, I think it was here on the forums. I'll try and find it.

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Meh, actually that's not the best source, I had a better one, also an official document by either USN, USAF, or USMC. Don't know which one, though, but IIRC it explicitly stated the ranges where the hit-chance for a standing or a prone soldier is 100%, 10% and 0.1%

I'll dig through my documents when I'm home tonight.

 

EDIT:

Found a link in one of my text documents that might lead to the thing I was talking about, but it is not available at present because of lack of funding (USA shutdown) :(


Edited by Aginor
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And with tons of damage I mean that a person hit by a single fragment will quite likely die, even hundreds of meters away.

 

Well if fragments are that big, then there are not a lot of them which in term makes it very unlikely for a person to be hit at a few hundred meters, especially in such a way that it will result in a fatal injury.

 

 

Example: A hand grenade has such a dense fragment cloud that you still have a 80% chance of being hit when being 15 meters away from the explosion. And a hand grenade is tiny, even compared to small bombs.

 

Yes, but that is standing and in unrealistically flat terran. If you are under or very close to the plane that the grenade went off on, your chances of being hit are much, much smaller. That is where fragmentation modelling gets hairy and ressource intensive.

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Well if fragments are that big, then there are not a lot of them which in term makes it very unlikely for a person to be hit at a few hundred meters, especially in such a way that it will result in a fatal injury.

 

Yes, but that is standing and in unrealistically flat terran. If you are under or very close to the plane that the grenade went off on, your chances of being hit are much, much smaller. That is where fragmentation modelling gets hairy and ressource intensive.

 

To your first point: Why does a fragment have to be large to kill a person? A bullet from a M-4 is just 5.5mm in diameter and kills a person easily. It just has to be fast, and according to http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/bombs.htm such fragments are pretty damn fast.

Also danger are not only the bomb itself but also stuff that is on the ground. Dropping a bomb on a gravel road might lead to people dying of injuries caused by getting hit by gravel, just like a bomb dropped on a house might kill people with glass fragments.

 

As for your second point: I agree with that, especially if you take both things in account we mentioned in our last posts. So there has to be some sort of simplified model, that goes without saying.

 

But even if you leave that all out the distance where you are injured with a significant chance is somewhere around 200m for a mk-82. less than 60-80m means you are most likely dead. The minimum safe distance for troops in a combat situation (out of the "danger close" zone) is ~250m, the minimum safe distance for training is 1200m. And that's the smallest bomb.

I admit I didn't test that lately, but IIRC in DCS I can drop a mk-84 (which has more than double the explosives of the mk82) some 150m away from infantry and they are not even damaged.

 

EDIT:

More to fragment speeds and stuff:

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0730949


Edited by Aginor
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To your first point: Why does a fragment have to be large to kill a person? A bullet from a M-4 is just 5.5mm in diameter and kills a person easily. It just has to be fast, and according to http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/bombs.htm such fragments are pretty damn fast.

 

Bullets are very carefully shaped so they have as little air resistance as possible during their flight, they are also spun so they don't tumble, both is not true for fragments.

 

Further, just hitting someone will not result in an instakill. Wounds from 5.56x45 are no joke, but for a person to be killed, they still need to hit a vital blood vessel or the head, that works considerably on your propability.

 

I agree that bombs do indeed propel out other debris, but the effectiveness against prone targets is considerably less than what you would expect, since the bulk of that debris is propelled slightly upward at an angle. If maximum fragmentation damage is desired, an airburst fuse should be used.

 

I'm not saying that the damage model currently is anywhere near as sophisticated as other parts of the simulation, i consider it lacking even, but usually when ED tackle something, they either do it proper or they don't do it at all. I suppose that currently they see their ressources better invested in other parts of the simulation

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Come let's eat grandpa!

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I'd like clarification on how "splash" is actually modeled.

 

If you drop a Mk84 in the game and compare it to videos of them, the explosion animation alone is incredibly small. The damage done is even less, being able to drop GBU-10's between tanks that are 10 feet apart and only damaging one of them.

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This makes me think that bomb explosion graphics are both undersized and too short in duration.

 

These bombs did a great job of marking targets—even from 20,000 feet, any pilot could see a 500 lb bomb exploding, especially an airburst that made even more smoke than a groundburst.

 

Some of that will be hard to model—it seems unlikely that DCS will model the wind picking up dust and keeping it aloft in the near future—but it's definitely not the case that I'd consider a general purpose bomb a very good marking tool in our simulation.

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Bullets are very carefully shaped so they have as little air resistance as possible during their flight, they are also spun so they don't tumble, both is not true for fragments.

 

Further, just hitting someone will not result in an instakill. Wounds from 5.56x45 are no joke, but for a person to be killed, they still need to hit a vital blood vessel or the head, that works considerably on your propability.

 

I agree that bombs do indeed propel out other debris, but the effectiveness against prone targets is considerably less than what you would expect, since the bulk of that debris is propelled slightly upward at an angle. If maximum fragmentation damage is desired, an airburst fuse should be used.

 

I'm not saying that the damage model currently is anywhere near as sophisticated as other parts of the simulation, i consider it lacking even, but usually when ED tackle something, they either do it proper or they don't do it at all. I suppose that currently they see their ressources better invested in other parts of the simulation

 

I think I can agree with that in all points.

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I'd like clarification on how "splash" is actually modeled.

 

If you drop a Mk84 in the game and compare it to videos of them, the explosion animation alone is incredibly small. The damage done is even less, being able to drop GBU-10's between tanks that are 10 feet apart and only damaging one of them.

 

This.

Mk84 is silly in DCS. Well I'm not real pilot but there is something fishy in it.

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rockets, bombs all of that is quite useless.. you pretty much have to pin-point hit a target.. about troops, you should be able to disable them with mk82 or similar heavy ordnance pretty easy and that is if you miss something like 100 feet.. the bomb shock wave is what kills..it messes your internal organs, you start bleeding internally.. you don't need to have your head torn off, a simple mortar round, medium to small size will kill a person standing 10 yards away.. and that is not from a shrapnel..simple shock wave..

 

so, all soft targets like cars, hummers, trucks, to some extent even apc's..should be severely in danger if you drop 1 mk84 100 feet away.. and a crater would be nice, right now dropping bombs feels quite "empty"..

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