Originally posted by CurtissP-6EHawk
You really need to look into this a little more. I certainly do agree with the theory but it stinks. I on the other hand see it a different way.
1. When I am the first to hit a con I can blow the stinking crap out of him and him have no visable damage. Not just a few pings but light him up like a wild fire. Then I loose what advantage I have and have to move on. 30 minutes later I get credit for him. I hit him enough to get credeit but not enough to kill him or render him a non-threat!
2. Then I see it the way these guys do. I come in a target that has no apperent damage, light him up with a few pings and then he goes down.....stinking assists.
Sure the 50% thing seams ok but but its not. The guy getting the 50% deserves credit but its the way the first 50% doesnt cause any unairworthy damage that can get you killed. 
I had my physics hat on over my first cup of coffee and came to the same conclusion as you did. Over my second cup I put on my programmers hat and came to a different conclusion:-)
For we players it is fairly intuitive to determine who shot who down. Problem is, computers are notoriously non intuitive. Take, for example, a situation where you pound the wing tip to 90% damage with 20MM. I come along and knock it off with a few .50 hits. The plane continues flying, albeit in an unstable condition. Along comes a Spit I and puts a few .303 hits on the planes tail. The pilot maneuvers, stalls, spins, and augers in.
If this situation occurred within the span of a few seconds during a furball, I would probably have a good claim to the kill, since I took off a big, visible, part of the plane. Of course, my snapshot would not have taken off the wing tip at all, if you had not hammered on it first. Then too, the plane may have been able to sneak off on the deck, if the Spit had not forced it to maneuver.
If this occurs over the span of many minutes, with you and I having flown off in another direction, the Spit would have the claim to the kill, since his shots caused the plane to crash.
There are a lot of conditions attached to this one kill, and these conditions must all be tracked over time. Each series of hits would require more subroutines, numerous loops within the subroutines, many explicit conditional statements within the loops, and a whole lot more variables to track the many hits per minute occurring in the MA.
If I were doing the programming, I would explain to HiTech that this is a non trivial code change to correct a problem that, statistically, will all average out in the wash:-)
