I've flown with bombom in WB and even in AH (albeit his stay here was a breif one), have known him to be a very precise pilot and a capable commander (in fact, there was this one strike on Rabaul where he ran the Betties, I the Zekes against a mess of RAAF Spit Vbs, and we completely destroyed the enemy,with our losses totalling one G4M ditching on the way back).
I find it amusing that the same arguments have been thrown back and forth now for what? 15 years? and nobody's showing signs of fatigue or being convinced.
I guess for every four-hour session of practicing exclusively loose deuces and double attacks, you guys spend at least two hours honing the same arguments (and updating the ol' horometer).
The problem is always the same one: while the arguments focus on horse***** such as damage models, ballistics and flight models, the real issue is the limitations of historical simulation, in this case a double supersoldier problem.
The classic supersoldier problem is that your game entities have no fear of death, and therefore will behave unrealistically to life-threatening situations.
This problem is further complicated by the fact that in an historical situation such as this, many of the players have a couple orders of magnitude more experience with employing the weapons system in combat than the soldiers they're supposed to be representing.
I have no doubt bmbm has 8000 virtual cockpit hours of combat flying WW2 mmp sims. That's 4 working years of shooting stuff down 9-5. Hans Rudel had 2530 sorties in WW2, probably a record, but most of those would have been under an hour.
Moreover, we've got access to more and better educational materials to train for stuff like deflection shooting.
So, given all this how do you make a bomber intercept believable? If you have gunner AI and make him realistically wild, you reward the unrealistically good pilots on the other side, and make flying bombers extremely unrewarding. If you make the gunners unrealistically good, so that fighter interceptors have to fly like experten, the experten whine that they've got to fly like experten.
And then there's the problem of bombing accuracy. High-level bombing is not very accurate; and, in terms of crew and material per pound of explosive delivered, is much more expensive then a good ol' fashioned JABO run. F/Bs can also fight back, and fly reasonably fast. The historical choice for level bombing had a lot to do with survivability: dive bombing a target could have success, but you were likely to encounter appalling loss rates from AAA and fighters preying on low-level a/c. But in a game, AAA is lethal to one side only, and it costs a lot of resources to simulate it in historically convincing numbers. If you make the AAA superlethal, then dogfights become exercises in ack-dragging. If not, then it's much simpler to just divebomb a target.
In the end, the LW pilots whine without realizing how good they've got it. And the bulletin boards echo with the cries of the posters' fathers. And people waive their joysticks around as if that should impress us. And buff drivers _always_ get screwed.
Oh and batz, germany lost WW2.
