Murdr said:My point being, that some lethality issues are a matter of perception.
This is quite true. Many times, when I've had like a 10-20^ tracking deflection shot, it's looked from my POV behind the sight like I've put every single bullet right into the cockpit. And seeing all those hits apparently in the same place, I've checked fire to save ammo, thinking the bastard will fall apart in another second or 2 once lagged damage kicks in. Then I've been very annoyed the bastard didn't die. Maybe a piece came off, maybe he smoked, but he kept going.
This, mind you, is right at convergence range, because all the hits were practically in the same small spot in the 2D plane of the monitor screen.HOWEVER, this seemingly lethal appearance ignores the 3rd dimension along the line of fire. When I look at these films in an external view from a different angle, I see instead the hits are all along the plane's length, with some on the tailfeathers, some on the wing roots, and others spaced out all along the fuselage. Never enough in any one spot to inflict immediately fatal damage, despite how it looked in the foreshortened POV at the time. Thus, even when you fire at convergence range, you still have to fire long enough bursts to accumulate enough hits in 1 spot to do fatal damage, despite how it might look after just 1 second of fire.
As to the question of how you can determine the actual range under the new icon system, the old tried-and-true method is to put marks on your gunsight that line up with the wingtips of the typical fighter target at your convergence range. To get the marks in the right spot, take a screenshot of an offline drone right at the correct range, as seen through your sight, and then put marks where its wingtips are.
This brings up the issue of determining your best convergence range. It ideal is to set your convergence at a range where all your guns are very close to being converged for some useful amount of space on both sides of the specified range. And to know that, you have to experiment with the .target XXX command. Set your convergence for, say, 200, then see what the pattern looks like at 100, 150, 250, and 300. Play around with the convergence setting until you can get a decently tight pattern for a space of about 100 yards. This will vary from plane to plane depending on the types and locations of guns aboard.
Several months ago, I sent in some revised skins for the .target XXX target. These had ass-view, full-size silouhettes of a spit and a B17 centered in them. This would enable you to see how good your pattern really is versus the typical targets, because the simple rings on the target as we have it today utterly fail to provide that info. Unfortunately, HTC hasn't seen fit to incorporate this into the game, and they have to do it because this isn't something you can incorporate on your own.
