Any advise on engaging bombers?

[DamnedRen]

If we tell you just how easy it is to kill bombers we wouldn't have anyone flying bombers anymore.

Joking aside....come in from ahead/above and the real secret is to fire a burst and when it begins hitting the plane adjust your aim and continue to fire on the one spot you see the flashes. The weight of the ammo will destroy that point on the plane. My favorite aim spots are the fuselage just ahead of the tail on the B-17's and the wing roots on the rest of them.

When you dive on a buff, you are in for a killing shot but you also need to be already setting up your next attack. As you kill one, you should already have rolled to point your lift vector back out ahead of the buffs line of flight. Your excess speed will easily take you ahead and above him for the next attack. If you don't extend ahead and above him you put yourself in the position of now having to catch up while trying to get above him.

The hardest thing for anyone to do is to get above and ahead of the buff so you can attack. It's not from a lack of trying just a lack of patience. The next time you see some buffs come over your field take a look at all the guys trying to shoot up the buffs from their 6 position. Then watch how many of those guys either go down in smoke/flames or are limping home without a kill.

If you do it right, the buffs go down and you land your 3 kills. Every time.

Hope this helps.

[Xasthur]

I've been flying the 109K almost exculsively this tour and I have have pretty good success rates against enemy bombers.

The 109K performs magnificently at higher altitudes, so it's quite good for high-level bomber intercepts, especially if there a P51s stupid enough to get in your way at that altitude.

I can't add much to what has already been said here, diving/slashing fast attacks are definately the way to go and with the K4, you have such an outstanding climb rate that it's really no bother to put a couple of K on a set of bombers and then drop in hot and heavy on them.

With B-17s...be carefull, the guns (especially tail) are very vicious.

With 24s, as was stated earlier....go for the wing root... this will result in either an engine fire (fatal hit) or a wing seperation (also fatal and much cooler to watch)

Lancs.... belly shots are the best bet. I always try to take the tail section off too with those.


I thought I'd post a couple of photos of the 109K in action against bombers.



I think this is a good example of a front quarter, diving, slashing, front-on assault.

This sort of attack will (most importantly) make you very hard to hit and as you see in the photo, inflict damage on engines and the cockpit.

Not one round got near me on this pass and this pilot was an exceptional gunner.



This second image is a perfect example of the B - 24 attack that has been mentioned earlier.

Here, I took the time to climb +2k on this guy and dive at high speed (i came in from and angle and straightened up at the last second so as to make me very hard to line up for a shot)



I destroyed all three bombers in this flight (the pilot was no dead**** either) with a few 30mm rounds to spare and with nothing but a scratch on my canopy.

Hopefully, these shots will help you size up and perfect your attacks a little to.

Oh, i just rememered. Do youself a large favour and look up the movie by 'ParIN' (pretty sure it was him) that he called 'Skull'. He posted it here not long ago, there are some great 109 techniques in there.

anyway, enough jabbering!

Good luck!

[humble]

went ahead and filmed a buff attack in my P-40....the 1st pass is pretty typical attack profile. you'll see the buffdriver open up at 1.5 or so. When I see he's got the bullet stream out front of me like that its a sign he's normally pretty decent. I break the attack off and execute my prefered attack. I very rarely get pinged at all on this type of attack profile....normally the buffs gone before I even fly by...Buffbusting 101

1st rounds are right on the cockpit

[humble]

what are you using to capture the screen shots??

[RTR]

All really good info here!

Here's another tidbit. Each different type of bomber has it's own blindspots (the point at which non of the gun positions can track you).

What I used to get my squad to do, back in the day, was fly each different buff type and have another squad  member fly intercepts on him. this accomplished two things right away.

1. It showed the buff driver (when gunning) where his blind spots were, and allowed him to get a better understanding of how to gun from a buff more effectively.

2. It showed the intercepting pilot where the blindspots of that particular bomber were, and allowed him to set himself up for a safer killing shot.

Hope this helps a bit.

cheers,
RTR

[Xasthur]

Originally posted by humble
what are you using to capture the screen shots??

To capture my screen shots, i play through the film of the engagement I want to capture and hit the pause button right on the frame that I want captured.

Once I have the desired frame, I hit 'Full screen' mode on the Film Viewer and then press 'Print Screen'. With my keyboard, i have to hold the 'F-Lock' key then press the 'PrtScn' key (usually situated right next to the 'F12' key. (sometimes PrtScn is written on the side of the key, not the top, too).

I then press 'ctrl + v' to past the capture into Adobe Photoshop and use that to crop, resize and save the image as a JPEG.

I have noticed that Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Aces High Film Viewer do not make good bed fellows at all.

The two programs, when running at the same time cause a critical error in my video driver which sends me back to 640 x 480 screen resolution and makes me reboot to fix this.

I've found that if I close photoshop straight after saving the JPEG and then go back to using Film Viewer (never have the viewer trying to play while photoshop is running) it seems to be alright, just runs very slower than normal.

I hope that helps, mate.

Regards

-Archaius