rubber bullets from hell

[CavemanJ]

In the arena today while flying an F4U-1D I bounce a B-17.  Nice sweeping attack, a solid 2-3 second burst right to his starboard wing root/fuse, all right around convergence.  Only thing that happens to this B-17 is the #3 engine starts trailing black smoke.  Climb, reposition, reattack on the left side this time, same attack w/ 1-2 seconds of fire on the left wing root/fuse, and only visible damage is the #2 engine starts trailing black smoke.

All told 4 attacks were made before this B-17 blew up, and it took a little better than 3/4 of the -1Ds clip to get the kill.


Awhile later I'm flying a B-17 to pork the fuel/ammo/barracks on 18 and relieve 19.  While I make my first pass a P-51 gets position and as I turn back for my second run this pony comes at me at damn near the exact same line/angle of my first attack on the 17 mentioned above.  1-2 seconds of fire and I'm a fargin fireball, like I had been attacked by a -1C/Tiffie instead of a P-51.

I've had this problem since 1.03, which is about when I started flying cannon kites.  I used to fly the 38 and pony w/ the 4x.50 til this cropped up.  Usually dinnae have much of a problem killing with the 4x20mm on the -1C or the N1K (when I'm feeling ultra-dweeby   ), but the .50s are like throwing playdoh/empty beer cans at a target; worthless.  Hell in another sortie today in the -1D it took 4-5 seconds of fire, at convergence range, to peel the wing off an N1K.

I'm getting damned tired of flying with .50s shooting ammo made in a Nerf factory  

[Lephturn]

Hmmm, I don't see any problems with the .50's, but lets examine a couple of things.

First, you need to remember that it can take up to two seconds for your damage to register and feed back to you visually.  A four second burst won't tell you much, since the first bb might have killed him but you didn't see him "die" for a few seconds.

The second issue is convergence and range.  I know you are used to those big cannons, but the .50's don't work the same way.  What is your convergence set to and what range are you hitting at?  Although you can get pretty long range hits with the .50's, I don't find them very deadly unless you are closer, like 300 yards.

This is of course assuming that nothing else funky is going on.  What video card are you running and what drivers?  Do you see any graphical anomalies?  Do you have v-synch disabled?  (Although lately many folks disable it on the GeForce 2 cards and have no problems.)

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Lephturn - Chief Trainer
A member of The Flying Pigs  http://www.flyingpigs.com
 
"A pig is a jolly companion, Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt --
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale, Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you, When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover, You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!" -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"