Goos:
I remember this being discussed a lot at the time of the AH2 transition -- but as I recall, the programmers swore that the gun modelling had not changed with the version switch. The big change that LOOKED like a drop in guns effectiveness came from the introduction of smaller (and much more realistic) "hit boxes." And there was not, to my knowledge, targeted changes to single planes' gun effectiveness. The complaints came from everybody!
From my understanding, what happened to give that impression of decreased killing power was this:
In AH1 planes' structures were broken down into fewer and thus larger "boxes" for damage assessment purposes. The boxes were not only larger because they covered bigger portions of the surface, but HTC gave credit for near misses. In essence, there were larger bubbles both on the planes' surfaces and extending from the surfaces into what looked like air
In AH2, planes were broken down into more damagable areas. That meant each one was smaller, so the same spread of hits would now be divided between several damage columns without any one of the columns surpassing the threshold for critical damage. That made it look like the hits did less damage, when what really happened was that the same damage was just spread out.
On top of that, in AH2 your rounds had to be much closer to actually hitting the target get credit.
That combination of effects meant that EVERYONE'S hit percent dropped; that it was much, much harder to get kills at long range (800 yards was pretty routine from good shots); and that people felt the guns were weaker. After all, things didnt blow up as easily as they used to! However, the reason was not weaker guns, or changes in plane performance. It was increased sophistication of the damage model.
And in any case, it's way more realistic. In real life, most shots were inside 200 yards. In real life, even "stable" gun platforms had noise and vibration issues we can't even imagine..just watch some of those gun camera films, and see how everythign jumps around....can you imagine keeping the pipper rock solid in those conditions?
