Folks have complained about puffy ack for a while.
Why can bombers, flying level, steady, and slow, be unharmed while fighters doing 500+ TAS at 25k are hit repeatedly while jinking and evading?
Hitech has explained how it works. There's a box within which ack is fired. The box follows your plane. The box gets larger (the area the hits can explode gets less dense) the faster you are, if you're turning, or diving/climbing.
Yet, somehow, this disparity of intent and effect persists!
While flying 500 TAS at 22k over an ack strat, and being pinged REPEATEDLY, I decided it was time to type up why I think the puffy ack doesn't work properly, and perhaps get it changed.
This is all based on my experience, and based on what Hitech has described, and using some logic I can put together a reason for what's not working.
Say you have a box around a plane. However the code is set up, say a % of the shots are all clustered pretty close to the center of it (even if they're not hits, they're near misses). So you fly level and oooh and ahh at the eye candy bursting around you, but your bomber never takes a hit.
Now, say you're in a fighter, making S motions gently, climbing and diving but still going very fast. The box opens up to a larger box. The puffy ack can still spread out and be further away, but it's still got N% near the center of the box.
So, it's hard to explain without diagrams and sketches, but since I'm at work and have no access to photoshop I'll have to use words.
If while flying steady and slower, a puffy burst would have gone off at your 11 oclock too far away to hurt you, since you were S-turning to the left anyways, and going much faster, you've now flown INTO the puffy ack.
The intent is that the ack gets further away from you, less likely to hit, the result is that it gets more in front of you and more likely you will actually fly INTO it rather than past it.
Think of it as a ring around the plane, but the ring doesn't take into account speed and velocity changes. If you are constant, the ring is constant and keeps pace. You might get close to the front of the ring, but not touch it. Say you're going much faster, turning left, right, up, down. The "ring" lags behind your movements, and now you've breached it either by speed or manuver, and the puffy ack hits you repeatedly.
How I would suggest fixing this:
The faster a con is, add a higher % of puffy ack to the REAR quadrant of the box around the plane. Less in front means that due to the delay of fire and burst, the con is less likely to be hit. Also, I would seriously suggest concentrating more ack closer to the center of the box and in the forward quadrant, the slower and more steady the con is. Back in AH1 the puffy ack used to be a threat to bombers.
Rather than randomly puffing code in the box, assign % of that ack to different parts of the box.
For a long time, however, I've never been hit by puffy ack that wasn't manned by somebody in a fleet 5" gun. My suggested correction would make puffy ack more of a nuisance for bombers. I don't want it to decimate them, but I really HATE that it never even touches them!
EDIT: If it's easier than assigning a % of ack to a part of the hit box, then simply move the hit box. Instead of always centering it on the plane, move it backwards the faster the planes goes, so that with the same random dispersion it the effect is still the same: the puffs start lagging behind instead of hitting you repeatedly.
