How tough is this question?

[kfsone]

Without flicking into aces high or looking it up on the web or any other form of reference material, how many of you can answer all of these:

What key do you press to access:

 nose gun on a b17
 nose gun on a b26
 nose gun on a lancaster
 top gun on a b26
 top gun on a lancaster
 tail gun on a b17
 tail gun on a b26

According to a little online test I just did, no bombers knew exactly where any of their guns were without trying them first.

Given the inability to have more than one gunner, given the absence of any form of auto-gunning and given that guns tend not to be pointing in expected directions due to auto-tracking, this puts most bombers at a great disadvantage.

Even when I have someone flying gunner, at crunch time they often easily jump to the wrong gun position and take a few moments to register this depending on plane and/or gun angle.

Aside from seeing the guns put on sensible numbers (8 nose, 5 top, 2 tail, 0 belly, 4 left waist/rear, 6 right waist/rear), I'd very much like an option for pilots/gunners to disable the robotic tracking mechanism.

[RebootSequence]

I have too much stuff to remember to keep information like that in my long term memory.  However, I always run through the gun positions and learn which are where before I start my bomber rolling.  I fly them enough that once I get in there and see where one of the number keys take me I immediately remember all the other positions.

However some standardization on the positions isn't a bad idea at all.  The lanc is especially screwy because the nose gunner is the first gunner.  It'd be cool if they were standard because then I could just map a stick set for bombers and set up my hat switch to cover at least most of the positions.

If for some reason you want to fire without the Robo-Track enabled on the guns (desire to conserve ammo or desire to get shot down quicker are only reasons I can think of) you can use the secondary fire button.  It is set up to only fire the gun position you are occupying.

-sequence

[This message has been edited by RebootSequence (edited 05-12-2001).]

[kfsone]

Actually what I'd specifically want is for them not to track, so that, for example, you can more easily switch between gun positions to scan the sky, since you are having to play the role of, say, 6 gunners instead of 1 in the b17, or 3 gunners instead of 1 on the Lanc.


Personally I'd prefer that each gunner could have a human man it concurrently, or that until better solutions are derived, we could have some degree of auto-gunnery.

Unfortunately no matter how dumb you make auto-gunners, cretins who insist on climbing up the tail-pipes of bombers or sliding down their 12 will complain that they have to maneuver to kill buffs and that ain't fair or some such rubbish =)

[Jekyll]

Kfsone, the relatively obvious idea of having the same keypress access the same gun position on all buffs was, I believe, first raised on the day the B26 was made available.

It has been consistently ignored by HTC.  I don't expect anything to change in the foreseeable future.

[Mark Luper]

The question was answered once. I can't find the post and I don't remember the answer, but I can see where it would be a problem.

The B-17 has 6 gun positions, the B-26 has 5, the Lanc and the JU-88 each have 3 (not counting the forward firing guns on both the JU-88 and B-26). I suppose you could have the keys 2 through 4 all represent the same guns on all planes but you would end up with the lower ball turret being 7 on the 17 if you made the waist gunners the same number on both the B-26 and the B-17.

Personaly, on the B-17 I prefer to use 2 through 4 for the two ball turrets and the tail gunner since those are what I use the most when trying to defend myself in that plane.

[Steven]

I have an old TM Pro Flight Stick with only forward, back, left, right views (no 45 degrees) and only four buttons.  My trigger is mapped to fire all guns (so that, to drop a bomb, I have to shoot a bullet too.)

Did someone just say that on a bomber all guns that can shoot at a target will then shoot at a target such as top turret even if I'm in the tail gunner position?

Maybe this explains why when I jump from position to position the guns aren't pointed in the direction I'd left them.  That bugged me a lot the couple flights I have in a bomber but maybe now this makes sense.

[Trell]

it was not ignored by htc the posted a reply saying i believe that it was difucult to change and was not a easy fix and that they were working on it.

but that was a while ago so i dont know.
maybe they could give us an update?


Trell

[kfsone]

I gather that HTC have said it would be difficult to do this because it's part of the aircraft model itself - i.e. it relates to which order the guns were added, and affects the entire gunner model?

Well, how about putting a remap function in above the gunner stuff? Which uses a keypad-based model for assigning gunner positions; e.g.

8 = nose, 5 = top, 2 = tail, 0 = belly, 4 = left, 6 = right.

In the Ju88 the top-tail guns would be 4 and 6.

Heck, you could even remap the gunner positions to shift+keypad-key so that you can use your keypad to jump between positions in a way that REALLY makes sense.

(And I think most people can probably manage right-shift+keypad key)

K

[AKDejaVu]

 

It has been consistently ignored by HTC.

It was adressed by HTC.  Most chose to ignore their reply.  Just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean there wasn't one.

AKDejaVu

[iculus]

Simple fix:

Create some labels

I'll get going on it...

<S>IC