** Pulls out the flaming Pom Pom's and dons HTC Cheerleader outfit** < So Towd and Raubvogel can feel good about themselves and blame it all on the "porked UFO hispano laser capitalist opportunists">
Widewing, I will happily acknowledge your expertise in aircraft history, but I have to disagree with you on those points.
1.) Battle Damage: First realize as Lephturn said, the offline damage model is not the same as the online model. The offline model is greatly simplified allowing for very easy kills. Plus the drones fly in a very easy to follow pattern that allows quite easy tracking shots, thereby causing concentrated damage. In the arena, the enemy is usually twisting and turning, and actively evading you, so its much harder.
Even online though you will see cases where the x4 cannon aircraft will disable you with a single burst.
Is this realistic? In my opinon, yes. From watching guncamera footage, I tend to notice that once the attacker starts to get actual hits on an enemy fighters, it is usually just a few strikes before some catastrophic damage occurs. There are just way too many critical systems packed into a very small tight space. Yes, there are many accounts of fighters coming home with bad damage. But there are just as many cases of pilots coming home with kills to discover that they expended just a few rounds from their cannons, and less than a hundred MG rounds.
If you would like to spend some time in the Training Arena with me, I will show you that its much different in actual virtual combat, than against the drones offline.
2-a.) Smoke: All I can say here is to repeat what was said earlier in the thread. Due to the way that you engage the drones offline, you will tend to stay in the thickest of the smoke for long periods, thereby enhancing the visual effect of the smoke trails. Is it right or wrong? *shrugs* I honestly don't know.
3.) 20mm Cannons Grossly Overmodeled: Now here is a point I will have to disagree with you on totally, as its an issue that I have done quite a bit of reading and research on, and its something that we have debated on this board ad nasuem.
Looking at available lethality data and historical research into this subject, such as the data presented at the Joint Fighter Conference, where they go into length concerning the lethality of the Hispano 20mm versus the Browning .50's, I think the guns in AH are pretty close.
If you compare static testing within the game, where you fire at a static target such as a hanger, then count the number of shells expended before it destroys the target for each gun type/caliber, you will see that relative lethality in the game follows the historic data.
We have also done the same using theoretical engineering calculations to compute kinetic energy and explosive energy per gun, using the theory that applied energy to an airframe is directly proportional to relative lethality (Robert Shaw's Book Chapter 1).
So either all the guns in AH are pretty much off, or none of them are.
There is a reason that x4 20mm cannons became much more common as the war went on (and experimentation with bigger guns such as the Russian 23mm or 37mm, and the German 30mm.)
4.) Spins: All I can relate in this area is my own experience, which is admittedly quite sparse. A couple of years ago, I got to fly a AT-6 Texan down in Kissimmee FL (I have it all on video tape, from the cockpit, tail, and wing). In one manuever, an immelman, the instructor told me as we hit the top that turned the aircraft over that I was gonna stall it. He was right. It stalled, dropped the wing, and spun around about one full turn before I could recover, and I was suprised at how easy it was to recover. I figured that from all the talk over the years, that a stall and spin would be vicious, and very difficult to recover from.
5.) G Limitations: Here I can probably agree with you that its probably slightly too sensitive, but not totally unrealistic. G tolerances seem to vary widely from person to person. HTC had to decide what "average" was and apply it too the sim.
Again from my own experience, when I flew the Texan, I pulled around (and maybe over) 5 G's without a suit, with little to no problem. But I was in my late 20's, in good physical health, and worked out regularly. But a friend of mine took the same flight (same general age and physical conditioning), and he had alot of problems with the G forces and seemed to have a very low tolerance. On the other hand, the instructor told me that I seemed to have fairly high G tolerance's, and he was suprised that it didn't seem to effect me at all.
In regards to the comments about G-Suits, and reclined seating in the Fw190, this is a very difficult issue to address. Remember that AH is suppose to simulate the entire war, not just 1944. So how do you implement features such as G-Suits without unbalancing the arena's, or introducing something that would be anachronistic? It is certainly an area that could be improved upon in AH, but I'm just pointing out that its not as easy to address as some may think.
A converse point is that currently AH does not model progressive pilot fatigue. In AH you can pull the same number of G's until your aircraft stalls and plummets into the ground. In the real deal, pilots get tired, and the more you pull sustain G's the more sensitive you become to them. Actually this is something I hope to see in the future. It will cut down on the turnfighters that pull hard 7-9 G turns for the better part of a 10 minute fight with little to no cumulative effect.
** Hands flaming Pom Pom's to Towd & Raubvogel, "How was that Boys for a great big HTC rah rah?" **
And Widewing,
Please realize I am just debating the issue with you, nothing personal involved. Anything between the ** symbols is just a blatant attempt to needle other players who don't want to hear an honest debate on the issues.
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Vermillion
**MOL**, Men of Leisure
