Taters n Tails

[greens]

is this a before an after conception>/? 

[VonMessa]

Well, ballpark quickie google search muzzle velocity appears to be in the 2400ish feet per second with a 500 and some grain projectile for the MG131's 13mm round.  .50 BMG is ballpark 2900 and change, with a 700 and some grain projectile.  That's an almost 25% increase in muzzle velocity and over 1/3 more projectile on the .50.

Since all of the destructive capability of these rounds is in their kinetic energy, the .50 is going to hit significantly harder because it is both significantly heavier and significantly faster.

Not that I'd want to stand in front of either one, but the .50 is a much better performing round.

Wiley.

I can't claim to know an awful lot about WWII fighter plane construction except for what I have seen personally, and the Goon restoration project that I have helped with a few times.

but...

What I DO know from those experiences and from scratch-building my own plane is that everything (obviously for weight purposes) is mostly hollow.

Wouldn't it seem that a round with more kinetic energy would have a tendency to pass through an airframe a lot easier, leaving less of an "exit wound", as opposed to, a round that was slower and perhaps would "tumble" leaving a bigger hole if it exited sideways, etc?

More surface area contact would transmit more of that kinetic energy (at least in theory).

I could be wrong.  I THOUGHT I was wrong once, but it turned out that I was just mistaken...   

[Guppy35]

The tail of my plane comes off the same as always when a Tater gets it.

[LLogann]

It really depends on the specific plane for some of those assumptions.... I won't touch them.... But what I will say that our cannons fire a combination of both kinetic rounds as well as HE rounds.... Not sure if it's 50/50 though.  As such, the non-HE rounds should be doing little damage to anything it hits aside from mechanisms and people.  So with a good hit% of 11%, only about 1 in 10 rounds hit the target to begin with, now incorporate the idea of a 50/50 split, just start playing the odds.  I'd still rather bet an HE round will hit over playing the lottery but it really is a tough thing to gauge consistently as we never know what type of round is hitting the target.

I can't claim to know an awful lot about WWII fighter plane construction except for what I have seen personally, and the Goon restoration project that I have helped with a few times.

but...

What I DO know from those experiences and from scratch-building my own plane is that everything (obviously for weight purposes) is mostly hollow.

Wouldn't it seem that a round with more kinetic energy would have a tendency to pass through an airframe a lot easier, leaving less of an "exit wound", as opposed to, a round that was slower and perhaps would "tumble" leaving a bigger hole if it exited sideways, etc?

More surface area contact would transmit more of that kinetic energy (at least in theory).

I could be wrong.  I THOUGHT I was wrong once, but it turned out that I was just mistaken...   

[AWwrgwy]

I speculate that with more individual points of damage modeled that the damage gets spread out more.

When there was only elevator damage you would see more elevator/vert. stab damage versus now where, I imagine depending on where the round hits, more elevator/horiz. stab damage.

Maybe it really is a function of specifically where the round hit instead of an average formula.  How often does a hit only take the elevator now and not one side of the stab.  A holed rudder is not necessarily a destroyed rudder.

I was actually looking to 6 o'clock once and saw a tater hit and just take off the entire right horizontal stab.  Figured I was dead.  I was surprised.  Looked really cool though from the perspective of getting hit.

But, like I said before, maybe it's just realism being modeled as closely as they can get it.


wrongway

[Tec]

Since when do our cannons fire a 50/50 mix?

[Vinkman]

Before the stabs were split, a tater to the tail section would remove elevators and rudders and stabs.  After the split, only one ele/stab will be be destroyed.  Is the splash damage just being sucked up by the other parts, without causing failure?

That actually seems reasonable. If you think about the round hitting the elevator and exploding, it's easy believe the round would penetrate and explode. Most of the force transfered to the rest of the plane would have to move through the hinges that hold the elevator to the horizontal Stab. I'm no plane designer but it might be that the hinges are designed to fail before the stabalizer. So while the round would blow the evelator apart, and off, it's probably true that most of that engergy wouldn't make it to the rest of the plane.

[Vinkman]

I can't claim to know an awful lot about WWII fighter plane construction except for what I have seen personally, and the Goon restoration project that I have helped with a few times.

but...

What I DO know from those experiences and from scratch-building my own plane is that everything (obviously for weight purposes) is mostly hollow.

Wouldn't it seem that a round with more kinetic energy would have a tendency to pass through an airframe a lot easier, leaving less of an "exit wound", as opposed to, a round that was slower and perhaps would "tumble" leaving a bigger hole if it exited sideways, etc?

More surface area contact would transmit more of that kinetic energy (at least in theory).

I could be wrong.  I THOUGHT I was wrong once, but it turned out that I was just mistaken...   

To Von's point, it's not just the Ke of the round, although that's a good starting point, it's how much of that engergy is absorbed by the plane/wing/part. If the round passes through and has velocity on the exit side, then all the engergy wasn't transfered.  Exploding rounds have both a KE component and chemical engergy component. If the round penetrates and explodes, it seems nearly all of the engergy would be absorbed by the wing. If the round hits an area of the wing where the cast aluminum structural crossmember that holds the landing gear is, it could be that it explodes on the surface of the wing and a good portion of the engergy would not be absorbed resulting in less damage.

I'd bet the AH model considers all engergy of a round "absorbed" by the part it hits.

[Crash Orange]

Wouldn't it seem that a round with more kinetic energy would have a tendency to pass through an airframe a lot easier, leaving less of an "exit wound", as opposed to, a round that was slower and perhaps would "tumble" leaving a bigger hole if it exited sideways, etc?

Not with a solid (i.e., not HE) bullet like a .50 or 13mm. Neither one is going to have much effect if it just goes through the skin on each side. And a higher velocity round isn't necessarily more stable when it hits something, just look at the 5.56mm. But the heavier and higher velocity round will do a lot more damage when it hits something solid. What a .50 BMG will do to a car has to be seen to be believed.

[Wiley]

I can't claim to know an awful lot about WWII fighter plane construction except for what I have seen personally, and the Goon restoration project that I have helped with a few times.

but...

What I DO know from those experiences and from scratch-building my own plane is that everything (obviously for weight purposes) is mostly hollow.

Wouldn't it seem that a round with more kinetic energy would have a tendency to pass through an airframe a lot easier, leaving less of an "exit wound", as opposed to, a round that was slower and perhaps would "tumble" leaving a bigger hole if it exited sideways, etc?

More surface area contact would transmit more of that kinetic energy (at least in theory).

I could be wrong.  I THOUGHT I was wrong once, but it turned out that I was just mistaken...   

Well, if it's a skin-skin passthrough, it's barely going to transfer any KE.  I'd think passthroughs would be roughly equivalent damage between them.  Where the difference would occur would be hitting stuff that would offer more resistance, like the ribs on the wings, guns, gear, engines, armor plating and soforth.  That's where you're going to see the difference between them.

I think Vinkman's point is probably right, that the DM assumes a projectile causes x amount of damage, and it's all transferred when it hits.

Now to drag myself back onto the tail thing and cannons and soforth.  Question- from what I've seen of the damage ingame, it looks to me like there's no 'splash' damage from cannons.  It looks to me like the individual round has to impact the part that it damages, is that right?  I've never seen sprites on an elevator blow off a rudder, for example.  I thought I saw somewhere that part of the modeling between cannons and MGs is that the cannons retain (possibly all) their damage out to further distances to simulate the explosive damage they have, while the MGs lose damage the further from the muzzle they go.  Is that basically the difference between the two?  It seems to me that's how it works.  That would also explain only half of the tail getting blown off from the 30mm.

Personally I think that's a pretty fair representation until we can get the computing horsepower to get a DM that goes down to the rivet modeling deformation and damage. <g>

Wiley.

[SWkiljoy]

Before the stabs were split, a tater to the tail section would remove elevators and rudders and stabs.  After the split, only one ele/stab will be be destroyed.  Is the splash damage just being sucked up by the other parts, without causing failure?

This happens to me more than often in my K4. I believe it was modeled this way.

[grizz441]

Ever since the tail got the extra parts to shoot off, landing a 30mm seems to only remove one piece at a time.  Is this a flaw?  Or feature?

Feature I think.  I take tails off regularly with one tater hit.  Sometimes though I just get a piece of the stabilizer.

[warhed]

Feature I think.  I take tails off regularly with one tater hit.  Sometimes though I just get a piece of the stabilizer.

Well, whole tail sections still come off the same, it's the parts on the tail that seem to be the issue (flaw or not).