Why I keep telling everyone you have all the tools offline to answer your static condition questions about specific aircraft's destructablility in the drone circuit.
The majority of players in the heat of the moment are lucky to get hit sprites in response to their best effort of each moment. Most of the time you only get the shooting window that's in front of you. Make the most of it, and often many players don't hold the trigger long enough, and the con is very often not cooperating at the same moment. ACM skills forces or sets the con up to cooperate in spite of himself.
As was recently explained about gunnery. Hit messages are transmitted by TCP. You see sprites the con will eventualy get your TCP message to that fact. Otherwise everything else is in play to make your shooting become what you see is what you get to shoot at, make the best of it. Superior ACM skills will enhance your ability to force the con to give you shooting windows more favorable to your gunnery.
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I went to the trouble to test all of this once offline with all of the fighters and some of the bombers while I was having a severe bout of the phenomenon we have erroniously named "Rubber Bullets". I used the twin 50cal from the Dauntless as my tool for dismanteling in controled single taps. Larger caliber cannon rounds were 2x to 5x more destructive in similare testing.
Destruction testing will show you a general trend in fighter destructability. Rear of the wing root in the fuslage going aft causes mostly no damge up to the failure point on some where they then loose their tail section. Shooting wings out board of wing tanks, guns, or landing gear causes mostly no damage until the failure point is reached and that section drops off. In both cases this is alot of concentrated or lucky fire just to break a complete tail unit off. In testing more often I removed both stabiliser and the rudder with nothing else falling apart in that area of the fuslage.
Shooting forward of the wing root into the fuslage will cause any of the following: fuel leaks, fuel fires, oil leaks, kill the engine and kill the pilot. Think P38 inboard of the booms in spades. All other fighters from the guns into the wing root you will destroy guns, fuel leaks, fuel fires and detach the wing at the root from the fuslage.
With fighters from dead 6 level shooting into the trailing ends of the fuslage and wings 70\30 will get you an assist unless you are slightly higher or lower placing rounds forward of the wing trailing edge. Think about when you vulch a plane on the runway from higer back and up. You are shooting forward of the wing trailing edge. What do you get? Fires, dead pilot explosion, or the wings and air fraime falling to peices. Shooting just left or right for a wing root will do more damage from level dead 6. In the heat of the moment a damage and armor list for each fighter won't do much good when most of your shooting is simply what you see is what you get.
Thats why dismanteling offline drones will teach you alot more than Hitech burping out data sheets. Hitech has generously included all of the tools needed for anyone to get up close and personal for understanding the damage model to every aricraft in the game from a shooters perspective. Offline drones and Full Zoom.
