Yes, yes, yes. Somebody said, "That is the only thing WT does better than Aces High." I beg to disagree. Sure, there's no lift losses on your wing and what not, but all your control surfaces can be blown to bits, and to be honest, the damage model in WT is really quite crappy when you actually take a moment to examine it.
What this guy didn't tell you is the damage to your wing actually adds a random loss to the lift vector. Completely random, I have done several tests where a single hit to a wing with a .303 resulted in greater lift lost than a single 20mm. I have seen the HUD display only light damage, yet your plane flops over like a donkey, and in the reverse I have seen your wing blacked out which according to the game is the heaviest sustainable damage your wing can obtain without it completely falling off, and yet my plane still flew completely straight. Not to mention, if you use mouse controls or even have them enabled while you use a joystick, it complete removes any effects of any lift or drag penalties introduced by damage.
Also, upon close examination there is really no lift loss at all it acts more or less like a massive shift in your trim, forcing your plane to roll in the direction of the damaged wing and has zero effect on acceleration of your plane, climb rate of your plane, turn rate of your plane, or even top speed of the plane, what actually ends up weakening these performance is you having to compensate with rudder or heavy aileron to fly in a reasonably straight line (And this is with mouse aim off) To test this I had a buddy of mine black-out my wing (Maximum damage to wing without it falling off) and use only rudder to compensate for the planes tendency to roll in the direction of the damaged wing. I recorded the climb rate I going through various altitudes, and also the maximum level speeds at varying altitude. I then upped a fresh, undamaged bird of the same variety, and held my rudder in the same position as I had for the damaged plane, and I found the results to be identical.
Fuselage damage in that game has absolutely no effect on the performance of any plane I have flown in that game regardless of mouse aim being enabled or not.
Regarding fuel leaking from the wings if they get shot up. Nope, sorry, they don't even have multiple fuel tanks modeled in that game, in the event that you do procure a fuel leak it will drain from all your tanks regardless of which one technically got hit. Subsequently, fuel only ads weight to a plane in that game, but does not shift its distribution at all.
Wing is either full off or on in that game, no wingtip shooting. But I guess the lift vector thing is a good substitute.
Also, I have seen several single engine planes (Mostly the Zero) be lit on fire, the fire burn out, only to watch them get lit back on fire, burn out, and get lit back on fire a third time while they mouse aim back to base.
The only thing they did right was the oil leaks and control surface damage. Your engine slowly loses power as oil pressure drops, and when you hit nill, it simply seizes up. And as far as control surface damage, sometimes instead of your ailerons falling off, or your rudder falling off, they will simply flap loosely in the air making your plane one hell of a squeak to fly, unless you have mouse aim enabled.
Once the razzle dazzle of that games sweet graphics wear off, you'll be dying to play AH again. This game may be a bazillion years old, but it still kicks the crap out of that highly funded brand new, POS Russian WWII "Simulator"
Oh did I mention all the maps are about the size of one sector in this game?
Oh and they don't even have compression modeled in that game, your wings simply break off at a certain speed, regardless of G's being pulled. Example, all 109s in that game wings break off at 750km/h IAS (~450MPH ), it doesn't matter if you are pulling any Gs when you hit that number, they just snap off. You can literally take a K4, get it to max level speed, but if you enter any kind of shallow dive that brings your IAS over 450, SNAP! Your dead!
The only thing, and I mean the only thing WT does better than AH, is GFX, that's it. Every other aspect is just so god awful in that game. This is why I am still paying 15/mo to play AH rather than play WT for free.
