The stats in the game then do count every death of a drone as a death in the K/D stats?
Then, no correction needed, and folks still shouldn't be multiplying it by 3, right?
Yes, yes, and yes. Each bomber downed counts as one kill for the fighter pilot and one death for the bomber pilot. This is true whether the buffs are in formation or not.
This business about a formation = one kill is nonsense. Attacking a formation three times and shooting down all three bombers in three passes is exactly as difficult as attacking three individual bombers in three passes and shooting down all three, and has the same effect on scores and stats. More difficult, actually, because with the three individual bombers you'll only be facing one set of guns at a time. Trips to the tower have nothing to do with it. You die and teleport to the tower and take off again, or you die and teleport to another bomber in your formation and play again, there is not one iota of difference. Either way you register a death, either way you're right back in combat.
BnZs, you wanted numbers, I gave them to you. In the April tour slightly more than 2.5 B-17s were shot down for every time a B-17 killed any kind of enemy. If the absurd claims being made in this thread were true, that ratio should be reversed. For other bombers the numbers are as bad as twenty to one. For every time one He-111 kills any kind of enemy, bombing or gunning,
TWENTY He-111s are shot down. There is not a single fighter in the game with a k/d remotely near that bad - in fact, there's not a single fighter in the game with a k/d as bad as the B-17. Based on actual statistics from the MA, your odds are better fighting a Spit XVI in a Spit I or P-40E than you are defending against that same Spit XVI in a B-17 - and WAY better than in a Ju-88 or G4M.
Maybe you're a way better gunner than you give yourself credit for, maybe you just happened to run into some particularly bad fighter pilots, or maybe it was beginner's luck. Either way, judging by cold hard facts from the MA, the experience you had was
NOT the experience the average bomber pilot has in this game. I'll say it again: looking at actual MA stats, the average B-17 pilot can expect to lose
2.5 bombers for every
1 enemy plane or GV of any kind they shoot down. This is actually
WORSE for the bombers than the historical loss ratio in either Schweinfurt raid (using postwar estimates of German losses, not inflated USAAF claims at the time). As I said before the difference between AH and WW2 on this is
NOT that bombers do better in AH than IRL, it's that AH players aren't deterred by that high loss rate while IRL it was crippling. If all those bomber crewmen who died or bailed out over Schweinfurt had instead been magically teleported back to England in perfect health to fly again the next day, and all the lost or crippled planes were replaced from an infinite supply of spares, the 8th AF would have had no reason to discontinue unescorted deep penetration raids, but of course that's not how it works IRL.
You folks making absurd and unjustified claims about the effectiveness of bomber guns in AH can hum and haw and speculate and offer random anecdotes all you like, but the
FACTS - real statistics from our MA and real statistics from the historical events - show that B-17 loss rates in AH are higher, and their k/d rates lower, than those of unescorted bombers in WW2 - and that's even with the bombers flying most of their missions within range of friendly fighters, and not even considering how many of the kills by the B-17s were carpet bombing helpless GVs at friendly bases.
