Tracers

[gavor]

It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.


Is this true? If so, are tracers modelled like this in Aces high?

[pimpjoe]

from what i've seen in AH... it looks like about every 4th bullet that comes out has a tracer. but it also looks like that the only bullets i get hits with are the tracers. is this how this works?

[Furious]

I believe every round is modeled as a combination of HE and AP, so no I don't think the tracers have different trajectory.

OTOH, your gunnery will initially drop and then climb back up to previous accuracy if you turn off tracers.  Especially in a bounce situation since it does not clue in enemy.


F.

[Tac]

Tracers in AH are tricky. I think they are only useful for 50 cal armed planes.

No tracers will allow you to shoot down other planes because they dont jinx to evade since they see no tracers. Especially true against runstangs, hunstangs and 109's that run and run and run.

No tracers allow you to get on someone's low 6 and fire a HUGE amount of lead at him and he wont know until he gets hit with a lot of bullets. Generally you miss the first 10 bullets and the tracers tell the guy you're behind him.. and he evades, missing the rest of your lead stream.

Tracers ON give you the ability to scare someone into turning and allowing you to catch up.

So it all depends on your aiming, ammo load and flying style.