"really so you've flown il2s p51"
I doubt Oleg and Co. are lying. It's possible that they might decide to do things differently but I doubt it. In any case, it's merely an illustration that NO game can be used as a benchmark for "how things should be" because all game developers have their biases and opinions. I put no more faith in IL2 than I do in AH or AW...which is to say, virtually none.
Anyway.....
"The point is that catastrophical structural damages in AH happen so often, from so far out."
There are several causes for this, none of which have anything to do with the power of the bullets.
1. The AH damage model isn't up to the task of modeling the effect of "peppering" something with bullets from long range--no parts can be "damaged". Either the part works fine, or is destroyed. You can pepper an outer wing with 10 .50 rounds in different places and it'll fall off when it should only make 10 little holes; you can hit a wing spar with a 20mm shell and nothing will happen.
2. Pilots in AH fire at greater distances than real pilots will because there's not much to lose by doing so--being out of ammo in AH is at worst a minor inconvienience; being out of ammo in reality means you might end up helpless in a hostile environment. In order to make game shooters as disciplined as real shooters, you must make shooting unrealistically difficult to compensate for the nonexistant fear of dying. This is further complicated because a real pilot is sitting inside a cramped, smelly, loud, vibrating airplane cockpit while we are in the comfort of our living rooms. We have far fewer "irritants" and so it's easier to perform the task at hand (shooting).
3. In order to get kills in AH you must remove something important from an airplane (like a wing). Real pilots would almost always bail out after something such as engine failure; this is not the case in AH. Trying to make a highly "realistic" damage model in AH could very well end up with dogfights turning into fights of engineless gliders trying to shoot each other down before crashing. This actually happened in another game I used to play--just think of the absurdidity of fighters pinging out each other's engines at 20K and glide-fighting each other down to the deck! Therefore, any change to the damage model must be evaluated for both positive AND negative impact on the game--if you make wings and such tougher to remove, then you must somehow force virtual pilots to behave in a more "real" manner....you have to make them incapable of fighting once something like the engine gets shot out.
It's not simply a matter of "make the bullets do less damage". The issue is far more complicated than that.
J_A_B
