What gets me isn't so much that you lose a whole wing panel when it gets shot off, but it's the fact that it just cleanly falls off the plane. In the pictures and footage that I've seen, mostly in buffs, when the wing gets shot up enough to fail, it folds upwards before it comes off. This is because the wing panel is still producing lift, but there isn't sufficient structure to hold it in position, so it pivots around the failure point. I have had a few R/C models whose wings have failed and I can say that the same thing happened. Made me sick to my stomach when I pulled a gentle loop with one of my favorite planes and the wings just bent upwards, leaving the fuselage to fall to the earth uncontrolled. That will teach me to make my strut-bolts extra tight.
Just the general cleanliness of the failures detracts from the realism IMO. To cleanly cut something such as a control surface off with gunfire alone would be tough. You would have to sever every hinge point and sever the control cables. What I see as more realistic would be a damaged control surface hanging in the breeze more or less, and being torn off later by aerodynamic forces such as flutter and other vibration.
Being able to bend things would be cool, but I bet it would be very tough to implement. Nose over and your prop blades get curled. Broken glass and instruments would add to the effect.
I'm quite sure HTC is aware of all of this, it's just a matter of devoting the resources to model it. I don't think that many people would appreciate an update that didn't add any planes, but was simply reworking things to look/work better. I think that people sometimes overlook how complicated it is to implement "easy" things that are somewhat complicated in reality.
Keep up the good work, HTC.
