Originally posted by hazed-
After recently buying a book on the P47 which has many pictures of battle damaged P47s and many snippets telling how the pilot returned with sometimes amazing levels of damage I now even more than i did before feel OUR P47s arent tough enough!!
There is one inherent problem with using the documented cases of planes making it back with huge amounts of damage as indicators of how resistant to damage an aircraft was. The sample is inherently self-selected -- you're seeing the planes that
did make it back, without knowing what it took to shoot down the planes that were
lost.
Take the case of the P-47 that made it back after having a FW-190 use up all its ammo on it. Yes, the pilot made it back with an incredibly shot-up plane -- but if the first burst of fire from the FW had shattered the linkage connecting the plane's stick to the aileron and elevator cables, it would have gone immediately out of control and crashed.
You can't know, for all the planes that were shot down and the pilot killed, how much damage it actually
took to take down the aircraft unless you go through all the gun camera footage for the enemy planes and count and localize hits -- which isn't particularly practical.
And the problem gets worse when you try to evaluate an aircraft's vulnerability to weapons that they didn't actually encounter during the war, or try to isolate damage by weapon type from aircraft equipped with both machine guns and cannon.
Originally posted by GScholz-
AH gunnery is very accurate it seems compared to WWII pilots R/L experiences.
Which is a
very telling point. Look at actual WWII pilot records. How many pilots in WWII survived getting shot down as many times as most of us get shot down in a week? Erich Hartmann got 352 kills -- but how many of his squadmates were killed over his career? We get shot down and 'killed', we just up another plane and keep going, learning from our mistakes -- of
course we're going to learn what works and what doesn't in AH, from simple repetition if nothing else. Most of us brought ACM and shooting skills from other simulations, as well.
The one fundamental problem with AH, or any other combat simulation, for that matter, is that the
player is inviolable. No matter what penalties you apply in the
game for being shot down and killed, you can't keep the
player from learning from the experience. If you make the player start their 'flying career' over after being 'killed', they're not starting over with the same
skill they had the last time they started over. Think back to the first time you played an air-combat simulation. You sucked, right? We all did.
Think of what AH would be like if there was some way to make the
player lose their accumulated flying skill when they got killed, and got locked out of an arena until the map got reset when they got captured. Staying alive would have a
much higher reward than it does now -- the 'pork and auger' crowd would be resetting themselves to noobs fresh out of flight school every time they did it, for example. Pilots would be a
lot more cautious about engaging; even the big furballs that lasz wants would die back. You'd get a game that would more closely resemble what actually occurred during the war -- but I don't think that it would be as much fun.
