News

[Barney Fife]

whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiine!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Charon]

guys remember, the trail ur talking about in RL isnt really a smoke trail as much as a contrail. the bullet is HOT and the air it is passing through is VERY cold, as the bullet travels it leave the contail much like high flying planes do with thier engine exhaust.

u wont see the trail shooting guns on the ground cause the air
is ALOT warmer then @ 30k.

whels

My understanding of contrails is that it is the heated water vapor in the exhaust cooling and condensing. I don't think a tracer produces water vapor (maybe it does)... but... I'm certainly open to an atmospheric explination.

However, I don't much care either way, and this was just an observation (not a whine, because I could really care less if it's corrected, unlike the NEED TO ADD A KI84!!!!! )... I had noted the same thing about a year ago with the current smoke. It does look cool and serves as an aiming aid and various LW and british aircraft had similar tracers at various point in the war. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, though at some point it might be a nice option to turn off for accuracy if you really wanted to in a scenario or something.

Charon

[HitM]

Gotta say I like what I see here.  Hope to be playinig the new version soon.

[Mister Fork]

Originally posted by whels
guys remember, the trail ur talking about in RL isnt really a smoke trail as much as a contrail.  the bullet is HOT and the air it is passing through is VERY cold, as the bullet travels it leave the contail much like high flying planes do with thier engine exhaust.

u wont see the trail shooting guns on the ground cause the air
is ALOT warmer then @ 30k.

whels

Whels is absolutley correct. Couple of points, you can have contrails at any altitude.  Most wwII gun camera footage has either smoke or vapour trails coming off the round.

Whether you're 500ft or 50'000ft up, rounds can and will produce visible trails. If you're at 300mph, it adds to the compression of the air around the bullet.  Something to think about.

And yes, if you fire a lot of rounds from a MG, over 100 yards the bullets tumble hense the spirling you see.

[Charon]

Whether you're 500ft or 50'000ft up, rounds can and will produce visible trails. If you're at 300mph, it adds to the compression of the air around the bullet. Something to think about.

Under what conditions? I've fired a lot of rounds, military and civilian, and been on a lot of ranges when a lot of other people were firing rounds, and never noticed this. There is usually smoke at the firing point, and dust at the impact area and not a whole lot in between.

And yes, if you fire a lot of rounds from a MG, over 100 yards the bullets tumble hense the spirling you see.

Would you clarify this statement? Tumble as in end over end? 100 yards? what does an end over end tumble have to do with a spiral?

Charon

[whels]

Originally posted by Charon
Under what conditions? I've fired a lot of rounds, military and civilian, and been on a lot of ranges when a lot of other people were firing rounds, and never noticed this. There is usually smoke at the firing point, and dust at the impact area and not a whole lot in between.

 

Would you clarify this statement? Tumble as in end over end? 100 yards? what does an end over end tumble have to do with a spiral?

Charon

the trail is a spiral because as the bullet travels  it is rotating due
to the barrel's rifling, as the trail forms at the back of the bullet it causes it to swirl behind it.

whels

[Charon]

the trail is a spiral because as the bullet travels it is rotating due
to the barrel's rifling, as the trail forms at the back of the bullet it causes it to swirl behind it.

Right, which is far different, in fact ballistically the opposite, of a tumble. Ive seen the spiral smoke effect in the German/Brit  guncam film, and an extreme sprial effect from tracers leaving the barrel (the tracer itself, not the smoke) of a shot-out M2 .50 machine gun on a weapons range at Ft. McCoy Wisc. It's been over 10 years since I sent .50 rounds down range, but if smoke trails were there they they were marginal at best and not anything close to the old or new effects in AH.

Hey, I'm open to an atmospheric explination. I have no reason to think it is impossible. I've even seen high altitude smoke trails from F-86 gun camera footage in Korea. It's quite possible I never fired an M2 in the proper environment to produce the effect (though I have fired the weapon in cold, moist winter conditions). I'm just curious about the specific mechanism and atmospheric conditions required since contrails are linked to water vapor that is formed as part of combustion in a jet or piston engine. [maybe, the bullet compresses and heats moist air as it travels which is then sucked into the low pressure area in the bullet wake (more pronounced maybe at 40,000 ft) where it then expands and cools to the dew point? perhaps accelerated by the nuclei given off by the burning tracer element.]

Charon

[whels]

Originally posted by Charon
Right, which is far different, in fact ballistically the opposite, of a tumble. Ive seen the spiral smoke effect in the German/Brit  guncam film, and an extreme sprial effect from tracers leaving the barrel (the tracer itself, not the smoke) of a shot-out M2 .50 machine gun on a weapons range at Ft. McCoy Wisc. It's been over 10 years since I sent .50 rounds down range, but if smoke trails were there they they were marginal at best and not anything close to the old or new effects in AH.

Hey, I'm open to an atmospheric explination. I have no reason to think it is impossible. I've even seen high altitude smoke trails from F-86 gun camera footage in Korea. It's quite possible I never fired an M2 in the proper environment to produce the effect (though I have fired the weapon in cold, moist winter conditions). I'm just curious about the specific mechanism and atmospheric conditions required since contrails are linked to water vapor that is formed as part of combustion in a jet or piston engine. [maybe, the bullet compresses and heats moist air as it travels which is then sucked into the low pressure area in the bullet wake (more pronounced maybe at 40,000 ft) where it then expands and cools to the dew point? perhaps accelerated by the nuclei given off by the burning tracer element.]

Charon

ive noticed in gun cams, smoke trails/contrails of bullets during high alt dogfights, but i dont think ive seen any trails in Guncams
when straffing ground targets.


i really think the effect only shows when the bullets are traveling in the sub zero temps of high alt fighting.

whels

[Bullethead]

blackwitch said:

I've seen some smoke trails in gun camera footage, however... IMHO I think the smoke trails we see in gun camera footage could well be caused by condensation from the heat of the phosphorus causing a smoke trail, perhaps we only see it in gun films taken at High altitude?

Hey Lee, good to see you

But...

If the smoke trail was an altitude effect, wouldn't it have been evident through the whole war?  IOW, any time tracers were fired in the "tracer contrail belt", you'd see the trails.  But as far as I know, the trails are only visible in Brit films from circa 1940, regardless of altitude.

The spiralling trail is from the shaking camera, as bullets don't rotate like that in flight.

I disagree with this.  In those few films where there are smoke trails, the spiral is evident even in the stills from individual frames.  If the spiral was an illusion from shaking, it would be seen as a spiral only when watching the whole film moving.  But each frame would be blurred 1 way or the other, not both ways at once.  So seeing the spiral in a single frame indicates to me that the spiral was really caused by the bullet's rotation.

In AH I think the most realistic way to display tracers would be to have the bright yellow of the tracer rounds but NOT the smoke trail.

Agree.

[HitM]

There is a type of MG round that is used in WW2 aircombat that hasn't been brought up that could be the one making all the smoke.  If I remember correctly incinderary rounds were part of the mix in addition to the regular and tracer ammo.

[Seeker]

Point of order!

Contrails have nothing to do with exhaust gasses.

Wings (and props) work by messing around with air pressure. Wings create a low pressure area over them selves; and a high pressure area beneath them selves. Props create a low pressure area in front of them selves, and a high pressure area behind them selves.

The amount of water air can support is linked to temperature; which in turn is linked to pressure. If the pressure suddenly drops; all other things being equal; the temperature will drop; and that given volume of air will not be able to support it's prior water content; the water will condense out.

You can see contrails forming at the wing tips in flight in hi G manouvers; and, if the conditions are right; coming off the wings of a modern F1 car.

[GScholz]

Germans used smoke tracers, don't know if some of the allies did too. Watch this guncam movie and you'll notice that when an allied plane is being fired upon you clearly see the spiraling smoke tracers.

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~chapman/flightsims/oberstguncam/Frameset/actualguncamfootageone.htm

[Mugzeee]

i Guess my main concern is whether or not the bullets themselves actually spiraled ? Or is it just the smoke?
If the bllets spiraled....and if HT models this in the game........,   rofl.....you thought targeting was hard in online envirionment before?  

[hazed-]

http://www.hitechcreations.com/images/ah2ss/11.jpg

this pic (one with smoke trails) got me thinking. is it possible to make the smoke trails discipate or be disturbed by the aircraft?

I would have thought first the bullets accelerate away from the aircraft leaving a smoke trail but then as the aircraft flys through the smoke it would be sucked into the turbulance around the plane and be sort of stopped or blown about by the fast airflow over the wings.at least until the aircraft stops flying on the same course as the bullets.
In that pic you can see smoke trails behind the plane which i think makes them look a bit unreal.Similar to tracers in AH as it is now.
would it be a humungous task to code out the smoke trails behind the aircraft?? or EVEN BETTER how about when an aircraft goes through any smoke trails they break through and spread or discipate it.
Imagine the high alt fights with all those bullet smoke and contrail whisps where they are broken up as planes fly through. It would look fantastic and be something completely new to Flight sims.

just had a thought.....

perhaps we could see smoke passing our cockpits?
if this is too much programming  to model in realtime 3d around your plane maybe HTC could use a sort of 'scripted' bit of graphics that plays on the users end and shows smoke around the screen his end and then stops playing once smoke is passed, to the user it would look like they had flown through a 3d smoke cloud but really it would be a 2d trick to fool the eye.

would this save bandwidth etc? as AH is now if we enter a cloud we get a grey area which looks kinda weird. what if it was coded so that whenever a player enters dence smoke (not bullets trails) or clouds etc it creates a trigger that plays a pre rendered picture of clouds racing by the cockpit on the users programme or 'his end'. It wouldnt need any server messages other than 'player in cloud' or 'player out of cloud'.The users computer would do the rest.

would or could this work? is it helpfull ?

[AKIron]

Originally posted by Mugzeee
i Guess my main concern is whether or not the bullets themselves actually spiraled ? Or is it just the smoke?
If the bllets spiraled....and if HT models this in the game........,   rofl.....you thought targeting was hard in online envirionment before?  

The bullets didn't spiral but they did spin, just like bullets from any rifled barrel.