Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Vermillion on March 04, 2002, 10:15:51 AM
-
I was leafing thru some new books I have picked up recently, and thought the following two pics are interesting.
Particularly because some people commonly claim that damage models are really bad because "large parts, like wings, just don't fly off".
Notice how in the first pic, the MiG hits the Sabre with a snapshot and the left outter wing section seperates cleanly from the aircraft.
In the second one, the rudder of this particular Sabre was removed almost surgically.
Well.. while these are NOT proof of either side of the debate, they do show that it does happen. :) Admittedly though they are both the results of heavy cannon hits (the MiG15 has a single 37mm and x2 23mm cannons)
(http://www.vermin.net/temp/guncam.jpg)
(http://www.vermin.net/temp/damage.jpg)
-
Hey Verm, think you're have got my ideas a bit mixed up ;)
I've been the one complaining about AH poor DM lately, and I still think it is. Note though, I've never said wings and big parts don't blow off, sure they do,I've got gun camera film of a 190 D9 losing about 40% of its wing, quickly puts it in a spin. However, it doesn't happen that often, specially not from 50 cal. In AH losing a wing or any other major part such as the tail are some of the very few reason you get killed, this was not the case in real life.
Enough of the ranting, very nice fotage you posted and as you said, the Mig 15 was equiped with 2x23mm and 1x37mm, all 3 nose mounted, a wing will most definatly blow off from a hit from that, specially since the Saber has got wingtanks :)
-
Not sure exactly if it suports the idea of wings being blown off, because it's so spectacular, but one of the most common Guncamera footages that I've seen is the P51 shooting down a FW.
The FW is about 100 feet above the ground, and the 51 saws off his left wing with a burst.
Another that I've seen a lot of is a high altitude encounter between a 190 and something. The film shows the 190 being hit all over, the pilot exiting the plane along with about 4 feet of wing.
I'm not certain if HT has it right or not, but all it takes is a little structural damage on a wing to cause it to fail catastrophically. I'd be willing to bet that they are closer than the nay-sayers think.
Ouc out
-
Is this the same "Ouch" from way way way back in WB's ?
-
CC Ouch, of course wings could be blown off, but it was quite rare, the gun fotage you see is often the most spectacular, I've got about 2 hours + of gun film, mostly LW fighters and it's very rare that planes loose wings, it happens, but most of the cases they go down due to too many holes, or just generally shot up, fuel tank exploding etc.
-
Originally posted by Wilbus
Hey Verm, think you're have got my ideas a bit mixed up ;)
I've been the one complaining about AH poor DM lately, and I still think it is. Note though, I've never said wings and big parts don't blow off, sure they do,I've got gun camera film of a 190 D9 losing about 40% of its wing, quickly puts it in a spin. However, it doesn't happen that often, specially not from 50 cal. In AH losing a wing or any other major part such as the tail are some of the very few reason you get killed, this was not the case in real life.
Enough of the ranting, very nice fotage you posted and as you said, the Mig 15 was equiped with 2x23mm and 1x37mm, all 3 nose mounted, a wing will most definatly blow off from a hit from that, specially since the Saber has got wingtanks :)
Everytime I seem to get shot down is because either my horizontal stabilizer has been blown off my P-38 or because I'm missing either the whole wing or part of it.
As for blowing parts off other planes with my 4 .50 cals, I've seen it happen a lot but maybe since I don't have convergence issues, the full force of my .50's are pretty much concentrated in one spot.
(http://www.hispanicvista.com/assets/479th_shield.jpg)
Ack-Ack
479th FG - Riddle's Raiders
-
squeake Bicthe squeake, some people will never be happy
-
People are not necessarily unhappy...
All computer programs can always be improved in some way.
When I play a WWII flight sim and the images I see on my monitor match real footage perfectly, then it will finally be starting to approach the limits of improvement.
I was happy with Battlezone and Zaxxon, but I am much happier with OFP and AH. No reason why computer games can't keep improving this way.
HTC get hot!
-
Originally posted by Ouch
Not sure exactly if it suports the idea of wings being blown off, because it's so spectacular, but one of the most common Guncamera footages that I've seen is the P51 shooting down a FW.
The FW is about 100 feet above the ground, and the 51 saws off his left wing with a burst.
Another that I've seen a lot of is a high altitude encounter between a 190 and something. The film shows the 190 being hit all over, the pilot exiting the plane along with about 4 feet of wing.
I'm not certain if HT has it right or not, but all it takes is a little structural damage on a wing to cause it to fail catastrophically. I'd be willing to bet that they are closer than the nay-sayers think.
Ouc out
Wasn't this discussed before in a similar thread? IIRC it was noted that the 190 sometimes shed it's wings easily because of hits to the unarmored (from behind?) ammo bays. Again IIRC particulary the 30mm ammos if detonated would blow the wing off.
Any shots of other planes (perhaps with no ammo/fuel in wings... say 109?) than 190's getting their wings sawed off by mg fire?
-
Originally posted by Wilbus
CC Ouch, of course wings could be blown off, but it was quite rare, the gun fotage you see is often the most spectacular, I've got about 2 hours + of gun film, mostly LW fighters and it's very rare that planes loose wings, it happens, but most of the cases they go down due to too many holes, or just generally shot up, fuel tank exploding etc.
Actually that is not quite true wil. MOST of those kills were pilots abandoning damaged AC, but not damaged so bad that they could not fly. The pilot's own instinct for survival took over when he had enemy in his 6 and he heard the hits. I have seen alot footage of pilots bailing from "seemingly" stucturally sound AC. In AH, we dont have our lives to lose:) We will ride that thing to the end.
ALot of USAAF and LW film I have got. Lots of AC fires resulting in pilot bails. I bet there is nothing like flames licking at a pilot's body along with being sprayed in the face with hydraulic fluid, loss of guages, broken canopy's (now the pilot went from a fairly noisy, but familiar sound to a very different dramatic wind sound, kind of like being in a tornado), to prompt a pilot to leave his mount. While all the while we see maybe a few flames, some smoke trailing the AC. This human effect is the biggest difference from AH to real life. When a flight sim can model this, then it will be alot closer to what we have seen in the footage. But how do they do that?
-
We can start by improving damage models :)
-
Two ways a plane can lose a wing from being hit:
a) the wing is hit and the explosion causes a clean break.
b) the structural support for the wing is damaged. The pilot, putting g's on the wing as he tries to evade the enemy, overstresses the damaged wing and it simply folds and fall away.
Guncam film I seen show a LW fighter hitting the wingroot of an allied fighter with a very short burst with the result that the wing completely comes off and the plane starts rolling wildly.
Also seen LOTS (especially from the Pacific) of burning planes that just lose all control.
Not too implausible to me. However, it'd be nice if Ah had more of a gradual damage model instead of the binary one we currently have - i.e if(damage > maxSustainableDamage(){ripWingOff();}
Would take a lot of effort to redo it though. Would be worth it, too :).
That'd give my c202 more killing power I believe, as the machine guns would degrade the enemys performance more and more, making 'um easier to hit with that 5 second sustained burst.
-
Ammo has the right idea; one thing that stands in the way of a truly realistic damage model is the fact that in AH there's no desire to survive--death means nothing.
AirWarrior tried using a fairly realistic damage model for a time--90% of the time a plane wouldn't explode, but it'd suffer something like a broken engine. You had to really hose the heck out of a plane to make it actually explode.
Unfortunately this simply did not work online. It totally messed up the game. A real pilot will bail out when his engine is out of comission and his plane is spewing smoke; not so in a computer game. Fights degenerated into planes flying around shooting out each other's engines then gliding away; kills became almost impossible to come by and in the end the system was unworkable, all because virtual pilots don't care if they "die". In computer games, to end the fight you HAVE to render the enemy's plane un-flyable.
Perhaps the solution is to make a lot of thick black smoke block the foreward view when an engine is knocked out. Deprive the damaged plane of any ability to fight.
J_A_B
-
Speaking of realism, the only other game I found that models damage realistically was Fighter Squadron: SDOE. I found most enagements of enemy bombers a little heart wrenching. The physics/damage modelling was so real it felt like you were watching camera footage from a WWII plane. Great game with the community patches. Fantastic damage modelling.
Last night I took up a 262 for craps and giggles around A5. A Lancaster was making a bombing run on a strategic target (training camp?). I made a loop around to his six, climbed above and behind to his 8 O'clock, and then dove down almost vertical onto the Lanc. I placed my gunsight just foward of the tail and made a 1 second burst and promply removed the ENTIRE tail section. :eek:
I watched in awe and a bit in horror as the Lancaster slowly tumbled to her death in a very realistic fashion. Slowly tumbling as the tail end dropped down and she started to flip end-over-end.
Last night Vermillion, AH seems very real for me when I ripped the Lancaster apart. I could only imagine what real WWII pilots went through on a daily basis...
Something to think about...
-
Wil you're flying in RL, you've seen your share of A/C and their structures i think.
No imagine one of those traveling at high speeds and a large caliber machine gun firing bullets (and cal. 50 ain't a small one) into the structure.
i have seen a lot of airplane structure and i have seen what a heavy MG does to stuff i can clearly image in my mind what happens to an airplane getting shot at and hit by a burst of cal. 50 fire.
Cannons must be even worse and it's a miracle by what i understand that some airplanes survived multiple hits.
Oh and please nobody come up with armor and stuff like that .. to an airplane you ADD LIGHTNESS .. you can't armor wings and the like.
DW6
-
Ammo, Duckwng, very true both of you, most fotage I have is where the pilot abandons the plane aswell, hell, I would too if I had someone shooting at me with alot of big guns, 50 cals are big and they do alot of dammage without doubt, I just don't find it very interesting to have about 2 ways a plane can actually go down (ok, a few more), would be nicer with something like IL2, wings can blow off, fire at em enough and saw em off, but planes can allso be disabled if shot you enough, that's shomething AH doesn't have except for complete loss off surfaces.
Yes Duck, I'd hate to see what 50's would do you light civilian plane, wouldn't survive much of it. Armor helped the WW2 plane to stay alive, but vs 50's and 20's it didn't matter much unless you had alot armor.
I just want more ways for planes to go down :)
-
I actually think J_A_B has a good idea.
Now if I have this correct, there are only three types of smoke in AH. One is the white 'fuel leak', the other is the pale gray 'oil leak', and the other is the dark gray 'radiator destroyed'. In case of a fire, which is a pretty rare phenomenon in AH(rare in the way that it is not so often the main reason for plane destruction. Most fires in AH are only 'accomplices' that follows with the structural damage), uses all three smoke at once(I don't know if the dark smoke is the result of a pale gray+dark grey, or a seperate black fume in place).
In support for Wil's plea for more ways to go down(and a bit of less percentage of structural failure :) ), I say we put in more degree of different damage on engine/radiator/oil mechanisms. A bit of heavier degree of engine damage that spews out a real black fume, the engine is not completely shut off as in current 'engine dead', but the performance of the engine is drastically dropped down unlike current 'radiator damage' or 'oil leak'.
If implementing a visually/systematically sophisticated damage model is too far-fetched an idea in current status, then I think there can be an alternative of maintaining current damage model, but more diversifying the categories of damage and the degree of damage. :)
-
Who cares?
just gimme the damn SABRE !
AH ver. 2.0 - Sabre jet
-
Ok... Heres a little check for ya. Yes, Maybe it was a seemingly rare scenario for entire wings to be blown off, etc. However, How many Pilots Flew 10 to 20 (or many more) Sorties in the period of just a few hours? How many had over 100 kills??
Why am I asking the seemingly obvious questions? B/c, This is exactly what you have in AH.
In just a few hours, each virtual pilot may fly anywhere from 10 to 30 (heh, if, like me, they really suck) sorties. I've seen Many peoples scorecards read way over the 100 kills mark (unlike mine, which is pitifully Low, LoL).
Point Being, You have more combat taking place over a very short period of time.
That being said, Even something that only had a 1 in 30 chance of happening in the real war is gonna happen much more often in AH. Especially if you think about the ammount of people flying N1ks and such with cannons. Aside from that... AH's Dm may not be exactly realistic... But then again.. Its a computer simulation. Computer games ( including sims, fps's, etc) are still a work in progress, so let the AH dev's continue to perfect this beautiful piece of software.
Zer00
-
Well, 50 cals take off wings just as easy as cannons in AH...
-
I think the AH damage model does its job. IMO it takes about the right amount of ammo to kill something; just in AH you're shooting off a wing or control surface instead of killing the engine and watching the pilot bail out. In terms of the tactics you need to use and the effectiveness of ACM, the damage model is about right.
Having planes lose their engine and plummet in a plume of thick black smoke instead of losing a wing or control surface might technically be more realistic (again if you can figure out a way to encourage the losing pilot to bail out), but if it's taking the same amount of ammo either way then it doesn't make much of a difference.
I offer another possible reason for the commoness of structural failure in AH:
I play AH in 800 x 600 and I cannot see it if I damage an enemy's elevators or some other vital control surface. I tend to shoot at a plane until something BIG breaks apart. Often I am shooting up a plane that is already "dead", but since I can't tell I prefer to "make sure".
Again, a more realistic damage model where engine failure and fire is most common is possible to program, but it needs to be done along with somehow rendering the "losing" plane unable to fight or run, otherwise the game degenerates into "glider war". The benefit of the current AH damage model is the losing plane cannot try to "take the other guy with him", and nor can it usually dive away to friendlies (hard to control a plane with no wing).
J_A_B
-
Originally posted by Wilbus
Well, 50 cals take off wings just as easy as cannons in AH...
If you are inferring that 50 cals have more detructive power than cannons in AH..well, that is BS.
Now if I hit a wing at convergence with my 8 50's sustained, I expect it to come off.
-
No they don't ammo, they have less as they should, however a wing wouldn't come off from 20x50 cal hits, if they hit the VERY vital parts of the wing, yes, not if they just hit the wing it self, try it in AH, put 20 of them in the wingtip and it's gone.
Too powerfull, I often use 10+ 20mm's on planes before they go down.
-
Wilbus - let me ask you a simple question through a typical scenario...
a. You are in a P-51 chasing another P-51 at 400Mph. It is at your 12'O 400 yards. It pulls up hard. You lead and hit it's left wing with 6 50cal rounds.
b. You are in a P-51 chasing another P-51 at 200Mph. It is at your 12'O 400 yards. You hit it's left wing mid point with 6 50cal rounds.
Tell me, considering the WING LOADING, which hit might rip off the wing?
HTC models wing loading and it does play a role in damage modelling.
-
I'd say number A, doesn't have much to do with what I mean though, you easily lose wings withuout pulling hard, 50 cals kill as easy and quite often much better then Mg151's.
-
*Sigh* I take the time to scan in some really cool guncam footage and nobody wants to talk about that, just piss and moan about something else. :(
-
The gun cam footage shown, while quite interesting, would be more "Officer's Club" material since it shows how effective Korean War MiG's were at damaging Korean War Sabres rather than supporting any argument for or against AH modeling. But you posted in the general discussion and challenged the public assessment of the HTC damage model, which of course lead to digressive threads that have nothing to do with the Korean War gun camera footage :D
I could learn way more from the photos if there were plenty of other ones to compare to, which would establish both the full range of possible outcomes and the average outcome rather than a couple of isolated incidents that may be far from typical and represent aircraft and weapons of a later era :rolleyes:
Okay, now I have discussed something pertinent to your cool photos you scanned in. Are you happy now? :D
-
gotta agree with streakeagle Verm, the footage was cool, but not really pertinent considering the difference in weapons deployed.....
And to join in the "other" discussion... I must be flying in a different arena or something, as I often suffer loss of "parts" without total wing failure, and performance IS diminished. Does AH model every little shredded, bent piece of metal or dangling wire?... NO...... would we want it to, considering the fps hit most of us would suffer when this was modeled in mmol play? Absolutely not.
I have a theory...... this is what happens when some folks get a bit impatient waiting for new versions... the nitpicking starts because there are no new features to keep em occupied. Now let's discuss an IMPORTANT feature that AH is lacking. I read once that C47's had rifle ports that passengers/troops could use to fire at attacking planes. Now THAT would be an improvement.. imagine, that poor, defenseless goonie looming large in your gunsight, your finger just about to squeeze the trigger, and some grunt's .30 cal round pierces your forehead just above the brow line, splattering your cranial contents all over the inside of your canopy.... now THAT's what I'd like to see! ;) :D
-
This is what made me wanna discuss DM
Particularly because some people commonly claim that damage models are really bad because "large parts, like wings, just don't fly off".
Cool shots yes, but with that comment it's impossible to avoid a discussion surounding AH DM.
-
FWIW Verm: I really appreciate the photos. I rarely get to see such things, so really appreciate it.
And I agree with your initial comment: this toejame does happen.
-
Sorry to punt the thread, but I was just thinking about this and a different but sort of related thread.
Are heavy machine guns overmodeled? The planes being referred to here are armed with a half dozen or more of them, which are generally grouped together closer than the weapons on cannon armed planes.
Consider the thread about the Macci 202's guns being UNDER-modeled. In that thread the general idea was it lacked the firepower it was supposed to have, yet it carried only 2 heavy MG's and a pair of semi-useless light MG's.
Ponder this: If the 202's weapons were sufficiently able to kill enemy planes to a greater extent than it can in AH, wouldn't aircraft armed with roughly 3 or 4 times the weapons do a LOT more damage?
Just something else to think about. Personally I think AH is about right, at least in a practical sense if not graphically.
J_A_B