Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: dedalu on December 31, 2002, 07:40:16 AM
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Hello guys,
I'm impressed with the high kills/sortie ratio. I don't know if I'm correct but I think that 8 or more kills per sortie is very much and that denotes an easy gunnery system... rools and hard manouvers are too easy to target in AH (and the veterans aren't using tracers to do that! :eek: ).
Would be good add more physics effects. The first one, like in the fisrtest ah's versions (I'm wrong?), is make the pilot "dance" with inertia.
Cya.
[], Dedalu
P.S.: I think easy get 5 or 6 kills with my p47d-25; but I don't like it. ;)
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Those 8+ kills could come from vulching, re-arming and then there is small punch of guys who really get those kills without eitner.
With patience it's not so unusual to achieve 5+ kills in a jug, lots of effective guns & plenty of ammo. I don't have that patience, tho :)
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Originally posted by janneh
With patience it's not so unusual to achieve 5+ kills in a jug, lots of effective guns & plenty of ammo.
That's the problem... gunnery is too effective in AH; so... if you have 3400 bullets... :eek:
The comment about my kills was only to avoid other arguments that we know.
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If you fly a plane that traditionally had high cannon capcity like the P47 you can sometimes get 8 kill sorties if you vulch a field but by far the majority of those large kill counts you see come from pilots extending their sortie by landing and using hte re-arm and re-fuel pads. Gunnery being too effective in AH stems from a myth from another board :rolleyes:
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Not counting any times where I vulched, I've gotten 8 kills in a sortie only once, in my P-38, and I reloaded once. I can never seem to get more than 6 kills in one flight, and that's if I'm having a good gunnery day.
I don't think there is anything wrong with gunnery or lethality in the MA. My bellybutton has been saved several times by my opponent's poor gunnery.
Here's a good example of a fight where I thought I was surely going to be killed, in at least two instances, but survived and made my attacker pay for his inaccuracy.
It only reinforces my belief that gunnery comes before ACM skill in a fight. ACM makes things easier, and it helps you survive, but it's your gunnery that wins the battle.
http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~wilson/ShouldHaveDied.ace
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what the balls is a .ace file?
My ah film files are .ahf
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1. AH pilots have disgusting amounts of trigger time, FAR more than any ww2 pilot.
2. The difference in skill between the average pilot, and the "above average" pilot is HUGE.
3. The vast majority of pilots also don't bother trying(too hard) to stay alive, making themselves easy targets.
Most ww2 pilots could probably count the number of times they shot at an enemy plane on thier hands, a few might need toes. The rest were the best of the best.
In AH I've shot at THOUSANDS of planes.
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Gunnery is not too easy in fact gun ranges in AH are shorter than real life . 30cal bullets don't disappear at 800 meters in real life, they keep on truckin' .
Maybe you have become accustomed to games where the bullets vanish at even shorter ranges . Or maybe you're basing your judgment on anectdotal information you've read in real life accounts of pilots who would only fire when their windscreen was filled with enemy airplane .
You can't go wrong with logic.
It's simple, if simulated bullets are occupying the same virtual space a simulated airplane.. well you know the rest .
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I will be the first one to admit my aerial gunnery skills are lacking. I don't know how many times I missed a kill that should have been one because I screwed up the gunnery. maybe someone can teach me
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Anyone here have a fighter gunnery % of 100%? No?
How about 50%? No?
Probably some 25% 'ers, then, right? Ah, I see a few hands.
How many are consistently 15% or better?
I'd wager the VAST majority of the player base is under 10% in fighter hit percentage. Is that "too easy"? I don't know; that's a judgement or "gameplay" call for the folks that run the game.
I think you get my drift. For most of us, firing 100 rounds and getting 15 hits on a consistent basis would be an exceptional gunnery % that we'd brag about.
So in the above mentioned example of an aircraft with 3400 rounds available, a 15% sortie would net you 510 hits.
Now should 510 hits bring down 8 aircraft? I don't know. I'd say it depends on where you hit them. 8 different rounds through the back of 8 different pilots heads would sure do it.
510 rounds through one tailwheel wouldn't.
In short, I have no problems with the guns, especially since ballistic computation is a pretty "known" science and one that computers are particularly suited to perform.
On the other hand, damage models are and always will be subjective.
Just my .02.
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what the balls is a .ace file?
It's a compressed file, like zip file. Winace is an excellent program.
Here's the uncompressed file.
http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~wilson/ShouldHaveDied.ahf
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Dedalu,
The biggest problem with request to make either the flight model, gunnery model or torque more difficult is the belief that it was surely more difficult to fly these A/C than it could possibly be represented in AH or any other video game/simm.
This is a myth. Here are a few easier things than you might think.
1. Visual identication of A/C is actually easier in real life.
2. Ever fire a long rifle? Hitting targets at 300yards is pretty easy. Firing a thousand rounds per minute from a .50cal your bound to hit something.
3. Ever fly an A/C? It's easier than driving a car. I have approx 16 hours of stick time logged and one hour at AirCombat USA. Dogfighting or at least the Geometry of the dogfight is right on with AH. The A/C I flew was very responsive with good e retention and the acceleration and climb could really be felt in the seat of your pants.
4. The myth of torque and wild stalls and stabilty. The F4U has the worst reputation of just about any WW2 A/C for killing pilots. Reading Jeffery Ethells, The Old Fly Machine Company or the Experamental A/C Socioty would tell you it was "docile" in the stall and a joy to fly arobatics and that torque can be trimmed out easily. Remember we have unlimited lives to learn to fly these virtual machines. Real life piolts only had one chance.
This is what I think is harder in real life.
1. Pulling G's hurts real bad. Try pulling 4 to 5 G's through a 5 minutes dogfight and you will want about 6 asprin and a nap. At least I did.
2. Engine management was allot harder when you had to worry about MAP, engine temp, fuel mixture, cowl flaps, carburator air temp etc. This is not modelled in AH. I wish it was but we would need two keyboards for all the keymapping. Oh well.
So just because you read it is easy doesn't mean it's not realistic.
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I kind of think of it this way...
Remember the first 5-10 times you shot at someone in AH? How did you do?
That is more than most WW2 pilots ever did.
AKDejaVu
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Getting some 8 kills not really that hard, I can do that often enough in a Bf109G6 using only 1 20mm with 150 rds and 2 13mm with 600rds - then have to land with 30-40 cannon and 200 mg left because I run out of gas. I average maybe 10-15% gunnery overal I think with that setup. But I tend to get close, real close for the 8 kill sorties.
I dont mind, seems this was possible to do in RL with similarly armed Bf109s.
F4UDOA I still dont think precision hunting/sniper rifles fired from a bench or prone or anyhow not moving or vibrating are a good comparison to rapid fire MG fired from a dynamic shaking mount such as a WW2 fighter.
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Originally posted by F4UDOA
4. The myth of torque and wild stalls and stabilty. The F4U has the worst reputation of just about any WW2 A/C for killing pilots. Reading Jeffery Ethells, The Old Fly Machine Company or the Experamental A/C Socioty would tell you it was "docile" in the stall and a joy to fly arobatics and that torque can be trimmed out easily. Remember we have unlimited lives to learn to fly these virtual machines. Real life piolts only had one chance.
And this can't be overstressed. The Corsair was called the 'Ensign Eliminator' becase, back before the little stall plate was attached to the wing, it would do some very ugly things if you made a mistake while you were a) low, b) slow, and c) had lots of garbage hanging out in the airstream (like gear and flaps) that meant you required lots of power to change either of a or b. How well did you do the first couple of times you tried to land on a carrier? And all you were doing was trying to put the plane down on the deck; you didn't have to watch the engine controls, fly the plane, and watch the LSO to follow his directions.
Remember the first 5-10 times you shot at someone in AH? How did you do?
That is more than most WW2 pilots ever did.
If I am remembering the statistic correctly, the average lifespan for a WWI pilot once they entered combat was 15 minutes. Think of all the famous aces from WWI who flew for years, and then consider how many pilots had to die in the first few seconds of an engagement for the average to be that low.
I see people squeaking about how they're flying a bomber formation and someone in a fighter makes one pass on them, and suddenly two if not all three of their planes are going down. There may have been, and still are, bugs in the way damage to bombers is modelled, but I saw the exact same screaming in both Warbirds and Air Warrior about fighters making one-pass kills, and how no B-17 ever went down in one pass from a single fighter in WWII unless they completely blew away the cockpit. Well, ignoring the fact that that claim is false-to-fact, what they're not seeing is that the people making these one-pass kills have been attacking bombers for years, making mistakes and getting shot up when they do. They've learned what works and what doesn't. During WWII, except for a few rare experten, most of the fighter pilots attacking bomber groups were lucky if they had as much as an hour of actual combat time. You either didn't make a mistake bad enough to keep you from getting home, or you died; you didn't have the chance to get 'killed' fifty, a hundred, even two hundred times figuring out the best way to attack a bomber.
And that's one of the things that makes AH -- or any air-combat simulation -- inherently unrealistic. People get shot down, and it's nothing more serious than a statistic; they (hopefully) learn from what they did wrong, take off again, and dive back into the fight. That's why the people who run places like Air Combat USA say that their customers who have played air-combat sims do better, and why the military is so gung-ho on training programs like Top Gun and Red Flag, and on developing simulators to let pilots make their stupid mistakes on the ground where they're safe. It may take orders of magnitude more repetitions to beat the lesson through your head if you only experience it in a simulation, rather than in combat, but you're not betting your life in a simulation. This is why the average AH player will find a lot more people playing AH who are better than they are than they would in the same situation in the USAAF, Luftwaffe, RAF, or VVS -- pilots don't die finding out they made a mistake.
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Grunherz,
I understand what you mean but with a long rifle you are not shooting thousands of rounds a minute. The rate of fire simply overcomes the difficulty of aiming.
Shiva,
That little stall plate is highly overrated. At least in it's change of the F4U flight envelope as recognized by the masses. That stall plate was installed after the first 800 were produced (along with many other drag reducing features) and then all the rest were retro-fitted all by August of 1943. So in fact of the 12,500 that were built only 800 did not have them for the first 3 months they were deployed. So it may have had a huge impact but it was only noticable to the few squadrons of F4U pilots. In any case I didn't want to Thread Jack.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
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I wonder why people think that aircraft shake so much.
Anyone ever see Bob Hoover's film of rolling without spilling the glass of water on the dash?
Turbulence exists. But the idea that you're continually in a martini shaker while inflight.......
As for recoil, remember that the guns are bolted to airframes weighing in around 5 or 6 tons. Also, remember that the little molecules of air are chasing over the top and bottom of the wing at 300+ miles an hour and exerting pressure on both the top and bottom of the wing.
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I'd wager the VAST majority of the player base is under 10% in fighter hit percentage. Is that "too easy"? I don't know; that's a judgement or "gameplay" call for the folks that run the game.
Would agree on that, just check the score pages for most people and it is bellow 10% (for the majority).
Personally when I land my sorties, it's usually quite high kill counts (without vulching). I usually fly 190's and the Ta152 with occasional sorties in the P51, Mossie (this plane I am starting to love), F4u, P47 etc. So I always have fairly much ammo, I almost never use all the ammo though.
Easy gunnery in AH? Possible, don't think so anyway. What is easy though is to spot every hit thanks to big flashes.
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Mossie (this plane I am starting to love)
LOL wicked Willi is starting to feel the power of the darkside :)
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Hehehe, cc revvin, landed one 9 kill sortie first sortie this tour (in the mossie). Then flew with Ghosth, both in mossie, We both died as at the end of the sortie it felt like all bish in the area were hunting us (really, they jumped us from every direction) and I died with 13 kills in the sortie (after zig zagging between trees and driving a Yak into the ground the last F4u got me). Landed another 11 kill sortie and a few small sorties aswell. I never used reload pad.
Perk point for my 9 kill sortie: 39.95. 13 kill sortie I had some 30 perks same with the 11 kill sorite :D
it can outturn most planes and outrun the others, gotto love it! :)
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Well, Its not uncommon for those of us in the 56th to land with 4-10 kills. Thats not by vulching, but by working as a team. If not we wouldn't be good Jug pilots :D
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Ooooo...Wilbus has a thing for mossies. Next he'll be flying spitfires.:D Mossies are pretty cool although i don't fly them as often as i used to. Its a nice feeling you get when you know you can kill out to ranges of 1.2k if a con tries extending in a straight line, those 4 hispanos are nice.:) I don't tend to use the mossie for fighting anymore, but for hit and run against bases. If you miss the fuel/barracks with the bombs the nose mounted 20mm take them out with ease. Another thing wilbus, how many of your deaths are from your mossie getting set on fire? Mine are alway getting set of fire.
Back to topic-
I have a high % gunnery but i don't think all i'm a great shot. It's not often i fire over 300m and even when it's a deflection shot at 300m it's hard not to miss. When i fly a spit i try to get 8 kills a sortie, it has enough ammo if you get close and fire under 300m. However if i'm in a plane with nose mounted guns i'll take shots a lot further out.
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Don't think any of my deaths are due to fire actually. One is when I got rammed, the other ones have been loss of wings or tail or something like that. But I know it's very prone to burn :)
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Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
F4UDOA I still dont think precision hunting/sniper rifles fired from a bench or prone or anyhow not moving or vibrating are a good comparison to rapid fire MG fired from a dynamic shaking mount such as a WW2 fighter.
Grun i must admit i also thought it was a bad comparison until i saw that F4UDOA has flown in AircombatUSA. To me this makes F4udoa much more experienced in actual dogfighting than any pilot who just flies cessnas.
If he feels the comparison is just then seeing as how he has flown a real aircraft in a mock dogfight and fired therifle he mentions he must be able to see the similarity far better than us who generally have done neither!
I was lucky enough to fire a MP40 in Las Vegas last year and i was astounded how accurate it was and how easy it was to hit targets the full lentgh of the shooting range. I had always assumed the gun would jump around all over the place and make accurate fire impossible but i could actually hit with relative ease even on my first manic burst of fire :D
I opened up like a lunatic and emptied an entire clip into a osama bin ladin target poster!!! :D. Grinning like a man whos just had sex with 200 nubile amazonians i turned to the gunsmith fellow and said 'wow thats accurate' and he replied 'could you not fire constantly, use short bursts please or you'll burn the barrel out' :p
I think I'll take F4UDOA's word for it at least until I get my chance to experience Aircombat USA too.
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man i must really suck. This was the first month that I scored over a 1.0 kill/death ratio. That means most of the time ill get 1 kill before being shot down some times 2. but there are days ill up 4,5 6 or more times and only get 1 or 2 kills the whole time. You guys make this seem so easy. Like shouldn't everyone have 4,5 or 6 kill runs 90% of the Time and land them. Any of you have my permission to look up my stats and tell me what you think
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I've fired plenty of RL M2 .50 cal rounds on full auto and the "vibration" is no big deal. In fact, it's a boring gun to fire. Even mounted on a flex mounting, it's just press the butterfly and walk in the rounds in short, compact bursts. In fact, to qualify you are expected, as I recall, to hit a target at 800m with the first 12 rounds. Setting the headspace and timing can be the most interesting part of the experience :) The only two times I saw significant "dispersion" were with a shot-out barrel where the rounds corkscrewed downrange and an imporperly sandbagged tripod mount. If you look at the gun camera film, for all the "shaking" that is going on most of the rounds seemt to arrive on target with little trouble.
Charon
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Meddog, I think your score seams pretty average (think).
Looking back on other tours you've flown your score has improved quite much :) Nothing wrong with you score at all, nor you kill death or any of it.
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My gunnery has improved some the last couple of months, in the 10-15% range. One reason is I got a Saitek X45 stick and throttle, much more accurate than the Thrustmaster Afterburner I was using before. Second is I started flying the LA7 a lot more. I have to wait till I'm 300 or less before I start shooting. That patience has carried over to all the other planes I fly.
I've had several sorties where I got 5 to 8 kills with the LA7 but I keep pressing my luck because I still have half a tank of fuel left or I still have 50 or more rounds left and I'm either defending and there is no time to land and get another plane or I'm capping a base we are attacking and there is no time to RTB for a fresh plane.
I once had a sortie defending a base on the AKDessert map, only 50% fuel available, took up a Vak 9T. Once we cleared the immediate airspace around the base, I went towards the base the attackers where using and met them half way. Killed a couple of goons, B-26's, and P47s. Spent about 10 mintues flying around. Got about 8 kills, used up all the 37mm rounds and had about 100 rounds of 12mm, decided to RTB to get a new plane and ran out of gas and had to ditch, I forgot I only had 50% fuel.
AirScrew (LA7 Dweeb and proud of it)
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The spray n pray method with the high ammo count birds is quite something...I'm always in awe (among other emotions...) when someone hoses me down from 1.4k and 1 ping takes off a wingtip and sends me to Earth :rolleyes:
I've been enjoying the planes with far less ammo loads, like the Yak and the Hurricane...both with the big cannon loads. Mostly for Tiger hunts but I've learned a great deal of discipline when chasing the Spits and La7s around to not squeeze off ammo until I have a sure shot at very close range. After a few flights in the Yaks, I'm pretty much gaa-gaa when I take a P-47 D-11 up and have more ammo than I know what to do with :)
I've just had a ton of fun lately flying the Yaks as of late...good perks, crap for ammo, but BOY when you ping em, they fall apart fast ;)