Damage depends on what canon you shoot with.
So when you score tons of hits with a .303 it does not do that much damage, one hit of a 37mm canon takes your plane apart.
Sometimes the other guy is directly behind you and gets multiple hits in short order, which seem like one hit to you but in rality you got 10 canon hits which is enogh to take any plane apart.
Often planes have two gun types, a weak mg and a punchy dangerous canon. Its harder to hit the other plane with the canon because shots per minute are less and the bullet is slower. So what happens most people fire both canon and mg but only hit with the mg, see the hits and think "full hit with all i have" wrong, only some of the mg bullets did hits and these do minor damage.
At long range the shots do less damage. So when you get lots of hits from 600yards with an mg not only they do few damage but also they are spread around the entire plane. Consider the plane has 30 hit places, each takes 3 hits to destroy you can hit 60 times doing no visible damage or hit 3 times and make it crash.
Exactly that is what happens, experienced or lucky pilots fly close in to 200yard, land 4 hits on one piece and you are down. You pepper a whole plane from 400 out and land 40 hits, he keeps flying.
On GVs the angle and the point that is hit is verry importand, hit into the driver view slit at the right angle and the tiger goes boom.
Hit a panzer on a sloped place with wrong angle and do 100 bounces. Use HE amunition on a panzer and get 100 hits without damaging him. Need to use AP and hit from behind or one of the verry small weak spots. Some GV experts give training.
To get solid hits you need to have the other plane at course so he will fly into your bullets and not pull the bullet stream over the target. If you pull your tracers over the target it will give you max. 1 hit, if he doesnt fly though. Hold your nose steady at the correct aim point and fire a burst gives multiple hits. Sorry i cant explain it better, but dragging the tracers over the target is bad.
Having 4 canons like in the typhoon or N1k definetly gives you a lot of damage when you hit.
You see the matter of killing with a few hits is not magic but a lot of training and complicated knowledge. I know what i wrote is not perfect english and might be hard to understand. Here some helpfull ideas.
-Shoot from 200 yards distance
-use canons only, 20mm hispano easieset to hit with, other 20mm good too
- cal .50 mg verry easy to hit with and most damage for any MG in game
- try to hit one piece (vert. stab, horiz. stab, tail boom, left or right wing root, left or right wing tip, left or right engine on multies)
-fire one type of canon only, no "mixed salvos" of diffrent canons or canon and mg
- fire only on "gun solution", no dragging
- learn weak and easy to hit places for diffrent planes
- learn weak spots in gvs when going for gv vs gv battle
- if you hit him and he can not hit you you can try as long as you want, attack fighters from upper/lower/rear, not front, bombers not from rear
- dead 6 is hard to hit, try to get a "profile shot"
-hanging in the air at slow speeds makes you a easy target for guys from above.
ciao schutt
PS i personally found for P38 its pretty easy to take the tail booms of with a few hits on the booms,
Spit is pretty easy to take rudder or one wing off, because they are nimble and often pass in full profile,
A6M burst in flames when you hit the fuel,
F6F, P47 and F4F are verry solid... dont expect to kill one on the first pass,
N1k2 i seem to take off the horizontal stab easy
Hurricane Mk2c just fly 1k away and look for another target,
LA7 make em stall and crash.
