Why would the number of engines determine the number of hits? In both cases the AAA is shooting at a single aircraft.
Because 4 engines give you roughly 4 times the target area (for engine hits) as 1 engine. Whether they are attached to 1 plane or 4 planes is irrelevant in this context. Each engine will average about the same number of hits, so the four engines taken together will average 4 times the hits of the 1 engine.
Try it. With arrows or darts if you don't have a shotgun, or dropping a bunch of pennies or pebbles or other small objects from eye level onto the floor, anything that gives a random distribution of hits. Because the shots are randomly distributed within the target area (the "box"), an object that takes up X times as much space inside the target area will average X times as many hits.
This is different from air-to-air gunnery, where you're trying to put a concentrated stream of bullets into a single spot. With puffy ack, even with proximity fuses, you aren't trying to hit the target with the shell, you are filling a volume of space with lots and lots of randomly distributed little pellets or shell fragments and hoping enough of them hit to disable the target, which is effectively like shooting a shotgun at an object that is much smaller than the shot pattern. A good ack shell, like a good shotgun, will give you a more
even distribution, but it is still random.
What you're saying - it's only shooting at a single aircraft - is like saying you should get the same number of hits whether you're shooting at a basketball or a golf ball, because either way you're just shooting at a single ball.
As stated above, the size of the aircraft is not a variable.
Exactly.
In the game it's not a variable, but in anything remotely based on the laws of physics in the real world it
should be a variable. Saying the size of a target is irrelevant to the number of hits you should expect to get on it is nonsensical.
Now, take your example and turn it around. A Lanc should be able to take X times more hits than a Spit before damage is done.
Right. The Lanc should take X times as many hits to kill, but it gets hit X times as much, so puffy ack should be at least as lethal against a Lanc as a Spit if they're both flying straight & level. As it stands, puffy ack is X times as lethal against a Spit as against a Lanc, which is wrong. I've had the same experience as everyone else is relating, I've bombed CV groups hundreds of times in buff formations and it's rare that I lose a bomber to puffy ack, and almost never before dropping, but to fighters it's deadly.
Again, this is not like air-to-air gunnery, where your burst either hits or misses and contains the same number of bullets and shells, and thus gives you roughly the same number of hits, if you hit at all, whether you're shooting at a Lanc or a Spit.
It all makes sense now, doesn't it?
It made sense before.
TnDep, your diagram isn't how it works. The box is the same size for every plane, with the same number of pellets in it, but the Lanc takes up more of the box than the Spit does, so more of the pellets will land in space taken up by the Lanc. (I won't try to draw that in ASCII art though.)
