Gun Ballistics

[wil3ur]

Is there any posts or charts that show what the ballistic drop is on the different guns in game?  I know you can do the .target and set it for different distances to gauge it visually in game.  Just wondering if anyone has taken the data and setup a chart for this?

[Canspec]

Please......don't ask for charts.........you will wake up the gastropod.....

[Becinhu]

Don't wake slimy!


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[DaddyAce]

Yes, wake him up, it sounds interesting!

[ONTOS]

You can go online to google and look up the guns . It will tell all about them. You can make a list of the ballistics. Hope this helps.

[Krusty]

Tony Williams has a wealth of information on them.

Your main request is too broad and vague. Generally speaking, Aces High models the correct weight and velocity of rounds large and small based on the weapons in question.

There are a couple of compromises, such as belting is averaged out on mixed-belt rounds, and such as prop sync doesn't degrade rate of fire as much as it should on some specific guns, but otherwise the round per round ballistics are quite good, even taking into account the air density if fired at 1k or 30k.

[bustr]

I started a project where I used fighter spawns to set all of the fighters in the game, and some bombers, on the edge of slopes surrounding a small airfield so I could use 6 of 8 spawns. Ended up with three small islands and three airfields with 18 spawns to cover 95% of all the rides. Turns out it is a large scale bite in the whatsis to adjust the terrain to have a fighter spawn on it and not break its back while resting with the center line level. So surrounding these feilds are pits that run off into the ocean.

The rational for this is the center of the .Target is aligned with the center line Hitech assigned to each aircraft regardless of pitch. So I end up pulling the target all the way in to let prop HUBS or obvious center lines show me how much I have to raise or lower the pitch of the ground under the spawn.

Once this is accomplished, I spawn out the plane, pull up the target at say 400 and look at the relationship of the center line\target center to the center of the gunsight and the impact point on the target. I'm a few planes short of being finished and I'm fully involved with my new Melee arena terrain I've been documenting in the Terrain Editor forum. Besides, setting a plane on a static stand to bore sight like this does not show where the IP point will be relative to the gunsight influenced by your speed, turn rate and nose pitch during combat. Only combat experience does. A better thing to see can be done by sitting on the runway and pulling up the target while adding positive pitch to put the target up into your gunsight. Then at 200-600 look at what your impact spread will be. Also, this setup will not show you how much gunsight elevation you have to use flying a level 6 chase to land rounds in your con .25sec after you pull the trigger at 400yds. Only in game experience teaches that.


Here is a P51D on a static stand. All this verifies is the bullets are impacting relative to the center of my gunsight at 400yds, the rest is eyecandy. And way more work than it's worth, or Hitech would have coded a hard stand into the convergence app to let us test exactly this. And I don't like using the thing now that I created it because it shows you can tilt the motor mounted cannons in fighters up through the engine which is impossible outside of this game. In real life they were bolted in place to the engine firing straight out of the HUB.

You can also pull up terrains offline and look for slope drop offs at the ends of runways, then inch your ride just over the slope. You use the target in F3 mode to inch the center line into position. That's what I did for a number of years with the TA terrain offline.

[haggerty]

I remember the Air Warrior book used to have so much information, someone should put together a similar Aces High book.

[bustr]

I remember the Air Warrior book used to have so much information, someone should put together a similar Aces High book.

Why can't you do it? All of the manuals and data is open source out on the internet. Why don't you try using the terrain editor and duplicate my hard stand bore sighting setup....

[wil3ur]

I started a project where I used fighter spawns to set all of the fighters in the game, and some bombers, on the edge of slopes surrounding a small airfield so I could use 6 of 8 spawns. Ended up with three small islands and three airfields with 18 spawns to cover 95% of all the rides. Turns out it is a large scale bite in the whatsis to adjust the terrain to have a fighter spawn on it and not break its back while resting with the center line level. So surrounding these feilds are pits that run off into the ocean.

The rational for this is the center of the .Target is aligned with the center line Hitech assigned to each aircraft regardless of pitch. So I end up pulling the target all the way in to let prop HUBS or obvious center lines show me how much I have to raise or lower the pitch of the ground under the spawn.

Once this is accomplished, I spawn out the plane, pull up the target at say 400 and look at the relationship of the center line\target center to the center of the gunsight and the impact point on the target. I'm a few planes short of being finished and I'm fully involved with my new Melee arena terrain I've been documenting in the Terrain Editor forum. Besides, setting a plane on a static stand to bore sight like this does not show where the IP point will be relative to the gunsight influenced by your speed, turn rate and nose pitch during combat. Only combat experience does. A better thing to see can be done by sitting on the runway and pulling up the target while adding positive pitch to put the target up into your gunsight. Then at 200-600 look at what your impact spread will be. Also, this setup will not show you how much gunsight elevation you have to use flying a level 6 chase to land rounds in your con .25sec after you pull the trigger at 400yds. Only in game experience teaches that.


Here is a P51D on a static stand. All this verifies is the bullets are impacting relative to the center of my gunsight at 400yds, the rest is eyecandy. And way more work than it's worth, or Hitech would have coded a hard stand into the convergence app to let us test exactly this. And I don't like using the thing now that I created it because it shows you can tilt the motor mounted cannons in fighters up through the engine which is impossible outside of this game. In real life they were bolted in place to the engine firing straight out of the HUB.

You can also pull up terrains offline and look for slope drop offs at the ends of runways, then inch your ride just over the slope. You use the target in F3 mode to inch the center line into position. That's what I did for a number of years with the TA terrain offline.


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Ouch, quite a bit of work on that one, which is why I was hoping HiTech might have just a quick "30cal german MG's are coded with 1" of drop for every 100 yards" or something similar. 

[Wiley]

It's swell to have a spreadsheet and all, but given the fluidity of aerial gunnery, does it really do it that much good?  Your airspeed affects the apparent trajectory of your bullets, your moving target is gaining/losing separation from you most of the time, your G load affects your aim point, alt plays a factor.

Just seems to me like a ton of work for not much applicable information, where looking up the real world info is likely to be close enough given all the other variables in play.

Wiley.

[haggerty]

Why can't you do it? All of the manuals and data is open source out on the internet. Why don't you try using the terrain editor and duplicate my hard stand bore sighting setup....

If all the similar data is available I'd be glad to work on it.  I've never used the terrain editor, is there good information in there other than creating terrains?

[bustr]

Contact Easyscor and he will get you going.

[Krusty]

Like Wiley said, you don't have to do all that work. It doesn't really tell you anything that the .target doesn't tell you already.

As for hub guns: They could be harmonized to a certain extent. They also weren't fixed to the centerline. When a plane flies its "forward" view is static and it can pitch up or down while maintaining level altitude based on its flight speed and/or weight. Rather, the gunsight and the guns are matched together and you fly the plane so that the gunsight (and thus the guns) is over a target. Then you shoot. Sitting a plane on a static stand does nothing to change this, and most planes that were on static stands also have moving targets fixed in front of them. It wasn't for scientific means, it was so they could see where bullets landed instead of "up into the air."

HTC also models in the scattering effect of vibrations on the guns themselves. You'll notice wing-mounted guns sometimes have a bit more spread because 6 guns vibrating next to each other can shake a lot and a tiny fraction of a degree means a bullet could be off by 1 mil (or whatever example). Nose mounted or more rigid guns tend to have tighter clusters, and bullets that fly faster and have tighter groupings anyways also have slightly less scatter because they hit the target before they can deviate all that much.

[bustr]

It's swell to have a spreadsheet and all, but given the fluidity of aerial gunnery, does it really do it that much good?  Your airspeed affects the apparent trajectory of your bullets, your moving target is gaining/losing separation from you most of the time, your G load affects your aim point, alt plays a factor.

Just seems to me like a ton of work for not much applicable information, where looking up the real world info is likely to be close enough given all the other variables in play.

Wiley.

Gunnery training in the real world taught you that your guns would be harmonized to the maximum effective distance you can expect to hit a moving con. You fired inside of that as a rule. Fighters 300-400 and bombers 600-1000. Then you had to learn deflection shooting and the 100mph principle. Only your armorer needed to know what your bore sight picture looked like at the effective range. You trusted that the rounds would pass through that point when you pointed the reticle and pulled the trigger at a con. After that you had to practice the skill of areal shooting. Most fighter pilots sucked at it and why the holy grail of gunsights were gyro compensating lead sights.

There is a reason the standard fighter reticle was some variation of the 100mph ring. Or a 100-140Mil ring depending on the guns being used. Those default gunsights are not in your rides just to clutter your view. And Hitech's physics models the 100mph principle.