Sigh. Not the old "I can't kill anything with my 303s line." 20mm isn't going to make sucky gunnery any better or improve bad tactics (one of the big mistakes I see on the LW side in this scenario is people thinking they are still flying a 190 or something; the 109's 20mm runs out real fast, and then you in deeper doodoo than any RAF fighter). Friday I shot down 4 88s, and Saturday I lost count of how many I downed, when a bunch of us were defending that vehicle base to the North of the Thames. Also had a couple of great one-on-one fights with 110s and they broke up real nice under a hail of 303 fire.
Is the 88 a tough adversary? Oh yes. But it's got little to do with the hitting power of 303s. You concentrate your fire on the wingtip or tail section and they go down. And it's not that their guns are overmodelled. The problems are two-fold. One is the fact that this 88 is a later war variant and a lot faster than the one in the BOB. That means that it can climb faster, and is harder to catch in level flight. An early war Luftie level bomber can't be far away, especially since this was such a point of contention in the BOB scenario last Summer.
However, a slower bomber isn't going to fix what is the major problem. A real 88 crew was sitting inside a flimsy glasshouse behind half inch to an inch thick perspex. The crew in an Aces High 88 is sitting behind 6 inches of Kevlar. Try it some time. Concentrate your fire on the cockpit area and see how long it takes it to have any effect. Put a couple of hundred rounds into the cockpit of a real 88, especially from a HO, and the brains of the crew would be flying out the back end.
But aim anywhere else, and you get pretty much what happened in real life. If you didn't hit the crew in the real BOB, it took a lot of lead to bring a bomber down. Look at guncam footage from that period, and it's really rare to see bomber that shed their wings, etc. Bottom line, I don't think there's much wrong with the relative gunnery modelling. But you need to get up close and personal if you are a RAF fighter, and that (as it was in reality) can be the trick when facing faster planes. Remember that what we fly in the CT is not historical, because the LW fighters are freed from the tasking of protecting bombers (which limited their effectiveness) and now can be all they can be.
[at this point I will confess that despite the fact that I love flying it, I have a few reservations about the accuracy of the flight modelling of the 110. These things were sitting ducks, and they rule the roost in the CT. Now, I'm going to climb back into my 110 cockpit now!]
Get above them and dive almost vertically is the best approach--which is why the good buff pilot will go high. Fights in the CT generally start at a much lower altitude than the MA; I've flown buff missions at 15K and had people trying to climb up to me all the time, rarely coming down on top of me. A 15k approach to a contested field in the MA is tantamount to suicide. Or, as Cavalier says, work with a group.
You get in close to a LW figher, with your guns set at 200 or 250 yards convergence (and even that is long when compared with the average BOB convergence which was usually 150 yards), pick your target (tails on the 110 are vulnerable, wings on the 109), and let fly.
I love this particularly scenario, but it's a challenge for me chiefly because my ACM still sucks; on the rare occasions it does work, and I put myself where I want to be when I think I should be there, the 303s have never let me down!
