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About Rattlesnake

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  1. Have you looked at it lately? I don't find it all that aesthetically obtrusive, and let's face it, aesthetics is what we are going for here, if we wanted to properly simulate fighter pilot vision on small monitors we'd need icons/labels. Speck size partially depends on how high you have sharpness setting in postFX turned up. I have it on the low end as too high makes the picture ugly and is not necessary. I imagine hardware has something to do with it as well, probably more obtrusive on a huge monitor/tv than it is on a moderate size one. I bounce and get bounced unawares all the time mate, especially in multi-bandit situations. Anyway, the problem with spotting in real life isn't that planes are borderline invisible until well within guns range, rather it is the fact that there is a massive lot of sky to search. There is no way to practically simulate this on a monitor, although VR is getting to the point where it does so I suppose. When it comes to sneaking the six o'clock position specifically, well sit down in your car, put your seat belt on, twist around and look out the rear window. See how many *hours* you can do this before it gets uncomfortable. 🙃 Again there is no way to simulate this particular effect on a monitor, although I guess VR kinda does the trick here too. Seems like the ultimate long-term solution is for everyone to be playing in VR. And at the end of the day if the target sees you, so what? Some air combat maneuvering may be necessary? Horrors. The whole point of playing online is to fight other humans. Regarding judging distance: You zoom into the flyspecks to bring their planform, direction etc into view. The more zoom it takes the further away they are. Not perfect, but again what can be done within the limits of a screen. I've already conceded that there really ought to be more zoom possible to ID at a longer distance. I don't know if the fact that alternate visibility isn't widely used on servers proves anything. Many players seem to seriously believe that engines would destroy themselves if left at high power settings for 7 minutes instead of 5 , so if they also believe the average WWII fighter pilot suffered from severe and uncorrected myopia it wouldn't surprise me.
  2. Here mate, the flyspeck effect is fairly visible at the outset of this one. Keep in mind the standard caveat that due to compression the YT quality is far grainier than what actually appears on the monitor. I play the game on a 1080p monitor, but with super sampling turned on, no antialiasing. This results in a VERY sharp image on my screen for easy spotting of both tanks and planes, albeit I have to turn off some of the eye candy (shadow effects) to keep the 80 or greater frame rate I consider ideal for dogfighting performance. If I was willing to put up with 50-60 average I could play with a lot of that stuff on. Pea Shooter vs. Biplane
  3. Ah, another day, this discussion again. I started playing this genre a decade and a half ago, on a machine that was primitive at the time. Needless to say there were icons in all games then (a plane at firing range would have just been a smudge without either icons or vast levels of zoom). I am very gratified that things have advanced so much that we get to enjoy the aesthetics of playing without icons somewhat functionally, but sometimes one looks back a little wistfully on the simpler days when people discussed dogfighting tactics, instead of the arcane art of boosting your spotting capability.🤪 It's 2020. Surely we can come up with a way to give our virpils the equivalent of at least 20/20 vision (most fighter pilots possess better than 20/20 eyesight) while still keeping the icon-less aesthetic. Online play shouldn't be looking for fleas on a black dog, that's neither realistic nor fun. The "fly-speck" contact dots War Thunder simulator mode uses at long range work, and work well, to at least bring players together. Just steal the idea already and be done with it. The downside is that primarily because maximum zoom isn't as great, type ID of what you've spotted can be a problem, whereas it's fairly easy to ID in Il-2 once you've actually detected something to zoom in on in the first damn place. But it is far, far better thing to high-speed buzz what turns out to be a friendly than it is to cruise 30 minutes in what as far as you can tell is an empty arena. Some day...
  4. Considering how much aileron deflection in WWII depended on upper body strength, and that the Jug is a good roller anyway, it's perfectly plausible that he was never out-rolled. Athlete before being a pilot. Greg of Greg's Airplanes has examined his speed claim, and guess what, it's also plausible that when you hot-rod the R-2800 to produce nearly the same power as a 470mph P-47M in the less draggy razorback you will get the same speed. Also his claim IIRC was 300mph IAS in level flight, the TAS has to be calculated based on factors he may or may not be guessing right. The man's books sold on the basis of being a fighter pilot credited with a large number of kills in the recent war. There is no need for him to describe the kills other than how they happened. The very first description is a bit self-deprecating, and obviously a short burst, as his own gun noise scared him, highly excited state having something to do with this no doubt. Also there is sufficient confirmation of 109s and 190s suddenly exploding or having bits of wing or surface fall off from other pilots and gun camera footage. Keep in mind that because of the difference in practice time the average WWII fighter pilot was certainly a terrible shot compared to the online pilots with thousands of hours shooting at virtual planes and no life or death worry on our minds. AIs are also vastly more likely to die quickly to .50s in online arenas, so it's not a net issue. Also other gun packages still seem effective enough, so not a net issue, unless net issues can somehow effect .50s alone. There's no truly scientific data in existence on this question because as I say, it would involve shooting at the real fighter in question in flight with real guns under conditions much more controlled than combat. There are only pilot descriptions and gun cam footage. I don't know how long you've been in sims, but most devs of most simulators have done their dead level damndest to be realistic when it comes to flight model and damage factors at least. And guess what? They frequently come out with greatly varying results. Just look at DCS versus Il-2, for instance. If you can play multiple different sims and still have faith in "we know this is accurate because our program which runs on a personal desktop in some guy's den calculated it to be so", well I can't help you. For years the most cutting edge and expensive computer technology on the planet has been used to help engineers decide how a new airplane will fly, and sure it's gotten more capable, but still, in the year of our lord 2020 flight test often reveals surprises.
  5. 3/4s of the players I'm shooting at have net issues bad enough to absorb this many bursts with hardly any effect? Big Doubt. And I thought these games were client-side anyway (i.e If I see the bullets landing on my screen the damage is allotted). And as others have pointed out, other gun packages don't seem to have "net issues" so we can rule that out immediately. There's your opinion about what 8 .50s hitting all in roughly the same place do, and then there's Bob Johnson's actual experience, which involved many cases of quick disintegration. He was of course likely a fantastic shot compared to the average WWII fighter pilot, but so are most of us, having the benefit of literal decades of practice in these games. https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/62134-all-of-robert-s-johnsons-kills-described-in-his-book-thunderbolt/?tab=comments#comment-949733 Oh, and .50s definitely aren't cannons in War Thunder. The cannons are very much more lethal in short bursts. Planes do fly through short snapshots of .50s without getting destroyed, but that was more of a high G tracking shot close to converge range, things should be disintegrating quickly. BTW, I don't find wings coming off super often in WT, if that's a trigger for you. They usually die to fire, pilot kill, or loss of control first, so why keep firing? In case you didn't know it, War Thunder's primary brag is being very autistic about their modeling of every single bullet, penetration, damage, etc. IOW, they will claim a very high stnadard of accuracy. Who is right? Here's the truth: Without the ability to shoot at actual WWII airplanes in flight with actual guns under controlled scientific conditions everyone is FREAKIN' GUESSING, let's be honest about that. But WT's guess is definitely leading to better gameplay right now. If I fly myself to a proper gun solution on a 190 he's quite dead, of course if he does the same to me I'm much, much deader, but that's fine. Kind of like hitting a fly with a swatter versus with a hammer. Those conditions make a better experience than what you saw in the video I linked, for many reasons. If you don't want to get shot down fly out of his guns envelope. What's NOT a good experience is a stick-stirring enemy you're firmly saddled on being able to tank hundreds of bullets (because he is strategically making sure they get spread across his plane by stirring) and come out with leaks at worse, and still be in enough control to shoot you when you literally have to break off firing at point blank to avoid collision.
  6. Well, since you asked: No, not a track but a direct screen capture and you can see how many rounds went in the D9 without causing any apparent control loss with your own eyes. All 8 guns, Converge 250 meters. You can go into Berloga, take a 6-8 .50s plane and repeat the results all day long, albeit there will be lucky insta-kills mixed in. But those are effectively random. Also the insta-kill seems much more likely to happen with AI, so you can't replicate the experience multiplayers are having offline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjiaY9zcXoU
  7. Thanks OP, seeing a new release come up gave me hope, you saved me some testing time. Oh well, life has certain compensations if you keep and open mind and are willing to look for them. P-47M Gunnery
  8. I will point out that you didn’t see this neg G chicanery as much before because: 1. Actual defensive ACM like breaks and barrel rolls weren’t going to suddenly and unpredictably black you out at ??? G loading, it doesn’t matter (within reason) what the specific limiting G in a game is, but it must remain *consistent* to know how to select and execute your maneuvers. 2. Most gun packages were efficacious enough that the person pulling this landed trout BS stuff would probably just be taken out by a short burst at close range anyways. Unintended consequences, and “If ain’t broke...”. (If it is broke at least don’t make it broker.)
  9. "G tolerance is an individual thing, heavily dependent on the pilot's physical health and fitness, height, fatigue, smoking habits, drug intake, etc. Most fighter pilots, with training, can learn to sustain about 5 Gs for a considerable time without ill effects. In addition to training shorter fighter pilots (a personal favorite), there are certain techniques and equipment which can increase G tolerance. In the area of equipment, the G suit is the most common. This is usually a trouserlike garment that incorporates inflatable bladders in the abdominal area and along the legs. These bladders are usually inflated by high-pressure air from the aircraft by an automatic valve in proportion to the G level at any moment. The G suit squeezes the pilot's lower extremities, and this tends to restrict the pooling of blood in these areas, thereby leaving more blood available for the upper body and head. A properly fitted G suit can typically increase a pilot's tolerance by about 1 G." Shaw, "Fighter Combat", page 377 http://falcon.blu3wolf.com/Docs/Fighter Combat-Tactics and Maneuvering.pdf
  10. I've been re-reading "Thunderbolt!" by Johnson and am currently working on getting all his descriptions of kills from the book into one post. So far it looks like losing speed to drag increase is the LEAST of your worries when being hit by .50s, at least by 8 of them at convergence. So far his first five kills all more or less follow this pattern.
  11. I was re-reading this recently and thought it would be interesting to post the descriptions he wrote of happened to each German fighter or zerstorer he shot down. There are several other cases where he describes in detail someone else shooting a 109, 190, or zerstorer, I may add them in also. First Kill: Second Kill: Third Kill: Fourth Kill: Fifth Kill: That's all for now. I'll try to continue posting these until I've worked through the entire book, then do a statistical analysis of the results.
  12. Didn’t get a response in the right forum, and that’s an awful frustrating wait for a product I’ve put money in to the tune of owning nearly 100% of the planes and packs.
  13. Hi all. Re-downloaded the game, did the reset password bit. It still keeps giving the message in the subject line. Please help, really want to play again!. I did a password reset on startup. Logs me in just fine on ROF website. I have already tried writing it into startup.cfg manually. Also I can't figure out how to reset password again, just in case that helps. This is infuriating.
  15. I’m not sure it is the case that RoF is notably harder to fly. That said, it is true that many WWI pilots soloed, started on advanced types, or went into combat with a scandalously small number of hours. Whereas many virpils have enormous numbers of pixel-hours. Thus I tend to think it perfectly reasonable that a plausible simulation of almost any fighter accepted for squadron service should be fairly easy for experienced virpils to do basic maneuvers in and aim with.
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