Like why does a single rifle round in the wing send a plane into a flat spin and render the controls useless but AA gun hits and plane cannons require sustained hits.
I feel I have more kills against planes with machine guns and smgs and random rifle shots than with the dedicated AA gun.
5 Likes
Yeah, I have shot some planes with a fighter, get hit markers and see smoke but they still don’t crash, and sometimes I get shot down and don’t even know what it was.
1 Like
It depends on what was damaged. Like BF110 is just fine flying with one dead engine and holes in the wing, but if tail is slightly damaged then flight assist itself kills you as it can’t properly compensate for sustained damaged.
The reason why damage from small firearm tends to look higher than from AAA is simply because AAA tends to hit head-on and almost never hits in parallel to the target because of how plane approaches and slow traversal of AAA. So what happens is that AAA hits better armored parts or things like engine or front of the wing. Small arms fire has a higher chance to hit tail or ailerons and those are way more important as when they are damaged, flight assist just oversteers and kills you.
2 Likes
Yes there are particular parts that when damaged even slightly render the plane uncontrollable. The lower wing on the Russian bi-plane for example.
I’m not sure about the hitting the front/back mattering. Most of my kills are with machine guns or rifle against a plane diving straight at me I just hit them once in the wing and they flat spin out. While from behind with a canon armed plane i chewed up the enemy plane and it didn’t crash but was on fire.
The controls are very weird too, if you switch off the instructor the plane becomes almost impossible to fly with a joystick, the control surfaces are massively heavy. It is very WiP I think.
I was seeing if the devs had said something about it like it is a gameplay balance thing to make infantry better against planes or just not finished working on it.
For example
The left plane damage I flat spinned and crashed instantly while the right I was able to continue flying and destroyed more targets.
There’s no consistency or rules for the damage at the moment.
4 Likes
The damage is supposed ot be indicated by the colour of hte area - rudder gets “light yellow” is the silliest cause of losss of control I’ve seen.
Any damage to any of hte flight controls - elevator, ruddr, ailerons, has a massive effect on controlability - certainly much more than I’ve come to expect from WT playing RB air. And as an aircragft mechanic (with no expereiince at all repairing combat damage!!) it seems very unrealistic - I have seen small planes with quite severe damage due impacting things, or broken contol cables, that were still able to be controlled relatively easily - albeit the pilots were pretty tense!!
Large amounts of damage to fuselage and wings should make hte plane slower due to drag - that much is reasonable IMO
2 Likes
I’ve had my BF 110 go straight into a uncontrolable dive after the engine cowl gets slightly yellow. The engine wasn’t even damaged.
Thanks 
Yes there is 2 outcomes that seem to happen
The normal damage that works as you expect like war thunder and the weird damage where I can drop a plane with a single rifle shot (try it, it works great but usually only the bots fire at planes because people think their guns can’t hurt them).
The second one seems to be a issue with damage to the hull of the plane having weird effects. It actually makes the Russian and German biplane quite deadly since their high rate of fire machine gun bullets can trigger a death spin with a single hit.
This seems to have been patched now yay!