Jump to content

a few more thoughts


Tomb

Recommended Posts

bear with me first a few boring numbers

FP means fire power, burst is the in Dif rating

FP plane burst

2 Ki27 0

3 P35 0

4 Glad 0

4 109B 0

4 KI43 0

-------------------

6 P40B 1

8 Hurri 1

8 Spit 1

8 109E 1

8 A6M2 1

9 109F 1

10 110C 2

11 109G 1

12 P40N 1

12 F4U-1B 1

12 P51D 1

16 P47 2

16 A6M5 1

16 Ki61 1

16 P38 1

18 A6M8 1

20 SpitV 1

20 SpitXIV 1

24 109K 1

--------------------

28 J2M3 2

32 Fw190a 2

32 Mossie 2

32 Hurri II 2

This is a table of relative firepower it is derived in usual war game fashion from weight of fire X rate of fire X number of guns

We assume the .3 cal is a base line of 1 and gives an FP of 1

So approx

0.3cal =1 (0.4lbs/sec)

0.5cal =2 (0.9lbs/sec)

20mmFF =3 (1.2lbs/sec)

20mm151=7 (2.7lbs/sec)

20mm hisp=8 (3.2lbs/sec)

30mm 108 =20 (7.9lbs/sec)

So you can see how the table above builds up, the dashed lines showing breakpoints (mine) very little varience between Mg types for FP so really only two 0.3cal/7.7mm and 0.5cal/13mm

To my mind two inconsistances show up immediately

The 110C with it low rate of fire and weight of shell..does it really rate an burst rating of 2 when so many more planes have higher firepower and the P47 with its all Mg is also a low fire power plane, the two cannon 4 Mg spits have more as does the 109k with its 30mm

The other 2 burst planes have 4 cannon and this I would suggest is a more reasonable benchmark for two “bursts” since thier firepower is so much greater, three times the 110c and twice the P47. realising that this would leave the yanks with no two burst plane might I suggest the oddball of this USA plane set, the F4u-1b, which is the british corsair designation by the way, is changed to an F4u-1a or better yet an F4u-1c 4 cannon variant (FP 32) and the P47 and 110 is reviewed and reduced to 1 burst.

This would put consistency in the “burst” model.

Hope you are not offended by this Dan, maybe nobody has challenged any of the assumptions and when laid out in the above table, inconsistencies are more obvious

have to say got interested enough that i am now after the original board game of Dif RoTL and Dif 8th airforce

regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello Tomb,

No problem about questioning the data and the stats. I take it as a compliment. I figure it means you are interested in the game and care enough to research the game, the data, and post your findings and questions.

If I understand your post correctly, I think your questions might be due to typos when you entered the data. The Bf-110C has a FP of 1. The P-47D has a FP of 2.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Dan, Kilth

Yes indeedy the 110C is my typo I stand corrected, however is the P47 really worth 2 “bursts” since so many other 1 burst planes have higher firepower?.

Yes Kilth using the arbitrary system then Dans system makes the p47 more powerful than a cannon armed plane I would suggest you would be hard pushed to find evidence that 8 Mgs is equal to four rapid firing cannon, while planes flew home with hundreds of Mg hits nobody would be in anything resembling an airplane after hundreds of cannon hits, in fact I doubt their would be enough left to get hundreds of cannon hits. I think you can visualise my point

However I would hope that I could convince Dan to change to a more reasoned system with a more scientific basis. I put the weight of fire per gun so it could be seen how the numbers were arrived at. I think you can see the 20mm hispano should be four times the factor of the .5 and eight times the .3, not two times the .5 and four times the .3 as in the arbitrary system.

I did a lot of research on this back in 1999 using the RAF/USAAF/Luftwaffe research Data. Basically I found their was only fractional differences between MG types for weight of fire so only two types were needed Normal (.3) and heavy (.5)

However their was great difference between 20mm cannon types with the worst being the oerlikon 20mm FF (3 points) and the best being the Hispano (8 points)

The Japanese basically used the oerlikon or mauser or derivations thereof.

Anyway here is an extract

the old way of gunfire/damage modelling is weight of fire assigned a point value and everything extrapolated from then on for example a rifle size round round is given a value of 1 for a 1 sec burst and is about .4 lbs a second weight of fire while a 30mm which is not quite 8lbs a second is 20 times greater so we give it a value of twenty and we know that 1 30mm round will destroy a fighter plane structure so we assign a value of 20 to the structure we also know that a 3 sec burst from a hurricane will also destroy a fighter 8x .303 = 8x 1 point in our system x 3 seconds = 24 points of damage..It’s looking good..the sums add up

Link to article part 1 if this subject interests you be warned it quite long and has two parts but is outside the scope of DiF

Flying for many years in various online flightsims it soon becomes obvious that a good pilot in a two gun Ki43 can rack the kills up as effectively as a six or eight gun fighter.

No board game really represents this (never played DiF). For me however the DiF system is perfect with the IMS cards since a 1:1 card can be landing a full 2 gun MG burst but nowhere vital, to clipping an opponent with a 8 gun MG or cannon burst. At the other end the IMS :destroyed card can be the 2 gun Ki43 putting all the rounds through the cockpit to kill the pilot, to the eight gun fighter shredding his opponent, to the cannon blowing it apart. Is it realistic, I would argue yes since many JAAF pilots became aces in a Ki43, doing that in most board games I have tried is damm near impossible

So my point is to only change the wieght of fire IE “burst” per plane to something more representative. In fact only the P47 needs downgrading to 1 burst instead of 2.

Thoughts ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tomb,

I can see your thinking, and it makes sense.

In historical reports, I have come across pilot accounts playing up the destructive power of the P-47's 8 guns, as opposed to the normal 6 guns of the P-51 and such.

I was thinking that with the additional number of bullets being fired (from 8 guns), there would be a greater chance of hits, thus it might be worth more than its low weight might indicate. This is way I increased it to a 2 instead of a 1.

Thoughts?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

heh heh, i guessed that might be it (ROF) so i will point out 8 gun hurri and 8 gun spit, which fire at a higher rate. the RAF also thought this way for a while and tried 12 guns as in the hurri IIa they found the old ww I lesson was relearnt..you missed just the same, only with more ammo. and the increase in damage was again not that great when you hit. incidently the average pilot will only hit 2% of his shots, 4% with a gyro sight.

the basic technique remains the same, get close and let them have it. against a guy who cant shoot back anyway, against a bomber formation that could get real dangerous.

during testing the RAF thought to up gun to .5 cal but found the improvement was not much greater than the .3 cal so went for the 20mm which greatly improved destructive power.

you must remeber though at that time the RAF was interested in shooting down bombers and MGs were inadaquate so over to cannons, after the bomber threat was largly over 4x20mm was overkill and of short duration. so a mixed armament was preferred IE MG+cannon this is in fact true for all the comabatants except the USA which pretty much stuck to MGs (except p37/P38) analysing this you can see that the USA was fighting lightly built and lightly armoured jappanese planes..the all MG armament was good enough. in the ETO against the germans against fighters all MG armament was also good enough. to press the point those who had to fight bombers IE the lufwaffe,the RAF and the russians all had to upgrade to cannon Mg was not good enough

the germans had the most difficulty and found MGs not good enough in fact they found the best solution was more rapid firing harder hitting Cannon. in a firing pass you simply could not get enough Mgs rounds on target in the time availible . in fact even 4x20mm was marginal what was needed was a one kill weapon (rockets) or only a few rounds (30mm) germans did not build big heavly armed and armoured bombers so 20mm was enough 20mm was also the choice of night fighters since in a short firing pass it would kill other nightfighters (serrate mossies V 110's) The 110s however (G model) still packed the 30mms as they needed to kill 4 engined heavys. interestingly in the schrage musik instalation, the slow firing 20mm Oerlikon was preferred, a slow but certain kill was preferred by settin the bomber alight, lets face it a heavy cannon rapid kill with a bomber carrying a 12000lb bombload exploding above your head only a few hundred feet away is a seriously bad idea.

some other things to consider are solid rounds ie bullets are less effective at high speeds and high alts, HE rounds explode just as well at any speed and Alt

bear in mind those wieght of fire numbers i presented do not account for the extra damage an explosive shell would cause, But as they are, they produce a result that "feels right" and can be supported by giving the right results ingame to match historical evidence.

In DiF as in real life i feel a eight MG fighter or a two cannon fighter has an equal chance to hit and kill if you are sat right behind another fighter a two MG fight however would need to try a bit harder (the zero burst rating)

however against a heavy bomber this would not hold true, MGs are going to show a serious lack of destructability compared with cannon.

lets take the head to head case a in which you get a spit second to fire an MG may put out more rounds but few will hit and unless you get lucky not much significant damage will get done however if just a few 20mm round land you are going to hurt and if just one 30mm round hits you wont have an airplane any more.

am i convincing you ? I would suggest the cannon factor is undervalued if its 1,2,4,6+ and really should be 1,2,8,20 for .3,.5,20mmhispano,30mm Mk108 also use 3 for oelikon based weapons (german Jap model 99 mk1) and 7 for mauser 151 types.

are you convinced ?

regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not totally Tomb as you are only talking about weight of fire and firepower which are great if you’re shooting at bombers but when you’re shooting at a fighter muzzle velocity and ROF become much more important. You half said it yourself when you talked about the RAF interceptors deliberately kept their armaments mixed, while the all cannon fighters were held back for V1 and ground attack.

Everything that I have read would indicate that the 30mm mk108 while devastating, performed poorly when used against fighters because of its poor muzzle velocity of only 500m/s. This limited its effective range when compared to the MGs and good canons like the hispano MkV which had Muzzle velocities in the 800m/s. So I don’t think it should receive such high FP rating like 20.

The only other thing that I would add is that your MG FF figure doesn’t seem right according to my web source http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/8217/fgun/fgun-pe.html has it as a ROF of 530 rpm with a 134g shot which would give it 2.86lb a sec.

From a game play point of view I thing that if DiF as a system of calculating these values then it should be stuck too (esp this close to release?? :D ). Also I think that if the P47 lost it’s burst 2 then there wouldn’t be any incentive to fly it over the P51 once people max out their XP.

{Edit}

Just on your fomula Dan what has a rating of 41+ All I can think of is a fully decked out He219 Owl?

[ January 19, 2005, 10:31 PM: Message edited by: Kiith ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi guys.

To address Kilths point that the P47 should have 2 burst’s as an incentive.

I going to pretend you didn’t say that…..are we not suggesting a more scientific method

To address the 20mmFF well the later versions were firing the minegeshoss round which is what only 92 grams

The basic facts were as tested and evaluated, is that the hispano was twice as effective as the 20mmFF and the 151 was half as powerfull again as the 20mmFF this would give a rating of 4 for the 20mmFF 6 for the 151/20 and 8 for the hispano. The system I outlined, would I grant underrate by 1 the 20mmFF and overate the 151/20 by 1

I feel Dans system underrates cannon and overates the MG.

Given the new information of extra damage well that’s good.

Given that Dan says I was thinking that with the additional number of bullets being fired (from 8 guns), there would be a greater chance of hits, thus it might be worth more than its low weight might indicate. This is way I increased it to a 2 instead of a 1.

Ok it’s a fair comment but I would point out that that (giving both guns their max values) rate of fire is 8x1200 for the .3 is 9600 and 8x850 for the .5 is 6800.

So why does the 8 gun spit1/hurri 1 not benefit since they fire nearly a third more rounds the the P47 ?

I think you will agree that’s a bit of a flaw, why should the P47 be given the golden BB’s ? if rate of fire is the factor plus weight of fire then you are back to where I started all this ;) on Dans system 8 x .5 guns x 2 points =16 and 4 x 20mm x 4 points is also 16 which gives them the same destructive power. I am inclined to think absolutely not.

If we look at rates of fire for a second

Spit/hurri 160 rds/sec (8x.3)

P47 113 rds sec (8x.5)

Mossie 30 rds sec (4x20) +(80x.3)

109K 10 rds sec (single 30mm)

Me262 43 rds sec (4x30mm)

I include the 262 because with its closely grouped 4x30mm in the nose its rightly regarded as top of the heap in terms of destructive firepower. Though its not in DiF

The actual hit rate was for the average pilot was 2% but im going to be way generous and assume you are right in his Six at close range and say lets have 10% of what you fire hitting the target

This means

8 gun spit 16 x .3 rounds hitting,

P47 11.3 x .5 rounds hitting

4 gun mossie 3x20mm hitting + 8x.3

1 gun 109K 1x30mm round hits

4 gun 262 4.3x30mm

Now lets look at destructive power

For fighters we know that 1x30mm round is fatal and 3-5x20mm is fatal we also know 3 secs of .3 is fatal lets say 48 rounds is enough an lets be generous and allow just 34x.5 rounds to be fatal

The 262 would be over kill destroying the wreckage since the first hit was enough, the 109K was just enough, the 4x 20mm just make the bottom range for a kill

The MG armed fighters will still need another 2 seconds and the 20mm might need another second.

Bear in mind this is the ETO.

I think there is justification to increase the 8 gun fighters to a 2 burst rating (more chance of a hit) given this statement that Dan says I was thinking that with the additional number of bullets being fired (from 8 guns), there would be a greater chance of hits, thus it might be worth more than its low weight might indicate. This is way I increased it to a 2 instead of a 1. since both the spit1 and hurri 1 both have 8 guns and a third greater rate of fire. i think if you apply a rule it should be across the board and even handed

perhaps also consider in addition, increase damage rating for cannon armed planes , +1 for two or more 20mm or 1 or 2 x 30mm and +2 for 4x30mm or more

How would this look well the spit1 v 109E would give a spit more chance to hit with a burst rating of 2+0 rating and the 109E would have a 1+1 rating, more chance of damage This would think reflect the historic battle of Britain choices of more chance to hit (Brits) to more damaging hits (germans)

The 109G would be a 1+0 rating it was under gunned, which is why they hung 2 more on it the 109G6/r6 would then become 2+1, the P47 would remain at 2+0 the 109K would also be 1+1 the mossie would be 2+1

However I think the simple solution is to drop the P47 to 1 burst since evidence would suggest you had the same chance to hit no matter what guns or how many you had, what varied was the destructive power and 4x20mm is way above 8x.5cal, about twice better i reckon

Thoughts on that lot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by Tomb:

I think there is justification to increase the 8 gun fighters to a 2 burst rating (more chance of a hit) given this statement that Dan says I was thinking that with the additional number of bullets being fired (from 8 guns), there would be a greater chance of hits, thus it might be worth more than its low weight might indicate. This is way I increased it to a 2 instead of a 1. since both the spit1 and hurri 1 both have 8 guns and a third greater rate of fire. i think if you apply a rule it should be across the board and even handed

perhaps also consider in addition, increase damage rating for cannon armed planes , +1 for two or more 20mm or 1 or 2 x 30mm and +2 for 4x30mm or more .

I was thinking along similar lines last night regarding the damage bonus, as I was unaware until yesterday that there was the ability to add damage to hits in DiF.

Honestly I think such a system has a lot of merit but if the game is stable and near complete in it’s current state I wouldn’t change the system to delay the release.

If it could be added as a mod or trialed post realise I'd be very interested in seeing it but at the moment my desire to the get game is overiding everything ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kiith,

you dont think Dans going to change his P47 burst rating ,cos of me do you. I think not. It was a discusion point and it wont stop me buying, playing or enjoying the game.

i got a look a brief look at the board game version the other day, i must say its far more comprehensive than the computer version as revealed so far, but lacks the pilot role play.

out of interest the Me 262 had a 2+1 Burst/damage rating.

The main draw online is the greater number of opponants and creating a pilot and seeing how far you can take him. for the board game i'll will be lucky to find 3 or 4 opponants (assuming i can actually get my own copy)

i look forward to playing alongside you or shooting your butt off, either way ;)

regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello All,

I like the idea of differentiating machine guns and cannons in how they affect game stats. In short, having many machine guns will give a higher burst rating, and having many cannons will give a damage bonus.

The system kind of works that way now, but only for 30mm cannons. The idea is to start the divergence sooner, at the 20mm level.

However, making such a big design and coding change when the game coding is done and almost ready for release is dangerous (also, Martin has threatened to kill, cut into pieces, then burn us all if we make such a last second sweeping change.)

So, here's the plan: I'll adjust the numbers for the P-47D for the first release. In the mean time, I'll revise all the aircraft stats for a post-release revision that will take into account machine guns vs. cannons for all aircraft.

Tomb, as the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.” I was wondering if you would do some research to find the different types of 20mm cannons used by the various aircraft? If you can, I will send you a list of aircraft. My sources do not list the types of cannons used, and your numbers referenced different types of cannons.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...