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[Slikk]

Ok I have totally hijacked the thread sorry for that.  I started another one about the Damage to ships using guns mod. If anyone wants to continue talking about 50 cals in this thread, I promise I won’t derail it again.

https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,17647.0.html

[tooslow]

By the way, in several of the books I have on WWII warships it clearly shows that Destroyers don't have any real armor.  The gun turrets are either light metal or very thin shrapnel shields and probably would not even stop a 12.7mm round.   There were several instances where strafing aircraft disabled Destroyers with just their guns.   Almost any part of a Destroyer could be penetrated by a 12.7mm round.  This is why they were called "tin cans".   Cruisers on the other hand usually had one to six inches of armor and the armored areas would be very resistant to even 20mm rounds.  Not every part of even a Battleship was covered by armor so there are always weak spots that would be damaged by 12.7mm rounds, but these were usually less essential areas.   

So it would be realistic to have 12.7mm rounds hurt most ships from Destroyers on down.  Submarines would be much harder to hurt with their pressure hull which acted like armor for light rounds.   

[Schwieger]

Submarines were very vulnerable to machine gun fire - a lot more so than destroyers.

[Wildchild]

Submarines were very vulnerable to machine gun fire - a lot more so than destroyers.

And just one round in your sub and your dead. Ask the pearl harbor mini sub  ???

[Pursuivant]

I always assumed that the hulls of even cargo ships were fairly thick, so even if they were made of unhardened steel, they'd still have a fair chance of turning a bullet, especially one fired from a relatively long distance. Likewise, I assumed that the pressure hulls of submarines had to be strong to resist crushing at depth, so they would also be resistant to bullets. How wrong I was!

Tooslow is absolutely correct that destroyers (and similar small warships, like corvettes and frigates) don't have any armor. The "armor" on the hull of a Fletcher class destroyer was about 3/4" (1.9 cm) which is equal to the hull thickness of an ordinary cargo ship. As a point of reference, the nominal hull thickness on the Titanic was about 3/4" of an inch (1.875 cm) which seems to have been common for cargo ships for much of the 20th century. Modern supertankers have hulls that are 1" thick (2.54 cm), as do large, modern cruise ships. Metal thickness of superstructures was and is considerably less, ranging from 1/4" to 1/2".

While subs might have very tough pressure hulls, the outer hull and ballast tanks of WW2 era submarines were made of ordinary hull steel which might be only 2-4 mm thick (ca. 1/10" to 1/4").

Given that the rated armor penetration for an M2 0.50 API round is 0.83" (21 mm) at 500 meters, and 0.43" (11 mm) at 1,200 meters and that rated penetration for 7.62 mm AP rounds is 0.28" (7 mm) at 300 meters, and 0.2" (5 mm) at 500 m (Source: http://www.inetres.com/gp/military/infantry/index.html#mg), it's obvious that aircraft guns should be able to damage an unarmored ship.

The problems are that ships are big and even a .50 caliber bullet is going to make a relatively small hole. Also, water is extremely good at stopping bullets, so MG bullets aren't going to be able to penetrate the ship's hull below the waterline, meaning it's very unlikely that you'll be able to sink a large ship with MG fire. Finally, some ships are double-hulled, and in any case, the vital parts of a ship are also made of heavy steel and are often behind one or more bulkheads within the ship. That means the chances of a bullet both penetrating the ship's hull and then penetrating something like a ship's boiler are minimal. So, as a simplification to the game, it's not unreasonable to say that you can't sink a ship using just machine guns.

Realistically, though, you should be able to damage a ship, or at least parts of a ship, using even a .30 caliber/7.62 mm MG. Likewise, it should be possible to damage or destroy smaller vessels, like PT boats, landing craft and submarines using just MG fire.

[Murray]

A standard .50cal sniper rifle today can fire a basic 50cal round down range, hit a 1/2" hardened steel plate at 1000 yards, penetrate, and still have enough puch to pass through ANOTHER 1/2" hardened steel plate 3 feet behind that. There was a show with that bald guy showing the accuracy of a new .50cal sniper rifle, but it was using the standard .50cal round you can fire from the Barret and the M2. The closer you get from 100 yards, the more punch it will have.

I think currently IL2's damage model is ridiculous. You get more realistic results if you turn "realistic gunnery" off than if you turn it on. You can read countless accounts of planes with light armaments firing short bursts and achieving great results. Naturally it depends on the target, but things like Fiats and Macchis against Hurricanes in the BOB, or spit1s vs 109Es, etc. You get these anecdotal results with realistic gunnery off, but as soon as you turn it on all your rounds do are disappear into the target. I tend to mix up my offline campaign settings to try different things for different campaigns. Probably an even mix of realistic/easy gunnery. Sometimes "easy gunnery" is just too easy, but other times it's much more like WW2 that I've read about from pilots' accounts.

I have no doubt planes strafed ships in WW2 and blew them up with .50cals. There's footage of it, so what's the debate? Surely not carriers and the like, but for cruisers and destroyers I don't doubt it.

[Pursuivant]

I think currently IL2's damage model is ridiculous. You get more realistic results if you turn "realistic gunnery" off than if you turn it on.

Except for the fact that turning "realistic gunnery" off does more than increasing gun strength, it also affect things like recoil, bullet drop and bullet travel time to target. Basically, if you turn off realistic gunnery, you turn IL2 into an arcade game.

I have no doubt planes strafed ships in WW2 and blew them up with .50cals. There's footage of it, so what's the debate? Surely not carriers and the like, but for cruisers and destroyers I don't doubt it.

I think that you'll be hard-pressed to find any accounts of any aircraft sinking a cruiser with just MG or light cannon fire. Those ships were armored, had double hulls and were designed to survive hits by bombs and artillery shells.

As I've pointed out, it's quite likely that airplanes armed with just MG or cannon could damage unarmored ships, and, if they got quite lucky they might even be able to disable them, but that sort of damage would only be due to a "critical hit" which damaged a vital part of a vital system. After all, if you only needed 0.50 caliber machine guns to take out a cargo ship, then why did planes sent on anti-shipping strikes carry rockets, bombs and heavy cannons?

As for exploding ships using just MG or cannons, I think that you've watched too many movies. Alternately, you've seen highly edited gun camera footage selected to show the most exciting bits of the action. When a target blows up spectacularly due to MG or cannon fire, it's not the gunfire that causes the explosion and fire, it's the high explosives or fuel carried by the vehicle that does it. The bullets just set the blast off. There's plenty of footage showing planes shooting at ships and boats where the the target doesn't sink and probably wasn't seriously damaged, despite the impressive water fountains from all the bullets.

[andqui]

I think currently IL2's damage model is ridiculous. You get more realistic results if you turn "realistic gunnery" off than if you turn it on.

Except for the fact that turning "realistic gunnery" off does more than increasing gun strength, it also affect things like recoil, bullet drop and bullet travel time to target. Basically, if you turn off realistic gunnery, you turn IL2 into an arcade game.

I have no doubt planes strafed ships in WW2 and blew them up with .50cals. There's footage of it, so what's the debate? Surely not carriers and the like, but for cruisers and destroyers I don't doubt it.

I think that you'll be hard-pressed to find any accounts of any aircraft sinking a cruiser with just MG or light cannon fire. Those ships were armored, had double hulls and were designed to survive hits by bombs and artillery shells.

As I've pointed out, it's quite likely that airplanes armed with just MG or cannon could damage unarmored ships, and, if they got quite lucky they might even be able to disable them, but that sort of damage would only be due to a "critical hit" which damaged a vital part of a vital system. After all, if you only needed 0.50 caliber machine guns to take out a cargo ship, then why did planes sent on anti-shipping strikes carry rockets, bombs and heavy cannons?

As for exploding ships using just MG or cannons, I think that you've watched too many movies. Alternately, you've seen highly edited gun camera footage selected to show the most exciting bits of the action. When a target blows up spectacularly due to MG or cannon fire, it's not the gunfire that causes the explosion and fire, it's the high explosives or fuel carried by the vehicle that does it. The bullets just set the blast off. There's plenty of footage showing planes shooting at ships and boats where the the target doesn't sink and probably wasn't seriously damaged, despite the impressive water fountains from all the bullets.

Completely agree. Like I said before, it's pretty much impossible to sink anything larger than a barge/gunboat solely with heavy machine-gun fire. Keep in mind, the key word is "sink." .50 bullets are simply not going to have much effect on a ship's buoyancy. That said, strafing ships and submarines with anything on hand was usually standard practice, not to sink them, but to wound/kill gunners on the deck, possibly hit steam lines and sensitive equipment, kill people in exposed places like the bridge, create chaos which makes the ship harder to manage, and *possibly* get a secondary explosion. In April 1945, the Yamato was strafed in the attacks on her- not to sink her, but to suppress AA fire and make the ship a very unfun place to be. And that's the biggest battleship in the world. Strafing was SOP in U-boat attacks in the Atlantic, to take out or drive away AA gunners from their weapons, and hit piping and vents that would leave the vessel unable to dive. Anytime strafing led directly to the loss of a ship, such as in the instance of the Japanese minesweeper W-10 (http://www.combinedfleet.com/W-10_t.htm) was through a large secondary explosion as bullets set off ammunition and possibly fuel, in effect creating a bomb in the ship. So the strafing ship argument shouldn't be limited to US .50's, but to any aircraft weapon with exploding or API ammo.

[Pursuivant]

In April 1945, the Yamato was strafed in the attacks on her- not to sink her, but to suppress AA fire and make the ship a very unfun place to be.

Good information. Your description of the Yamato attack is a perfect illustration of the tactical value of strafing a capital ship, even though it seems like futile gesture.

Another example would be the actions of the planes of the USS St. Lo, Gambier Bay and Kalinin Bay during the Battle of Samar Straits. When the U.S. CVE group Taffy 3 was surprised by a Japanese task force at close range, they launched all their planes with whatever armament was available. The U.S. planes attacked the Japanese forces with whatever they had, with some planes making "dry runs" at targets in order to distract and suppress the AA gunners.

[tooslow]

I tried the Coral Sea map in QMB and tried strafing the Destroyers in it and didn’t seem to do any damage to them even though I could see a very large number of strikes.   I was using a B-25 with the 12 fixed 50 calibers, but the Destroyers showed no damage.

Then I made the changes to the ship.ini that Silkk gave in his post on how to adjust the Gun Durability … the difference was dramatic.  On the first burst the Destroyer started showing black smoke and after a couple of runs it looked like it was on fire amidships.   This seemed realistic to me.    However, I had unlimited ammo turned on for this experiment and kept making runs at the Destroyers (there are two of them), but even as I did this the fires and smoke went away.  After that I could not seem to hurt them with gunfire again.

While I enjoyed my first success using Silkks change it did not seem to have any lasting affect, but this could be another problem with the Ship damage model.   

Because I liked to at least see the initial effect of my gun attack I will leave Silkk’s changes in my ship.ini for now.

Slikk, thanks for change … I like it … TS

[Murray]

Except for the fact that turning "realistic gunnery" off does more than increasing gun strength, it also affect things like recoil, bullet drop and bullet travel time to target. Basically, if you turn off realistic gunnery, you turn IL2 into an arcade game.

Perhaps to some extent, but you still have bullet travel time, you still pull lead. It doesn't turn them into lasers. What it does is take the "bullets do no damage except holes in a wing" and turn it into "bullets do damage and rip the wing off with enough hits" -- the end result is far more comparable to what I've read about and seen footage of. It's not perfect, but again the end result is far more realistic. (more often than not)

I think that you'll be hard-pressed to find any accounts of any aircraft sinking a cruiser with just MG or light cannon fire. Those ships were armored, had double hulls and were designed to survive hits by bombs and artillery shells.

As I've pointed out, it's quite likely that airplanes armed with just MG or cannon could damage unarmored ships, and, if they got quite lucky they might even be able to disable them, but that sort of damage would only be due to a "critical hit" which damaged a vital part of a vital system. After all, if you only needed 0.50 caliber machine guns to take out a cargo ship, then why did planes sent on anti-shipping strikes carry rockets, bombs and heavy cannons?

As for exploding ships using just MG or cannons, I think that you've watched too many movies. Alternately, you've seen highly edited gun camera footage selected to show the most exciting bits of the action. When a target blows up spectacularly due to MG or cannon fire, it's not the gunfire that causes the explosion and fire, it's the high explosives or fuel carried by the vehicle that does it. The bullets just set the blast off. There's plenty of footage showing planes shooting at ships and boats where the the target doesn't sink and probably wasn't seriously damaged, despite the impressive water fountains from all the bullets.

Those ships were designed and built only to protect from other ships. Many had glaring armor issues, like the sides were armored, but at long ranges often "lobbed" shells came down through the top deck with was not armored (or, not as much, depending on the type of ship) allowing shells to puncture and detonate inside the hull. Take HMS Hood for example. Pride of the battleship fleet, and taken out with a single shell dropping in through the thin top armor.

WW2 ships were woefully ill designed to take into account aircraft, as they were throwbacks from the WW1 era. Sure, the design improved, but it was still an outdated idea. When aircraft became a threat all they did was add tons of AA guns all over, bristling like porcupines, but the general designs didn't change all that much. The technology involved, the guns equipped, all improved, but at heart it was still a WW1 Dreadnaught.

That is why airpower made massive surface fleets obsolete. That is why carriers became the new battleships. Although, even the carriers which were designed to use and deploy aircraft, still were not so well designed to protect against them. Bombs often punched through the thin upper deck, meant to support weight rather than protect against bombs, and exploded inside the hangars, or other vital areas. The best defense really was just to stop the planes before they could attack.

About the "sink" comment: You're not punching holes in and the water sinks the ship. You're knocking enough parts around and blowing pipes apart and such, so that high pressure boilers explode. Or are setting of powder magazines. You wouldn't think .50cals have enough punch to reall harm a massive iron locomotive, right? Well, they blew the boilers on thousands of them when making strafing runs on them. This does not mean the rounds exploded, or that ammo or gas was set on fire then exploded, it means that the vital balance of pressure and heat was disrupted either but punching holes in the cooling pipes or blowing out release valves or something. Whatever. The end result is you blew the non-explosive locomotive engine sky high. The same goes for most shots of WW2 ships being strafed that I see. You see the boiler blowing, and a shock wave from the center of the ship.

So while armor does block bullets, there are very complex systems in ships where hits to any number of parts (inside that system) will lead to a failure of the ship as a whole.

My thoughts on how it is in IL2:

I think the problem is that the airplanes model interior bits like control rods, radiators, flaps, wheels, and all those "number of parts" but that the ships you see on the water are just a single box that soaks up hits with no vital components to kill.

I think it's just a fundamental game issue, personally.

[andqui]

I agree with you on the way that Il2 handles ship damage models- just a hit point system, where two torpedoes are required to take out a ship each time, with no variation or anything like that, is an extremely simplified damage model. However, with a locomotive the boiler is around half the "hittable" area of the machine. Furthermore, it is less protected than on a ship (I'm saying less protected- ships like destroyers did not have much in the way of armor, but there were several decks and metal fixes inbetween an attacking aircraft and the propulsion machinery). Most locomotives had nothing at all in terms of armor, whereas a ship like a destroyer at least payed lip service to it, so I don't think the analogy quite holds. I think it extremely doubtful that anything larger than a destroyer would be in danger of suffering a boiler explosion from MG fire- I can't think of a single example of a "sinking through strafing" that occurred to a reason other than an ammunition or fuel explosion. I completely agree with you about not punching holes in the ship to sink it, and that sinkings are from secondary explosions- but you can't reliably expect those to happen- otherwise we would hear about a lot more Japanese destroyers sunk by strafing alone than the one or two that I can think of.

You should not be able to fly around with four aircraft and reliably sink destroyers and bigger ships with strafing alone- you might cause a lot of carnage up top, take out radar and gun systems, and suppress AA fire, but unless there is an ammunition or fuel related secondary explosion, the ship isn't sinking. And yes, carriers did become the new battleships, but that was because their aircraft had bombs, torpedoes, and AP rockets, and not because the aircraft could reliably take down ships just by strafing.

In the end, I agree it comes down to a fundamental simplification in the damage model, which prevents any "critical hits" or different types of damage, such as we can see in aircraft.