Hey! Sry for the offtopic, but...
Great video! I absolutely loved the first part... the guy's just going along, and way out there in the back, you see this comet coming out of contrails... you just know the thing is going to end badly! I also felt tempted to claim these were your lucky shots that evening, but then I remember that memorable night when I flew with you.............. you wiped the floor with my ass in so many ways that I'm not even gonna dare say anything! 
Yeah I did have one that evening where I approached LaGG-3 from his 10 o clock high(he was chasing someone) and just 1 round hit - in the head. The approaching velocity must have been closer to 900kmph and I shot at maybe 200m. >user username STAT command confirmed that it was just the 1 hit, heh. Unfortunately it didnt look any good on the ntrk(with a lag spike and the burst missing the target entirely) so I left it out.
I've talked with people that have their convergence all the way up to 500 yards in IL2, so I don't think it's just ROF. Heck, the people I fly with probably have thousands of hours in IL2. I have a feeling our skies are very much different from those of WW2. Oh, an interesting thing was the Night Witches... they were apparently hard to hit, since their plane's top speed was slower than the 109's stall speed They apparently also used amazing tactics to come in and bomb undetected!
IMHO 500m is way too much. The high velocities make "dodging" bullets much, much easier than with the biplanes, as required leads are exponentially(?) larger. With fuselage guns one sure can hit a steady target 500m but it isnt practical. The solution is just too easy to deny/make too difficult that far. Just waste of ammo and SA in my opinion, and if shooter was closing and target was still unaware, also a surprise and a sure kill wasted.
I'm still amazed by the records I keep reading. I just finished Pappy Boyington's memoir, and I've read a few others whose names escape me now, who claimed to have fired on enemies within less than a hundred feet (~30m), all the way down to seeing the exhaust and oil marks on the plane... How crazy is that? At least they got'em that way, that's for sure!
I think most of the very best aces used to shoot very close to make sure they hit and the target went down... Whats very impressive in them is not maybe how crazy they were in doing that but how they managed to set up those shots in the first place - find their targets and close in that far for the easy 6 o clock solution, without the same being done to them!
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Topic: Interest in forum vs. forum Pacific War? (Read 6290 times)