IL-2 Series: Ground Attack Page 7

By SimHQ on July 10, 2007 in _air10, hide

Egress

Once you’ve fired or released munitions, continue to gently pull up over the target until the center of the site is about 35 degrees above the horizon and increase throttle to maximum. Don’t slam the throttle to the stops! The additional torque can make for a snap roll in some aircraft, and one is too close to Object One for that sort of silliness — smoothly accelerate the throttle in while counting to three in a normal cadence.

Roll a quarter of the way left or right and take a gentle climbing turn away from the target, and when you’re about 500-750 meters (1500-2200 feet) away from the target reverse your turn direction and climb a little more aggressively.

Do not pull into a vertical or near vertical climb!

Speed is Life at this point. Every gun on the ground is swiveling as fast as it can in your direction, so the more distance we can place between us and those guns in the shortest amount of time is critical for survival. Likewise, if an enemy fighter has sneaked in on us, he’ll have a much more difficult time attacking if we’ve conserved airspeed rather than hanging nearly stationary in the “shoot me” posture at a thousand meters altitude.

Conclusion

For those who want to see a little (26.5 MB) instructional video on Ground Attack, right click and save this .wmv file (it’s in .zip format to prevent streaming) that I made a long, long time ago:

http://www.darts-page.com/movies/Ground_Attack.zip

If you have a copy of the merged IL-2: FB / AEP / Pacific Fighters series (I’m running v4.08 from the 1946 compilation DVD), here are three .ntrk files zipped together (ground_attack_guns / rocket / level bombing) that you can save to your /records folder to view:

http://www.darts-page.com/files/Ground_attack_ntrk_files.zip

The tracks are “as flown:” you’ll see the views I used to make the attacks. I suggest you view them from different angles and using the external cameras available.

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