Machine gun damage to wing structure

[Spectre]

To give some scale, here is a 7.92mm (Labeled 8mm Mauser in the picture) in comparison to a British .303 round. As we all are very aware, the Hurricane and Spitfire that we fly are armed with EIGHT .303 browning machine guns and do significantly less damage in terms of shredding aircraft apart. Yes the 7.92mm is slightly larger and the MG17 fires faster, but by sheer data the eight .303's can spit out more lead and thus more damage than a pair of 109's MG17's and that is modeled much better in Cliffs than in BoX.

bullet8Mauser_1.jpg

Furthermore, just because a round penetrates armour doesn't mean its effective fire. Over penetration is typically a bad thing, and with aircraft its no exception. Over penetrating means you're causing less damage since you're just poking holes into the wing, especially when you're firing a mix of Tracer and Ball with nothing in-between.

The point of Onebads test is to show that by firing a minimal amount of rounds, the MG's alone cause the wings to separate quite severely. His point isn't dismissing the physics of losing a wing due to stress after suffering MG fire, since that is much more realistic and unfortunately the damage model doesn't use this feature much since it just drops your wing instantly as Onebad has shown.

[Kai Lae]

As far as I know, devs have never actually said exactly how the DM works. So at the least I hope that some clarity comes out.

[Frederf]

The wing is able to take the weight of the fuselage x 10 (10G turn) in rough engineering terms. To have the damage cause the wing to come off in 1G flight means that at least 90% of the structural strength of the wing has been removed.

[Jaydog]

I don't think the DM will be improved with BoX, but maybe that is something they will address with Bodenplatte before its release

[Dickie]

Maybe but I'd be very surprised.