Proper Use of CBU 87 in A10C

[goofey]

Can someone advise as to how to use this weapon? When I use it against a group of BMPs or something, I see the discharge but nothing happens on the ground. Must be some settings I am getting wrong or something. What kind of targets are these good against anyway?

I realize that the 97s are better but the 87s must have some purpose.

Thanks.

Michael

[fikmeinshizer]

soft targets like convoys will take more damage from the 87. 97s are more for anti-armour

you will need to set the height of function (HOF) and drop the bomb from above that with the right fuzing to get the bomb to operate. generally speaking the higher it functions the bigger the impact area. this also spreads the damage further so individual targets will take less damage. lower heights mean more concentrated bomblets meaning smaller area but higher damage

[goofey]

OK thanks.

[goofey]

I don't know. I have tried all the different settings on those 87s, such as height, nose/tail, spin rate, etc. And I can't make a dent in a tightly packed line of gas trucks.

Again, I know there are better (and presumably more expensive and rarer) weapons. But if you have a column of moving trucks, you need something cheap to do some damage in a single whack. You wouldn't want to waste 97s on that. You wouldn't use 82s or something because the radius is probably not good enough. The GAU is good, but often you get too close to SAMS and such when going in to strafe.

Seems like some sort of inexpensive cluster would be the way to go. Yet the 87 does not seem to fulfill this role. At least not with the settings I have tried.

[fikmeinshizer]

I would try rippling a few of them. Each bomb with a smaller, more dense footprint then spread the damage by dropping more. means you need to fly your approach properly to fly along the line of trucks but you might get some more luck with that.

The problem is less the bombs and more the DCS damage model. The 87 IRL causes a fair amount of damage but it's the secondary effects such as incendiary and anti-personnel that causes more damage. this sadly isn't modelled in DCS