B-29 in br 7.0

[Dogman Dorman]

Can someone tell me why Gaijin put b-29 in br 7.0 it is easily caught by any plane and cant out climb a paper plane plus has zero deFenses that make it hard to kill. all it is is a big slow easy target For the JETS in its br plus starts at a low altitude making it an even easier target.

[BTGbullseye]

It's there because it's better than a B-17 in real life, because Gaijin refuses to allow defensive gunners to fire at targets beyond 180m anymore, (players complained en masse about it when it was 800m, and refused to learn how to engage with that) and because Gaijin wants fighters to be flying tanks instead. (bombers used to be somewhat realistically modeled, but in the same anti-gunner complaints were the anti-bomber durability complaints)

TL;DR, blame the players for complaining about realism for this.

[Beast of War]

Well they do start to track at < 800 m and open fire at <500 m enemies but require real money being spent in their crew training to do so. I think that is useless for defending slow flying huge size target bombers too.

But something i found to be amusing and sometimes effective is man the gunning positions themselves and open fire at ~ 2 km, especially if they are under you climbing up to you. The game follows physics so shooting down has much greater range then shooting up.

Them encountering a stream of ( preferably very visible tracer ) bullets fired from 2 km may discourage them ( haven't seen that yet ) but also often damages them when you did correct in advance shooting, leading the target. I did see several brake off the attack because their jet was damaged or burning. Rarely enough to down them and get a kill though....

At some angles you do have a lot of .50 cal guns firing at an enemy....sometimes more guns then they can fire at you. The uneven part is the huge size of the bomber...it is very hard to miss while they are small and fast and easy to miss.....so you need to get them climbing up when they are still relatively slow and not evading.

AI gunners only worked satisfactory for me in very fast early bombers like the A 20 in a high speed power dive. Enemies then try to follow you and are surprisingly killed many times by even the pitiful British 7.7 mm singe mg turrets. The US A 20 version with it's double .50 is AI champion in killing tailing enemies, it got hundreds over them 2000 hrs i played the game :-))

But in a slow huge size B29 facing jets....don't count on AI gunners to save you. Only YOU can opening up at ~ 2 km firing down. Or find another bomber and stay close to it AND man the gun positions yourself. You then have a 50 % chance the enemy kills the other bomber and when the enemy gets too close faces double the AI defensive fire. But then again...another allied bomber reaching a base first robs you of a score,and you will almost certainly no reach another base.....getting destroyed without a score is even more frustrating then just being destroyed 100 % chance.

The absurd thing is the (almost) defenseless early jet bombers that are not all that fast either have a MUCH better survivability in RB then the B29 does in my hands. I guess they climb faster and reach safer higher altitude where few seem to look for enemies. The thing with that if you managed to land those bombers intact to rearm them you will 100 % certain not survive long after lifting off again, never being able to reach safe altitude again.

[55]

bombers in general are a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[French Cat]

Make AI gunners and durability good, then it'll be justified.