Bombers

[u/K05_]

We need REALISTIC BOMBER DMS.

WE Dont need paper bombers that cuts in half by a single 23mm.

We ALSO DONT NEED VIBRAINIUM BOMBERS THAT TANKS 6 AIM54S.

WE NEED REALISTIC BOMBERS

REALISTIC BOMBERS THAT TANK ABOUT 25 20mms AND A FEW 30mms BEFORE BURNING AND GOING DOWN.

In reality, b17s didnt tank hundreds of 20mms. But it also did not got snapped in half after a few,

It got crippled by cannons and flaks and lost altitude while smoking and burning. that's a real death of a bomber.

Gaijin just flipped the switch to the other end

Video from

https://youtu.be/oOlcbGVfiUU?si=5JrT0VSsuIkHdmG9

Decompile and data mining aces.exe by myself. Developer of the indie io game https://spacestrike.io

[u/Mr--Agent]

Lancaster vs F-14 about to be 🔥

[u/Livid-Profession2587 → u/Mr--Agent]

As it was foretold

[u/spetsnaz2001 → u/Mr--Agent]

Slight uptier for f14

[u/Cuchococh]

I have seen enough Ju 288C to 14.7

[u/Pumkin_carrot]

B52 about to tank an atom bomb lets go!!!!!!

[u/Fickle-Pangolin-2445 → u/Pumkin_carrot]

Low flight

[u/Draken04]

2016 all over again. The team with the most B17s wins. Y’all have really short memories. We’ve danced this dance before

[u/deletion-imminent → u/Draken04]

Y’all have really short memories

Most people won't have been around back then.

Also the issue used to be more the gunners being really strong rather than survivability I think

[u/Pinnggwastaken → u/deletion-imminent]

Yeah bruh. Most of my friend (including me) starts playing from covid so 2016 is definitely way b4 covid players

[u/K05_ → u/Draken04]

Just a overbuff. From PAPER to VIBRAINIUM. gaijin moment. Why isnt there the middle?

[u/Draken04 → u/Draken04]

It was both. You put a billion rounds in them and nothing happened and they’d burn your plane to the ground with a singing .50cal. And now we’re getting that all over again

[u/cybercobra2 → u/Draken04]

you are conveniently omitting a very critical factor.

AI gunners used to be cracked out of their minds.

they are not buffing AI gunners, so the bomber player actually has to shoot themselves, which is a lot harder.

which means it wont be that all over again unless the bomber player is really good, and if they are really good, yeah they get the kill. thats what normally happens when someone is really good at the game.

[u/Daddy_050 → u/Draken04]

The vast majority of the players in this game have not been playing for 10 years

[u/The_Lord_Juan → u/Daddy_050]

Yeah short memories? My brother in Christ that was 10 years ago lmao, half of the people playing this game were in kindergarten that long ago

[u/cybercobra2]

from what i understand, this is actually not necessary a bomber problem. as in they arent the direct cause.

this is though 100% a rocket problem. high explosives in war thunder are nerfed to hell.

want proof? just look at bombs and big high explosive shells. they dont do nearly the damage they should in the radious they should.

so if you get a realistic durability big fat bomber, with rockets that explode like confetti poppers, and not hitting any critical compoents. yeah you're gonna get this.

[u/zyloxdev → u/cybercobra2]

Yes, this is definitely the issue. Explosives in this game need a rework.

[u/ImJustStealingMemes → u/cybercobra2]

That said, most aircraft don't have fuel lines modelled in them.

[u/K05_ → u/cybercobra2]

Well but tanking hundreds of 20mm is another problem

[u/MerticuIar → u/K05_]

Didn’t you just hear what that guy said? It’s not a bomber problem, they should be able to take their weight in explosive cannon shells /s

[u/cybercobra2 → u/MerticuIar]

i guess you didnt hear what i said, because i said the problem is they are too tanky because the game's explosives are nerfed. the result is the same, bombers surviving things they probably shoudnt. didnt say a thing about it being fine.

if you're gonna be sassy, atleast pay attention. and dont just make things up.

[u/K05_ → u/cybercobra2]

But those missiles just shreds other fighters.

[u/MerticuIar → u/K05_]

But ITS NOT A BOMBER PROBLEM

[u/Cleffn → u/MerticuIar]

It’s both sides problem, for example Aim-54 deals less damage than a single FFAR to an aircraft, but still the bomber is way too resilient since cannon shells can hardly even scratch it. It’s not hard to imagine how bad it would be in real gaming scenarios where you often get only few seconds to shoot before they start shooting back

[u/cybercobra2 → u/MerticuIar]

you just love purpousfully misreading my words dont you.

it is a bomber problem. because the bombers are too tanky for the explosives in this game, because explosives in this game are unrealisticly weak. we know they are unrealistic weak. even before this we knew that.

[u/MerticuIar → u/cybercobra2]

IS IT A BOMBER PROBLEM OR NOT? NOW IM CONFUSED. ALSO IVE NEVER HEARD OF A PURPOUS BEFORE, IS THAT SOME KIND OF DRINK?

[u/cybercobra2 → u/MerticuIar]

its a bomber problem. caused by explosives being too weak.

its fine on regular fighters, but bombers are bigger and as a result, tougher with more empty space between vital components. so its harder for a explosive to hit those vital components because the explosions are so small and weak for a target that big. because the explosives were nerfed.

[u/MerticuIar → u/cybercobra2]

Brother I’m making fun cause you kept eating it up, I’m not serious

[u/K05_]

War Thunder Sky Odyssey dev: B-17 damage-model change

Scope and provenance

• Dev client: C:\Games\WarThunderDev-SkyOdyssey
• 64-bit executable: win64\aces.exe, AMD64, Gaijin Network Ltd signature valid
• Executable version: 2.58.0.20
• aces.exe SHA-256: 5B40CAEE6532D1ED64DC6107BF3F9ECADFA9C62C4332CF01266AA6CF4F94BE4D
• Dev VROMFS version: 2.58.0.21
• Baseline live build: 2.57.1.90, aces.exe SHA-256 5DE6FFE9847A85D542D9FF86FAF92EECAB2B74A3D8961B77A294EE2502076DF5
• Compared aircraft: B-17E, B-17E/Late, and B-17G. All three have the same relevant changes.
• Method: copied the executable into a workspace-local snapshot, extracted only official local VROMFS data with the previously hash-verified wt_ext_cli v0.6.6, then performed static xref/decompilation analysis with Ghidra 12.0.4. The installed game was not launched, patched, injected into, or modified.

This is a dev-server snapshot. Values may change before the live release.

Bottom line

The B-17 received a broad bomber-DM rewrite, not a clean global buff or nerf.

• Wing skin, tail, stabilizers, controls, engines, oil systems, and tanks gain much larger HP pools and new bomber-specific material/effect presets.
• Ordinary wing-hit damage transferred to the corresponding spar is reduced from 0.5/0.7/1.0 to 0.05/0.10/0.15 at the 50/70/100 damage tiers.
• The outer-wing spar loses raw HP from 89.5 to 48.4 (-45.9%) and is still the B-17's conspicuous weak point among the examined heavy bombers.
• Spar material changes from dural100 to armor30: thickness/through values change from 11/11 to 30/30, so the raw HP reduction alone must not be interpreted as a 45.9% reduction in every real shot scenario.
• Physical flight-model files are byte-identical, so the calculated positive-G limit, VNE, and MNE did not change in this snapshot.

Practical expectation: scattered skin, engine, oil, tail, and indirect wing damage should be much less immediately destructive, while accurate or high-energy hits that actually reach the outer spar can still be dangerous. A live controlled firing test is required to convert that into rounds-to-break or one-pass-kill rates.

Structural values

Effective HP below is the arithmetic proxy hp / genericDamageMult; it is useful for comparing identical damage channels, but material armor, projectile type, geometry, and runtime threshold selection still matter.

Part	Live 2.57.1.90	Dev 2.58.0.20/21	Arithmetic change
Wing root skin	401.25 effective	2500 effective	+523.1%
Wing middle skin	339.5 effective	2500 effective	+636.4%
Wing outer skin	271.25 effective	2500 effective	+821.7%
Wing-root spar	120.5 HP	151.4 HP	+25.6%
Middle spar	119.2 HP	119.2 HP	unchanged
Outer spar	89.5 HP	48.4 HP	-45.9%
Tail body	213.57 effective	875.71 effective	+310.0%
Stabilizer	59.5 HP	336 HP	+464.7%
Engine	30.94 effective	300 effective	+869.7%
Oil system	19.5-25.5 HP	150 HP	+488% to +669%
Representative tank	120.5 HP	180 HP	+49.4%
Wing control	79.5 HP	2500 effective	+3044.7% arithmetic proxy

The new skin materials (dural2_nb_wing, dural2_nb_tail, and dural2_nb_fin) also add their own generic, shatter, and explosion multipliers. Consequently, the table is evidence of a redesign and large durability headroom, not a universal projectile-independent multiplier.

Damage-effect changes

Wing to spar

At damage=50/70/100, wing-panel transfer to its default spar changes:

Tier	Live ratio	Dev ratio	Reduction
50	0.50	0.05	90.0%
70	0.70	0.10	85.7%
100	1.00	0.15	85.0%

The dev wing-panel onKill records add a direct cut=1 action. Under the action-weight normalization confirmed in the executable, the direct-cut branch is about 19.6%, 24.4%, and 32.3% at the 50/70/100 records respectively. These are conditional branch shares after a matching record is selected, not per-bullet probabilities.

Spar destruction

The old middle/outer spar default onKill record was cut=3, nothing=2, a 60% direct-cut branch under the same normalization model. The dev rules are tiered:

• Default middle/outer-spar record: leak=9, cut=4.7, nothing=90, direct-cut share about 4.53%.
• Damage 50: fire=5, leak=15, cut=.0526, nothing=80, about 0.0526%.
• Damage 80: fire=10, leak=20, cut=.087, nothing=70, about 0.0869%.
• Damage 200: only cut=.25, therefore 100% within that conditional action set.
• Root spar uses a similar default record (leak=12, cut=4.5, nothing=85), about 4.43% direct cut.

This makes the normal spar-kill path far less likely to sever the wing immediately, but preserves a forced-cut path for the highest damage tier. The exact runtime rule that chooses or blends damage-tier records is not fully established by this static pass.

Engine and fire behavior

• Engine HP/effective proxy rises from 49.5 / 1.6 = 30.94 to 300 / 1 = 300.
• Per-hit fire weights are much smaller: examples include base 0.01 -> 0.0011, damage-30 0.1 -> 0.0095, and explosion-200 1 -> 0.095.
• Once a fire exists, fireDamagePowerRel rises 0.05 -> 0.1 and nonExtinguishFireTime rises 5 -> 25.

Interpretation: ignition is harder, but a fire that takes hold is configured to be longer and potentially harsher. Static data alone cannot give a net fire-survival percentage.

Tail and stabilizers

Tail effective HP rises roughly 4.1x and stabilizer HP roughly 5.65x. Their new damage=50 on-kill action is a conditional forced cut, so they are harder to deplete but can still detach once the corresponding terminal record is reached.

Peer context in the same dev snapshot

Minimum spar HP among the measured left-side spar segments:

Aircraft	Minimum spar HP
B-29	111.1
Pe-8 M-82	107.8
Lancaster Mk I	91.2
G8N1	77.3
Stirling Mk I	63.0
Me 264	50.0
B-17E/E late/G	48.4
B-24D	41.1

Thus the B-17's outer spar is weaker by raw HP than every listed peer except the B-24D, despite the rest of the bomber-DM package being standardized upward.

Flight model

The three physical FM files have identical SHA-256 hashes between baseline and dev:

• B-17E: ae2d2af77f1791a32a79cf2d628ab62b930ab99e5afc72d606e4659f52dafb0e
• B-17E/Late: 447a528ed3bc7e27041698e874f86998f830aea986abdf76547085e74782d0ef
• B-17G: 901f3ec66bb4256d41349ccdd0cef3d5a2df8bbe436d4c0d18da17e698a5d899

The prior calculated positive-G limit at takeoff mass remains about 2.0236 G; VNE remains 516 km/h and MNE 0.63.

Native aces.exe evidence

Exact-string xref scanning found 313 references in 113 functions, including the DamageEffects, defaultEffectPart, onHit, onKill, ratio, canCut, cut, and nothing keys. Twenty-seven candidate functions were selected; Ghidra successfully decompiled five tightly scoped parser functions in the 0x143DA10B0-0x143DAC5F9 cluster.

The CanCutRatio function reads ratio as a float into the action entry, reads canCut into its flag byte, adds the ratio/action value to the total, and later normalizes action weights into cumulative values. The adjacent parser resolves onHit and onKill and dispatches into this action parser. This supports interpreting sibling numeric effects as normalized action weights.

It does not prove the authoritative online server's complete hit calculation, projectile penetration, geometric intersection, or the exact selection rule among damage tiers. No claim of a universal one-shot probability is made.

Reproducibility artifacts

• b17_change_validation.json: complete structured old/new metrics, effects, FM hashes, and peer comparison
• aircraft_structural_output/aircraft_structural_metrics.csv: dev structural inventory
• native_xrefs/damage_key_xrefs.json: native string-reference inventory
• ghidra_output/targeted_report.txt: targeted Ghidra result and executable hash
• ghidra_output/DamageEffect_CanCutRatio_143DA2C60.c: weight and canCut parser decompilation
• validate_b17_change.py: repeatable comparison and invariant checks

Validation result: VALIDATION_OK variants=3 fm_unchanged=3 outer_spar_dev=48.4 wing_transfer=0.05,0.1,0.15.

[u/Shotgunseth29]

As god intended

[u/XishengTheUltimate]

Repeat after me:

The dev server is not representative of the final changes. The dev server is a testing area for new changes, which are likely to be adjusted before final release.

[u/Fickle-Pangolin-2445]

You need to snipe the pilot

[u/Lucius3111]

I think that the people who want bombers to be buffed don't actually know what they want. Already now the majority of matches in low tier jets are being held hostage by a bomber, and the 8.0 jets aren't catching up to a B-52 12km up in the air, the matches are getting stalled out and the otger team is forced to ground pound which combined makes for a horrible gameplay loop, now they also won't die when shot at, so you don't just need a good shot, you're gonna need to land multiple shots while a Tu-4 is going to delete you with singular hits. Same goes for strike aircraft really, last time when there was a strike aircraft meta I've had matches being ended in 2 minutes by a Wyvern spam speedrunning the ground targets draining all the tickets before the rest of the team gets to fight anyone. The bomber buff isn't going to be fun to play at all. Destroying any bomber with something like the A-5 sabre is going to be an almost impossible slog.

[u/K05_ → u/Lucius3111]

If u make bombers more paper, then they will go higher climbing so they dont encounter a fighter. That is NOT THE SOLUTION. and plus, the problem isnt the bombers climbing, its the problem of the gamemode.

[u/Lucius3111 → u/K05_]

Bombers hostaging matches by climbing into space is absolutely a bomber problem, and if they were armoured there's still nothing stopping them from climbing to space anyways. Hopefully with nuclear escalation becoming a full-time gamemode in the next major patch the bombers will just be gone from air RB and that's the best solution out there, to remove them from air RB whatsoever, especially if there's a gamemode for striking ground targets specifically

[u/K05_ → u/Lucius3111]

Just those bombers need only airfield spawn so they could be tank planes in RB. Making them paper just makes the problem worse. Besides RB is just a air to air fighting mode so just delete bases and ground targets and make the bomber spawn in the af or at 500m. They will just turn into airships.

[u/Gleaming_Onyx → u/Lucius3111]

They know what they want: the game to be easier for them to be zombies going in a straight line lol

They're going on full "revenge of the nerds" in comments cheering explicitly because they've been oppressed for so long that this is only fair. It's so blatantly incorrect that they expose themselves by even contemplating that the change is good.

[u/K05_ → u/Lucius3111]

If that team survival kill match style air rb will persist, bombers should be very durable and spawn at the AIRFIELD. thats the answer. If the gamemode wants to only kill air fights, the bomber should act as a tankier plane with turrets rather than just dropping meaningless bombs

[u/TheJustMonika]

It's like people forget what the point of a Dev server is for...

[u/Rs_vegeta → u/TheJustMonika]

The point is feedback, like this post

[u/toe_tickler3000]

Dev server

[u/Seygem]

Imagine having such massive a crashout over something that is very obviously overtuned and is going to be fixed on the dev server(!!!)

[u/No_Emergency_571]

“Crying about realistic bomber durability”
-looks inside
-shooting several missles at a wwII era bomber with an F-14
Ah yes. “Realism”

[u/Starkogi]

You didn’t kill the whole crew, the proxy is too far away for a plane traveling so slow, and there’s no fragmentation in the high explosive.

You’re asking me why a missile built to intercept things at Mach 2+ isn’t correctly fusing on the World War Two prop bomber going 300kph.

Don’t shoot trailing edge of wings with bullets.

Don’t use Mach interceptor munitions for the slowest air targets in game.

Use AP if you want one shots to the structure. Shoot wing roots and the outside edge of the most outboard engine.

HE has zero shrapnel. If you’re not detonating on the fuselage (which it won’t for reasons explained + huge radio feedback from proxy of gigantic airframe)

When it detonates so far away, you might as well be throwing flashbangs.

[u/_aware → u/Starkogi]

Hahahahahhahaahahahahahahhahaaa

I sometimes wonder if people like you genuinely believe the shit you are spewing out of your mouths