"Best Squad"

This must be the minimum effort necessary for "Best Squad" !

Bombing

Newbies and noobs

Newbies are new players who are inexperienced and haven't 'automated' their actions yet (akin to a driving student who's already overburdened while slowly driving without listening to music or having a conversation at the same time).

I help them once in a while, with tips about instructor/speedcap, rope a dope, boom and zoom, combat flaps, victory conditions, battle rating management, optimum angle of climbing, choice of ammunition, gun convergence and so on.

Noobs on the other hand aren't the same as newbies at all; noobs aren't new, but resistant to improving. Some noobs have level 60-100. They tailchase an Il-28 just as stupidly as they tailchased B-25s. They seek head-on fights against superior fighters, fly their bomber straight while under attack without using manual gunnery, spawn in wrong spawnpoints, park their tank behind your tank when you predictably need to withdraw backwards soon, bomb minibases instead of tanks, fight in the streets against superior red tanks instead of waiting behind a building for a flank shot on an advancing red tank, drop lines of nine 500 lbs bombs obliquely to a convoy of AI tanks, dive into an overwhelmingly red furball to join the turnfighting there in a BnZ fighter, spawn PBYs in air domination, join ground strike missions with torpedo loaded in their bomber and so on.

Noobs are shit. Their only justifications for their existence are that they are fodder and decoys for good players and some noobs help fund the devs by buying stuff with real money.

Thus I hope you will help newbies.

Meanwhile, punish the noobs.

Craziest air battle in a while

So I was flying the USMC F4U and meant to intercept bombers at about 4,000 m when I saw the most crazy thing of the day (till then):

A red Blenheim climbed up to engage a blue B-25, it even helicoptered (slowed down to a stall while still pointing its nose up)! It did indeed survive this, and kept bugging that B-25 for a whole minute as if it had no gunners.

Later that same match I saw a certain message for the very first time after thousands of matches:

"A player of your team landed on an enemy airfield and surrendered" in big white letters at the bottom of the screen.

WTF???

Oh, well, and the match was notable for another weird thing: All incoming bombers seemed to be Wellingtons, and all of them seemed to chip away a bit more of my engine, hitting no other part of my Corsair, ever.

And last but not least: Heavy AAA kept shooting at my fighter at 5,000+ metres altitude even while it got bombed by actual bombers at low level. It felt like focus fire by heavy AAA whenever I was remotely in range of it.

So much crazy stuff, I got so very much confused and distracted that I needlessly accepted two head-on fights with a Spitfire IIb (both 0-0 with minor damages due to evasive manoeuvres after my initial burst).

Dive toss bombing

So you spawned in a bomber (or PBJ) in an arcade ground forces battle and see no chance surviving the many red interceptors that spawned as well? I get ya, particularly the Wellington is of very little use in such a situation.

There is one tactic that may still allow you to kill red tanks in that sortie, though: Dive toss bombing.

a depiction of a real world toss bombing manoeuvre

You retract the flaps if they're lowered (which they often are for no good reason) to reduce drag. Pitch down the nose to pick up speed. Once you're fast and close enough (based on experience), you pull up again into a not too steep climb. (Side benefit: The aim of fighters will be somewhat degraded by this manoeuvre.)

There will be the bomb impact circle symbol on the ground well ahead of you. Much farther ahead than if you were flying level. Maybe it's obstructed by your plane, in which case you should switch to "F4" view.

Now preferably aim at a group of red tanks that are bunched up or depicted in a (vertical) line. Quickly drop your bombs on these.

Next, press "J" to leave you bomber ASAP and resume playing tank before your tank gets roasted. Your bomber is of no use any more.

The bombs may very well be in the air for so long (doing their whining sound) that they'll detonate instantly on impact. This means stationary tanks won't escape by driving away, which partially compensates for the inaccuracy of the hurried tossing.

It's advantageous to be a skilled War Thunder plane pilot, even in War Thunder ground forces!

(Toss bombing was originally meant to allow subsonic aircraft to deploy powerful nuclear free-fall bombs without damaging themselves too much. The tossing increases the distance and the time till explosion.

Toss bombing was also used during the Falklands War for a low risk attack of Sea Harriers against the well-defended Port Stanley airfield. It can also be used to accurately attack a target with a guided bomb, as shown in the illustration above, if only the guidance method doesn't depend on the bombing plane itself having a line of sight to the target during the bomb's terminal approach to the target.)

Template change

I changed the template to another, simple one. The old template stubbornly refused to display the blog archive and labels on the right, left or just about anywhere.

Inconsistent bomb effects in AB ground forces

I got used to ignore the ineffective 100 kg bombs of Il-2 and 50 or 60 kg bombs of Ju 88A-4 and D3A, but this is new:

Four 500 lbs bombs of Havoc were dropped on one StuG, super accurate.

This explosion was survived. One metre ahead at most.

The scissors manoeuvre

I can't recommend this video enough:

The scissors are one of the few things in WT that I didn't figure out myself how to do right.

Essentially, this allows a good Fw 190A-4 player to beat a median Spitfire IX player at low altitude even if the latter begins the fight with equal energy 600 m on the Würger's tail. Well, at least more often than not.

It was also one of the reasons for why the Fw 190A-2 demolished the Spitfire Vs back in 1941/1942 so badly (the 190 rolls much better than Spits both in reality and in WT, and this is key in the scissors).

(this illustration doesn't quite show the beginning right; the attacker starts behind the defender and approx. at same altitude and speed)

I rarely used a similar tactic in such situations in AB air; lower landing gear, landing flaps, power to 0%, move erratically - all hoping that the attacker overshoots me before killing (and without ramming) me.
Oh boy, they raped me when I tried this in the 1vs1 duel tournament. So I did attempt the scissors instead in such situations, and the result wasn't much less terrible against players rated better than 250th place.

What I hadn't understood back then was the real key to success with scissors: You want them to overshoot, but you don't want to drop more in energy than they do. This means in WT AB practice that you need to climb -unnoticed by your opponent at first- more than him. This way you store more of your equal energy in potential energy, less in kinetic energy - which means he's faster and flies past you (with the option of crashing into you).
So don't use this if he's slower and above early on, or if his plane rolls better.
When you do the scissors manoeuvre do roll at about the same time as him, but always try to climb a bit more. With really, really well-rolling planes you may minimise your silhouette when he gets a snap shot at you (by rolling such that he doesn't have your wings as hit area except in front of your fuselage).