homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation IL-2: FB, AEP, PF Need Ju87G tips please

Can someone give me some tips in order to improve my performance with the Ju87G anti-tank version. Specially tips to hit the tanks nad how to survive the AAA and enemy fighters.
How the heck Ruddel killed all those tanks and survived the war??

Simple - often soviet tanks outran their AAA support and fighters weren't the omnipresent danger they are in-game.

Seems that this plane is one of the forgotten one

Really would like to help you, man. However after years of joy knowing this variant to be part of my fav WWII sim I still can't hit sh*t with those guns.

Steep approaches work best with me though you're way too fast past the sweet spot of your guns so you're moving mud in perfect symmetry all around your target.

Don't know if vertical convergence can be set with that plane at all.

Sorry,
muffinstomp

Maybe, if you set the gun convergence for a very short distance it would help. Since, you do not have to allow for gravity affects on bullets. That is if you are going close to vertical.

Convergence setting also appears to set elevation. Set for 1000m convergence, approach at 20-30deg or so, preferably with the target moving perpendicular to your direction. Aim for the rear of the tank, or a little further forward if it's moving. Takes practice but it can be done.

As Bimmer mentioned, practice is key. Especially when the -87G only gives you six or seven shots.



He was a lucky man ... Don't forget he was credited with the destruction of a Russian battleship in addition to his scores of tank kills.

I forget the exact figure, but he was shot down approximately 20 times and was wounded several times. So his success came at a high cost. Plus he was in a target rich environment and able to run multiple sorties each day with comparatively little interference from enemy fighters.

Figure into that also the fact the 37mm cannon in our sim seems to have significantly less punch than it had in real life. There was quite a debate on that very topic on these forums some time ago, complete with YouTube videos of actual Ju-87G 37mm cannon firings.

Rudel was also an air-to-air ace, with ... Umm ... 12(?) kills. He finished the war flying Fw-190's once there were no more Stukas left to fly.

Thanks for the info Sandman.
I am going to have to read up on Rudel some more.

IIRC, the Rudel mission where he sinks a battleship is one of the single missions in IL-2.
I believe it was the Marat he sank.


Wheels

Ditto. Setting a longer convergence will have your guns lobbing shells at a higher angle to meet that setting. That's because convergence means having the shells meet on your gunsight's centre at the predetermined distance, which means angle inwards (for wing mounted guns) to take care of the horizontal axis and angle upwards to account for gravity compensation. Now, too low convergence and your shells will drop fast, too big of it and they will be making too much of an arc and making aiming difficult for you in shorter ranges (ie, they fly above the target).

My advice would be to experiment in QMB with different values until you find one that gives you a flat trajectory with a minimal arc. I don't know what the sweet spot is for the Ju87G as the goal here is to find a flat trajectory. Since we can't adjust gun angle directly, we have to keep trying different convergence values until we hit the right one and that's dependent on the weapon's muzzle velocity.

However, i do know a good range for MG151/20s so we might be able to extrapolate something. As an example load up a Fw190A6 or later, default guns are all the same type from A6 and later, MG151/20s, so it will be easier to see the effect. Take that 190 for a ride against some easy targets in QMB and compare how the shells fly for a convergence of 350m and 700m. You'll see that using a 700m convergence you get a much flatter trajectory for the gun.

Now, i guess the MG151 has a higher muzzle velocity than the 37mms used on the Ju87G, so it should need less of an upwards angle to maintain a flat trajectory. Meaning, the 37mm will probably need a convergence bigger than 700m to get a sufficient upwards angle and give you a flat trajectory, as Bimmer suggests with his 1000m setting.

The trouble you might face when using a long convergence is that in the 87 the guns are placed about mid-wing. This means that even when you have the flat, easy-to-aim trajectory you will have trouble hitting things at close ranges due to the horizontal gun angles needed to meet that convergence, ie if you shoot from less than 500m your shells will probably bracket the target instead of hit it. That's not a problem with the 190 because it has 2 of it's cannons right beside the nose (in the wing roots) for close range shots and you can use all 4 of them to make long deflection shots, but in the 87 it will probably mean you'll have to shoot from a greater distance. It's all a trade-off as you can see

I believe his autobiography "Stuka Pilot" is still in circulation. You'd be amazed to know that he nearly washed out of pilot school early on.

Some of his exploits on the front were unbelievable at times. The mere fact that he survived the war in that capacity leaves one in awe.

There were apparently some issues with his ideologies that he took to the grave, however, someone else can comment on that if they choose as it is controversial. Nevertheless, his exploits as a Luftwaffe pilot were truly remarkable.

He flew on in 1945 after losing a leg.... A die-hard nazi if there ever was one.

See what I mean.

I wasn't going to mention specifics as I remember a thread that became heated over someone touting exploits over ideology. None of this is mentioned in his book except that he appeared to be fairly dedicated to Hitler.

Maybe it was over in EAW forum some years ago. All I remember, is that a few became very offended..

Thanks again.


Wheels

I know he had been wounded quite severely on several occasions, but I never knew he had lost a leg and continued to fly. Interesting ... Thanks.

Hehehe thanks for the tips, "good" to hear that he was shoot down on some occasions, make my paradrops less embarrasing

In one case he crash landed far behind enemy lines. Took him 2 or 3 days to make it back. Though in the game it's likely you won't be able to duplicate that feat. (sometimes you might get lucky if you're close enough to the front lines..)

Don't worry about your paradrops.
The factory seems to be able churn out new Ju's as fast as you need them.


Wheels

Yeah I remember that!! I believe it was in EAW.

Bear with me as i've had a few drinks too many. It's a long post incoming that will hopefully make sense, while i try to discuss the difference between political beliefs and military actions and also how each branch of service seems to be aligned to a different part of the political spectrum.

Well, polical beliefs aside Rudel was an outstanding pilot, as was that other guy who lost both legs, only he was in the RAF (Douglas Bader). It's no use getting angry over things like that as long as we can refrain from comparing apples to oranges. Was Rudel a nazi? Well, he most probably was. I think he went to Argentina after the war's end, which was a popular destination for people close to the regime. Did this make him a worse or better pilot or did it enhance or detract from the value of his flying achievements? Not really, it had no real bearing on his flying proficiency.

I mean, if you compare names among the host of luftwaffe aces, you'll find a lot that not only weren't nazis, but they were also critical towards the regime and risked a lot by making people unhappy with their observations, Galland for example and the so called "fighter pilots revolt". Galland lost his "inspector of the fighter arm" title and one of the other high ranking pilots who criticised Goering's decisions at that meeting was threatened with charges of high treason and a summary execution. So why did they do it?

It's quite simple, a real carreer man in the military is a creature of conviction and duty despite personal political beliefs, you can't survive in such a line of work otherwise and that duty is primarily towards the civilian population of your country and not the men in charge above your own rank. You are supposed to be the guardian of civilian life and activities within your borders, nothing more and nothing less. The rest is political powermongering resulting in wrong or expansionist application of this force, but the main goal of any army is (or more accurately, should be) the safeguarding of the civilian population.

Heck, i only served a year as a conscript airfield guard/flak gunner and i realized that much, conscripts who had problems with the whole thing all the time were much different from those of us who understood a bit of this responsibility and it all being part of a "necessary evil". Some people only thought about how their service obligations interfered with their civilian life, some of us thought that it is true but we also learned how to protect what is important in our civilian life, if there comes a need for it. That goes hand in hand with our millenia old tradition of the citizen-soldier in a democracy (being Greek and all that jazz), which is a notion held by most European nation-states as well since the age of enlightment, maybe even earlier.

Airforce being airforce (btw that was my branch too), the entire branch tradition is much different from other branches, ie they care most about the work getting done and not so much about protocol. Maybe it's because of the feeling of freedom that flying bestows upon a human being and since all high ranking officers are pilots this is applied to the rest of the service, i don't really know. My feeling is that this was the case in the luftwaffe as well. I don't believe anyone in their right mind would consider people like Galland or Rall a willing crutch for the regime (even if they were used as propaganda tools despire their personal beliefs), it's just that when you're thrown into a ballroom at gunpoint and everything you hold dear at stake, boy you're gonna dance...who started it all is irrelevant even if it was your own higher ups that brought this upon you, you just dance and hope for the best of outcomes for the sake of what's important to you as a citizen.

Some of these guys upheld those silly notions of racial superiority. The rest were simply trying to prevent a bad outcome for their people after the first shot was fired. I mean, if your homeland is bombed 24/7 and people are dying on the ground day in and day out, you're going to get straped into that 109 and go up against those bombers, despite what your political beliefs are

Generally speaking, the ground branch of any armed force is much more susceptible to being used in political machinations of a freedom reducing nature, aka coups. That is mainly because of two reasons. First of all, the airforce might win wars and the navy might secure supplies, but it's the foot soldier that holds ground, mans checkpoints and enforces curfews.
Second, protocol and chain of command considerations are much more strict in the ground branches as a part of the original training and indoctrination, since they arguably have the ugliest part of the job and they need to be effective to survive and win. Effective means more robot-like than human like, admit it or not, so this tends to create people with less of a doubt of executing whatever order might come.

So, when a guy who's got some strange ideas is in charge or in a position to get himself in charge, it's primarily portions of the ground forces that end up supporting him because of this rigid chain of command structure.
Interestingly enough, it's the airforce and naval forces that usually exhibit the opposite behaviour, being divergent from the main authority centres in times of crisis.

As an example from my country's history, the 1967-1974 military junta came to power through the ground forces. The air force had nothing to do with it and the navy was even further off, some ships even mutinied in protest.
Greek navy crews had also mutinied during WWII. When the country was occupied we had airmen and navy under british command in N. Africa , plus some ground forces that ended up taking part in the invasion of Italy (the so called Rimini brigade is notable). The air force was two fighter squadrons (hurricanes/spits) and a light bomber squad (martin baltimores). Navy was mostly destroyers and corvettes in the meditteranean theater (a couple of corvettes were also part of the D-Day invasion fleet),plus a well known cruiser that was initially commisioned as a battleship in 1912. That one started serving during the 1912-1913 Balkan wars with ammunition smuggled by a UK resident Greek merchant (there was some sort of embargo going on) and went on to escort allied convoys in WWII between Egypt and the Indian ocean, it's now a museum moored in Pireaus. Also, there was a lot of merchant marine running the U-boat gauntlet in the atlantic as part of allied convoys (now that i think of it we did quite good for a starving occupied country of about 6 million population back in the day, lol).
Anyway, that WWII mutiny deal was mainly a precursor to the 1945-1949 civil war that followed the war, between communist militias/insurgents (who nevetheless played a vital part in the war effort against the Axis through sabotage of supply lines and tying up substantial German reserves that would be otherwise used in North Africa) and the government army. Some pro-communist sailors mutinied while the ships were moored in Egyptian docks and the rest of the crews were forced to board them ship-to-ship and fight on the decks pirate-style to bring them in check.

In any case, it shows once again that air force and navy are usually less susceptible to political schemes of centralized control, even going as far as to sometimes openly challenge the state leadership in favor of more liberal political ideas (in the case of open mutiny) or simply exhibiting behavior that could be classified as insubordinate by the ruling regime at a given time (in the case of Galland's "fighter pilot revolt"). I guess that was the deal with many of the luftwaffe higher ranking officers and aces, they were simply forced between the hammer and the anvil. On one hand they had a totalitarian regime they didn't like and on the other they were in a war that devastated their homeland. In such cases, most people think of preserving their country's existence first and foremost even if that means working with the devil temporarily. You can't fix your country if there is no country left, can you now?

In my eyes people who held Rudel's beliefs were a minority in the Luftwaffe, compared to the hundreds of officers who simply fought in the hope that their actions could secure a graceful defeat and a fair peace treaty for their country, instead of the partitioning of it into two separate states as it happened in the end

I'll let you get back on topic now. I figure you will excuse my off-topic-on-a-tangent ramblings since

a) i made an on-topic post earlier on and
b) i'm drunk as a sponge

No harm here.. most reasonable folks understand the difference..