Willkommen Fliegers! I am your designated instructor for today and resident Focke Wulf Ace of the SG2, Flieger Wargtass. Today you will learn about bombing with the Fw 190 of your choice. It is very important that you learn how to do this, since taking a bomb on your Fw 190 is a tremendous waste of performance if you cannot hit your designated target. I will teach you everything I know of this subject, including choosing the right plane, the right bomb and of course, diving towards your target. That said, I encourage you to experiment on your own to find out how you can best perform a dive bombing with your FW-190. This is just the simplest and most precise way, best used as a serial bombing tactic with a group of 3-4 comrades in similar craft. Well, on to the lesson then! 1 Choosing your aircraft "What is there to chose?" you might say. On first glance it might seem that every Fw 190 is the same (excluding the long-nosed D-models with their more powerful Jumo-engines). However, there are slight differences that may very well turn your Fw 190 into a burden for your comrades. The Fw 190's are spread over two tiers (III or IV) and depending on the overall team setup, the choice becomes even more complicated as well. But now for the planes themselves. Let's have a look, shall we? 1.1 The two no no's! At first glance it might seem like the Fw 190 A-5 and A-8 are the best choices for Fw 190's all around. While four Mg 151's sounds like a good deal (and it is) they both have a serious detriment that disqualifies them from these lessons; they carry no bombs, only a pair of 210mm Nebelwerfer rockets. While rockets might seem like a preferable choice over bombs, they are inheritently inaccurate and serve best as ship killers since it's easier to hit a large boat than it is a tank (one salvo will take down a Light Cruiser, mind you). Another consideration will be discussed in 2 Choosing your load. 1.2 The best choice! That leaves us with the Fw 190 A-5/U2 and F-8. These can carry bombs and with two less Mg151 it means a lesser load, which means increased flight performance. So which one to pick? It all depends on the rest of your team. If any parts of your active Staffel are flying Stukas, choosing the A-5/U2 will serve better, decreasing your tier dramatically. If your Staffel is flying Fw's exclusively, the F-8 is a much more enjoyable choice (not to mention, it has an SG2 skin to go with it ) with even higher performance and more challenging adversaries. 1.3 The rest? While the Fw 190 D-9, D-12 and D-13 excel as fighters, they also have the capacity for carrying bombs. However, such loads cripple the delicate performance of the plane and as such should be left for the more robust F-8 models. 2 Choosing your load Here we come to a crucial point in the performance of your craft; parasite drag. Each of the loads that you can choose have a to parasite drag value. This value doesn't have much impact of your speed as such. Each load also decrees your speed and any possible parasite consequence is already calculated in the to max speed value on your load. However, any time you turn your craft, the parasite drag eats at your speed even more. As such, choosing the right bomb load doesn't just effect your performance as a bomber, but also as fighter once the load has been dropped, since the pylons for the bombs still effect your performance. As such you want to balance the bomb efficiency with the parasite drag to make the most out of your fighter as a bomber. 2.1 The Good In all ways possible, your best choice is one 250 kg bomb. Out of all loads it is the most parasite efficient and only the 210mm Nebelwerfer rockets have less of an impact on overall speed (but 0,01 more parasite drag). With a hit or near hit you will almost always take out a tank with one of these bombs (and that is, after all, what we are here to learn about). Even after the bomb has been dropped, you are as efficient as a fighter as you can be. 2.2 The Bad With 500kg and 1000kg bombs you are going to have a bad day. The bombs themselves will out-perform 250kg at any turn, but the parasite drag alone will turn you into a parasite and a drag for your team once the bomb has been dropped. If you get into a fight after the drop, you might as well crash your plane, because you will be falling into the enemy's sight at every turn and in the end you will stall and fall to the ground from the energy leech. 2.3 The Ugly Let's face it, with 50kg bombs you can barely even kill a medium or heavy tank in Arcade Battles. These are training bombs at the most and as such the worst parasite of them all. Don't even dare to take a few together with your 250kg bomb, you will regret it! 3 Choosing your target Your job is to strafe light ground targets with your cannons and at the most drop a bomb on a tank or tight cluster of tanks. But first and foremost you are a fighter! Once an enemy turns up in the sky, drop your load and climb for all you are worth. Your target is not ships or strategic installations (static targets), which are the sole responsibility of Stukas and proper bombers. Never forget that! 4 The actual thing you wanted to learn: How do I bomb? 4.1 Find your vector, make friends with it! That is, your vector sight, or as it is called in WT, your virtual cockpit. Here you can see your headings and your inclinations from a first person view of the aircraft itself. You have probably seen this when you have tapped your V-key frantically to get out of your bomb sight and back to third person view. It looks like this: On the top you can see your headings and on the sides of your crosshair you see your inclination in degrees. The crosshair is where your guns are pointed while the tiny circle is where your plane is actually heading. Therefore, to keep your plane on a level altitude you need to align your circle with 0 degrees, not your crosshair. 4.2 The approach Once you have picked your target you need to approach it from the right height. 750m is the optimal height I find, though anything within the ranges of 500-1000m will suffice for this technique. 4.3 When to dive Simple as pie. When your target comes in just above the lower edge of your screen like below, push your nose down and align your crosshair with the target. 4.4 When to drop Keeping your target just a tiny bit below your crosshair, you should drop your bomb as close to 300m away from the target as you dare (that is when you are 300m away from the target, the bomb should land head on). Once this is done, pull your nose up and push the turbo, you don't want to be caught in the blast! 4.5 Hit confirmation Yup, as close as I could get on the first try! When dropping from lower or higher altitudes than 750m, the spread gets worse but usually gets lighter targets anyway. For a sure kill on a medium or heavy however, always drop from around 750m! And that is the simplest way to bomb tiny targets with your Fw 190's. In case of moving targets (which they almost always are) remember to adjust your crosshair towards the direction they are moving (as to how much, I dunno, trust your guts). That's it for this time, Fliegers, now take to the skies with your new earned knowledge and give them hell! //Wargtass
Maybe you aren't a good fighter once your heavy bombs are dropped but with a bit of crew skills and some craftiness even the crappiest of dive bombers can be used to deliver crushing dive attacks along side being a capable fighter (if you don't include the Pe-3) Though so far I am pretty spoiled in choosing Russians to learn on with the BB-1 being a super capable fighter even with a massive bomb load. That being said, the rest of this is great advice. I do have one other comment though, why the VD instead of 3rd person? In third person you can't quite so much in front of you but you can also see your craft from spacial perspective and I think it helps keep you from hitting your team and enemy in the close brushes of dog fights. This is me being curious because no one can quantify a better reason then forward vision for the Virtual Display.
The VD is for the bombing only. It provides you with a simple solution to the "when do I dive?" since you only need to align the target with the bottom of your screen. Once the bombs are away, return to your preferred view. As for the fighter capabilities of dive bombers, the Focke-Wulf isn't a true dive bomber though. The primary function of a FW is as an interceptor and fighter. I Realistic and Simulator combat every little bit of performance counts, especially in the FW which is suffering from major bugs in its flight model. Add on that the fact that you don't need anything bigger than 250kg to take out any ground target, there is absolutely no real need to take a bigger load. It will just slow you down and leech on your energy once the dogfight begins.
