P-51 Guide to Aerial Combat - DCS World

foreign welcome back everybody and in today's video we're going to be looking at doing some air-to-air Gunnery with the P-51 Mustang both against bombers and other Fighters now the P-51 was an excellent fighter combining excellent maneuverability with a really good Firepower packing three Browning M2 50 caliber machine guns in each wing and while they may not have the punch of a 20 millimeter cannon like the Spitfire or the fw190 packs they do make up for it by being able to carry a lot of ammunition a good variety of its and rate of fire now before we get too far into the controls and actually Gunnery we need to look at how the P51 Mustang is set up because as you can see here we have a central Gun Sight but our machine guns are located out on the wings so we need to talk about convergence for a minute so the P51 in DCS is set up just like it would be back in 1944 following uh U.S Army Air corps Publications such as this one that's on the screen as you can see here we got a couple of different charts to look at both a side view showing trajectories of all six machine guns and how they should be set up because uh the ground crew could set up not only the vertical angle but also the horizontal angle of each machine gun so that they could meet this document this the specification that our Army Air corps specified so the side view is a good look at the trajectories of all the bullets and you can see that they have a nice spread as they fly through the air out to 2000 feet more importantly is the top down view which is the second one down now as you can see here they start out wide and then they converge at a certain distance and then they start to diverge again after that making an x uh a pattern like the letter x of note here is in between 1000 and 1200 feet this is where the bullets from the left wing uh crisscross with the bullets from the right wing and they have a very concentrated fire right there in front of the aircraft and it's almost right at 1100 feet that is very important in DCS you are not able to set the conversions yourself this is what we're limited to right here publication at Eagle Dynamics followed and this is what we have so having this is a very good piece of information because this plays a big part in setting up our k-14 gun sight in the cockpit which we'll get to here momentarily uh the other two views down towards the bottom half of the page show the different bullet drops and how they look at the different ranges and how tight they are and how they spread apart and you can see they they spread apart when they first fired and they cause and they cluster in Tighter and Tighter and then they start spreading apart again where they diverge and then you can see that in a 60 degree 2G banking turn how the bullets would fly as well all right so back in the cockpit here and there we have the k-14 guns uh gyro stabilized Gun Site right here in front of us uh major items that we need to look at is the combiner glass which is what we look through we have this Arch right here this marked off with a bunch of numbers this is how we set in our Target's wingspan off to the left you got this dial this is the range dial This Is How We Tell The k-14 Gun Sight to compute for a specific range right above that is this masking lever and I'll demonstrate what that does once we turn the gunsight on all right other controls is you have the throttle handles settled kind of like a motorcycle throttle so as you twist this it pulls on this cable which pulls up on uh the range dial it'll actually increase or decrease the range now it's just by simply twisting the throttle grip other controls you have are just underneath the glare shield on the left hand side and you got a couple of switches here this switch right here in the middle will actually turn the gun sight on and then you have the mode select switch you have fixed fix swiss gyro and Gyro stabilized and then this bottom one will adjust the brightness of the Optics on the gunsight itself all right so we have that turned on and we're in the fixed mode and we look through the glass and we see nothing how do we turn it on now well now we got to look down on our Armament panel and find the guns and Guns camera switch if we toggle it down to camera only we get the site but we won't get any machine guns if you want both the sight and guns you have to turn the toggle switch to the up position so now we have the Gun Sight plus the guns all right so this is the fix site and this is very useful for air-to-ground work and I will cover that in a future video that'll be the next follow-on P51 video I do but today's focus is going to be on air-to-air gunnery now that masking lever I told you about on the left hand side will obscure a lot of this a lot of the Optics except for the bore sight cross that more sight cross is the center line of your aircraft and it does not move it's part of the fixed site all right next mode of operation is fixed and Gyro which will combine both the gyro stabilized air-to-air site and the fixed ground attack site uh one of the things I like to do personally is I will run and then fixed in gyro and flip the masking lever down so I have both the gyro stabilized site plus my aircraft's bore sight line so that way I have both so I can uh it helps me calculate uh deflection shots which is a which is Handy or we can flip it to gyro only and now we have gyro stabilize the optic as you can see here we have a pepper in the middle surrounded by a ring of six diamonds now those diamonds are important for helping calculate for help and frame and a Target aircraft into the site so we can uh shoot and hopefully shoot them down now that is controlled exclusively by two things the arrange knob on the left side of the Gun Sight and the target wingspan adjustments now if you remember that chart from earlier our guns converge between one thousand feet and 1200 feet and ideally they crisscross right at 1100 so what we want to do is adjust the range to 1100 I have that right there and you notice our diamond pattern expanded outward and got bigger that's entirely normal so the big guy the big takeaway with the gun sight is you want to frame you want to put the target aircraft inside this circle of diamonds and I'll put a circle on screen [Music] what you want to do is you want to put your target aircraft inside that Circle so that its wing tips are just touching that Circle that's how you know you're at the ideal range of 1100 feet well so go with that we need to know the target's wingspan so that's where the arc the wingspan adjustment comes in if you know your Target's wingspan you can tile it in here and you can see it adjusts that Circle of diamonds ever so bigger and it's a different adjustment inside the k-14 Gun Site a lot of different technical stuff happening inside there the big thing is we want to dial in our we want to set the the range to 1100 and leave that there you don't really mess with that too much but we do want to adjust for our Target's wingspan and here on screen I have a bunch of uh different wingspans for a lot of the DCS aircraft both Ai and human flown that are able to be shot down or engaged by your uh by your guns all right I'm going to take her off active pause and I'll demonstrate what this looks like so if you notice the Gun Sight actually moves around it's gyro stabilized but it's also calculating and factoring in our rate of turn for for a deflection shot see I pull a tighter turn it falls back a little bit so this is this is a tremendous help over a fixed gun site like some of the older aircrafts have or let's say the Spitfire the bf109 or the fw190 they only have fixed sights now the the fw190 D9 is an exception that has a German version of a gyro stabilized Gun Site but uh the P51 and the P-47 bolt share the k14 Gun Site actually the f86 does as well for DCs all right one other thing I got to talk about with uh Gunnery and this also applies for air to ground is if you notice my turn in Bank coordinator there to instrument panel you notice I got a little bit of right side slip that will affect the aim of your guns uh here looking top down this is if you are trimmed up for straight and level flight everything's nice interim you're not slipping or skidding through the air however if you do have a little bit of side slip you're still maintaining a forward flight you're not going to be pointed exactly in the right direction that you may think you're flying so that's something you got to look for uh look for and and account for whenever you're trying to get guns or Rockets especially on target so what we want to do is Rudder that out or even some Rudder trim to help you out if you know you're going to be at a specific speed for a little bit the better you can maintain uh coordinated flight the better your the better chances you are to have gun tits all right so with that out of the way let's go engage a bomber and let's see how this looks in action all right so now I'm rolling up behind a junkers 88 it's a German medium bomber I have my gun sight set for 1100 uh 1100 feet and with the target wingspan of 65 feet which is uh ju-88's uh wingspan so right about there so if you look I have the the bomber framed nicely with my gun sight I'm a little off to the left but that's okay so right now this is I'm at the ideal range in order to open up and expect hits so put your ideally you want to put your pepper on the target stabilize for a moment and then squeeze the trigger and give them a good burst and come off Target nice that was a good verse lettuce left wing on fire now approaching them like I did is is I almost hate to say but that's That's a classic rookie mistake uh for a number of reasons one it it gives the Gunners on the bombers a good a good shot back at you while you're trying to close in and get a good guns uh get good gun range on them quickly the bombers are on their way to wherever they're they are headed to go drop their ordinance and uh return to their base so they're on a specific path they're not going to deviate from that very well uh the second you're in a fighter and far more faster and maneuverable so what you want to do is just kind of dance around them uh always changing heading changing course coming in you don't want to settle in in any one given spot that gives their Gunners a good solid chance to gun you uh right back what's this one thing you want to avoid let's go look at uh how a different engagement would look uh under better circumstances and I'm by no means an expert at doing this it's just things I've picked up things I've learned and things I'd like to pass along so you guys can fulfill your mission shoot down the enemy bombers and make it back to base instead of them shooting you down you're not getting any uh getting any kills all right now we're in a fight with against a fighter we got a FW 190 D9 I believe in this case so now we're gonna test out uh The k-14 Gun Site against another fighter so I'm going to switch mine to fixed in gyro Mash down I already have my range set to 1100 as before the d9's wingspan is about 35 feet so I got that dialed in as well so I see my foresight cross I get a good uh good idea of my vector and I'm trying to line up my gun sight and trying to connect the dots and this is where some deflection comes in notice I'm I got them framed nicely but I may miss see how my rounds are falling behind so I want to lead a little bit there's some hits so you may the k-14 is great it definitely helps give you a good idea of where your shots are going to fall but it's not perfect but it does help you out tremendously there's some good hits a nice burst you don't want to hold down the trigger and waste all your bullets so now I want to close in a little bit I can throttle up to uh military power there we go closing that distance a little bit looking good looking good another piece there oh Splash one awesome all right let's get back into max continuous there it goes good fight nice all right everybody uh that's the basics of Ariel Gunnery hopefully this video helps you out especially for those new war Birds as I've said before these things uh can be a handful of fly especially if you're new to them however you learn them you get good with them and it's a tremendous amount of satisfaction and accomplishment as you improve and uh Master at warbird they're an awful lot of fun like I said I love them and nothing quite like it to fly these uh these older aircraft compared to the modern stuff all right so you guys could look forward to air to ground Gunnery and weapons employment in the next P-51 video I do so until then thanks for watching and we'll see you next time foreign

Channel: Diesel Thunder

Views: 14,392

Keywords: DCS World, F-4 Phantom

Id: FqPWK7qdjFM

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023