Over the years of watching The Black Death track it long ago occurred to me that the behavior of the little bombs dropped by the Il-2s seemed a bit odd. There were the dust clouds from impact with the ground, but rarely a ground explosion. I added a line of code in Bomb.class to write to my log.lst the class name of whatever weapon was invoked. I found this bomb to be BombPTAB25.class.
In looking over the code, I noted that the explosion effect is set to be invoked in merely 1 out of 20 impacts, which appears to include object hits which do otherwise involve a detonation. I presume this is to simulate a failure to detonate in most cases of ground/water contact. But is this reflective of reality? I note that most objects destroyed also do not have an accompanying explosion effect, other than the effects associated with the object itself. For ground impacts, uppose it's largely hard rock; surely more detonations would occur then.
Or is this, as I more strongly suspect, an early instance of trying to keep the number of effects per unit time to a more manageable level back in the days of much weaker hardware, given these small bombs are dropped in large numbers? This weapon has been in the game probably since the year dot.
I altered the code to permit a detonation for every terminal impact (these bombs can skip one or more times in the interim). This changes the character of those drops in the Black Death track rather notably. LOTS of flashes/bangs now! What really stands out is the considerable distance many of these bombs will travel as they skip along, detonating FAR down range from their initial impact.
Here we see the first drop, done on the leading vehicle column. At the bend in the road are three visible detonation flashes (among the scores of detonations occurring over a period of several seconds.) Other explosions occur yet farther down range of this.
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Topic: About a certain weapon, and The Black Death track (Read 125 times)
