IL-2 Sturmovik / DCS World - Strafing with the Spitfire: By JC

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Sunday, October 22, 2017
By: JC
IL-2 Sturmovik / DCS World - Strafing with the Spitfire


Let's talk ground targets, guns and WWII aircraft.





The Operation Epsom Campaign for DCW World, has you strapped to a Spitfire in an armed recon role. The Spitfire LF Mk. IX featured can't carry bombs so you are limited to your guns.


Strafing by aircraft in WWII is a great topic that I would like to explore in this blog post.

There is probably no better book (at least in english) about WWII strafing than Colgan's Allied Strafing in World War II: A Cockpit View of Air to Ground Battle. This highly recommended book, although oriented mostly on the American P47, will help you to get into the "strafing mindset".

This blog post is focused in the Spitfire, but most of the same principles can be applied to other aircraft.



My first exhibit is a quick mission in IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Kuban, in which I'm flying a Soviet Spitfire MKVB.


In this quick mission, I strafe German targets that can't shoot back at me (artillery positions), which is great practice. A video recording of this mission is available below (please visit the YouTube version for full HD).




First things first, it is advisable not to dive down at full speed towards your target. At 03:20 in the above video, I put my engine's rpm below the 3,000 mark.

At which speed to strafe? It depends on the aircraft. According to Colgan's book for the P47 it was 270 mph. High speed dives result in a very unstable aim, a lack of time to correct it and off course the danger of hitting the ground. For the Spitfire, I find a speed of 220 mph as the one that allows one to aim properly.

In Colgan's book there is a mention of the so-called "boresight speed" (08:34 in the video above), which is the optimal speed to strafe. It all has to do with the harmonization of the guns (at which distance they converge), and the amount of time that the target is kept at that distance. The higher the speed, the shorter that fraction of time you have to pull the trigger.

It takes some practice, but it will come to you: the "sight picture" (how big the target looks like compared to the sight). At 10:26 in the video above, I can distinguish some features of my target. At this distance, it is rare to miss hitting a target. In this particular scenario (the ground target can't fire at me) I wait until the target is really close to unleash my cannon rounds.

At 10:30, my rounds come out. Note how I'm not hosing or walking my rounds towards the target. One has to remember that a very few seconds of firing are available. So don't waste ammo. In this case, since the ground target can't fire back, I have no problem getting very close to it before shooting with a lot of precision. This will prove different when you are confronting AAA, though.



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