Instead of them reaching 0 HP and crashing, they should have a period between 0-20% where the plane starts to be harder to fly. They’d start decreasing in altitude, wobbling, fire coming out of it’s engines, etc. At below 5 HP the plane is almost impossible to save and requires some luck to safely land without being shot anymore.
At 0 HP the entire engine should just get doused in flames, start nose diving, and explode in a few seconds whether it crashes or not.
yeah this would be cool, being able to shoot the engines and destroy the engine, shoot the wings off etc, rather than the thing exploding in mid air but staying intact like a clunky piece of shit.
perhaps if the engine was turned off in time you could stop the engine from exploding?
This would still make it a penalty because you would have to land without power(which would be liable to nosedive) and you would have to repair the engine before using it again
I don’t know I’m not a pilot
Yes, you shouldn’t be able to blow up the entire plane with poorly-placed shots. Each part of the plane should have HP with the engine being the “headshot” - shooting a wing to 0 HP will destabilize your left side and if you have an engine on your left wing, send it right off the plane. Similar to War Thunder indeed.
I realized I should probably further elaborate a bit.
Every part (or segment) should be individually simulated, and disabling or destroying it should have the exact effect you would expect, as opposed to overarching to others. There wouldn’t need to be a “headshot” area if the part is so important regardless due to the consequence of losing such a critical part of the vehicle. In fact, engine blocks in particular would be one of the most structurally sound parts of the entire vehicle to begin with. They are, after all, literally solid blocks of metal.
What I don’t want, for instance, is shooting the exact same spot on an engine 200 times and suddenly the entire vehicle explodes. To immediately detonate a vehicle though, you could shoot out the fuel tanks to critical integrity. I’d imagine fuel tanks being quite easy to tear up, causing leaks, and at critical integrity either catch fire or explode depending on the amount of fuel inside. Vehicles as a whole are rather durable, so we shouldn’t have the WoT/GTA-esque action movie self-destructing vehicles we have now.
(I’m sure this is what you meant, just clarifying it for anyone still reading)