The only thing I wish they'd leave out.

[Panzerlang]

Entire big components coming off under fire, like control surfaces, wheels etc. I've watched a lot of gun-cam footage over the decades and don't recall a single RL incidence of it. It's always looked cheesy to me and I'd hoped Korea would have improved on it.

[gecko]

Yep, and usually it happens on almost the first hit with anything bigger than a 50cal. Some debris perhaps is good, but a whole control surface almost every time?

[Avimimus]

It did happen though.

I'd suggest looking at photographs of heavily damaged aircraft (and maybe looking up a few more after action reports).

It seems that control surfaces which were partially shot loose often deformed producing more drag, leading to:

- The control surface itself then breaking in half, with part of it flying free and the other part of it remaining attached at its attachment point.

- The control surface remained partially attached and contributed to a broader structural failure of the stabiliser (e.g. tore part of the stabiliser free).

So, control surfaces probably weren't breaking as cleanly (i.e. having all their attachment points being shot away), but were definitely being shot away... just either taking a bit more or a bit less of the airframe with them.

Remember that, once a control surface is partially detached, aerodynamic forces have a very high probability of deforming it further.

That said - I do think you are essentially right in that it is much more likely that parts of the control surface will be shot away, rather than all of it.

[Avimimus]

[Leifr]

These are exceptionally clean breaks, and frankly look no different to what happens in GB right now with high-explosive rounds blowing surfaces cleanly away. I think out of the length of the trailer, this is what has disappointed me so far - it looks the same. There is no granularity as there is in your example photographs or as reportedly promised. Yes, it's an exceptionally small sample size, and maybe Korea is capable of something more compelling - well, maybe 1C should show that. 🤔

 

 

[Arty_Effem]

From a programming standpoint, what's being expected here is quite involved.

Damage results in randomly-shaped fragments being separated from an airframe.  This would entail generating those shapes, representing their absence from the airframe, then generating what amounts to a 'flight model' for each fragment to make its individual way to the ground, according to its size and shape. There are other considerations.

It's all perfectly possible, but asking a lot from this type of application.

Its more expedient to model a set of predetermined shapes.

[Col.Sanders]

19 hours ago, Leifr said:

These are exceptionally clean breaks, and frankly look no different to what happens in GB right now with high-explosive rounds blowing surfaces cleanly away. I think out of the length of the trailer, this is what has disappointed me so far - it looks the same. There is no granularity as there is in your example photographs or as reportedly promised. Yes, it's an exceptionally small sample size, and maybe Korea is capable of something more compelling - well, maybe 1C should show that. 🤔

 

 

It's the classic DCS tail pop.

[MajorMagee]

The Eppenage is typically constructed as a complete unit, so having it detach separately might seem logical. In actuality, it is extremely rare to experience it in real world battle damage because the way the structure is assembled makes the connection much stronger than the attached pieces.

Edited December 14, 2025 by MajorMagee

[gecko]

IMO endcaps that show damaged structure after a major hit would be more realistic and already used in almost every sim out there, including GB. Combine that with some debris particles when it happens and it will look a lot more realistic. The sim also doesn't have to keep track of a separated part of a model flopping around. I'd be happy to still see a control surface blown off on rare occasions - it can indeed happen - but the norm should be shredding them.

[MajorMagee]

We actually had a P-80 fuselage sitting outside the renovation hangar when it was hit by a tornado a couple of years ago (28 Feb 24). It got pushed around, and had some skin and structural damage, but the tail did not pop off!

 

[BlitzPig_EL]

We have a T33 (2 seat F80 trainer) as a "gate guard" outside the Wood County Airport. (1G0).  Several years ago a tornado picked up a  Cessna 150 and blew it into the Lockheed.  The vertical stabilizer was bent over about 75 or 80 degrees, about half way up.

The Cessna looked like a crushed beer can.  The F80/T33 was a stout airframe.  A local fabricator made a new vertical stab out of fiberglass, the airframe was repainted silver, and the 180th. Fighter Wing OANG provided all the correct markings for it, and it stands there to this day.

[Mysticpuma]

On 12/13/2025 at 9:03 AM, Leifr said:

These are exceptionally clean breaks, and frankly look no different to what happens in GB right now with high-explosive rounds blowing surfaces cleanly away. I think out of the length of the trailer, this is what has disappointed me so far - it looks the same. There is no granularity as there is in your example photographs or as reportedly promised. Yes, it's an exceptionally small sample size, and maybe Korea is capable of something more compelling - well, maybe 1C should show that. 🤔

 

 

Hopefully not as bad as CloD and the Ju-88 tail!

 

 

[FuriousMeow]

Soft body physics calculations would be needed to have a damage model where 3D objects don't separate cleanly like they do. Those are very expensive calculations, maybe if quantum computing comes online and it's several magnitudes faster than current super computers...

We're kind of stuck. Either full damage to each part is just progressively more damaged - as in blanked out at the texture layer - until its missing or the current way where there's levels of damaged textures until the 3d part separates but the end result is the same and one costs computationally less. 

Computational cost is the biggest challenge, and a wall, programmers have to deal with.

The 3d model soft body physics is still many many moons away. 

[gecko]

That would be one approach, but I'd argue that in most cases, the debris is small enough that it doesn't need to be a 3D part of the model with some sort of physics model breaking off at all.

 

Making every detail be supposedly physics-based can often be a step backwards in what you actually experience (and this is more a response to what we have seen with design choices in GB vs your pointing out of the challenges). It happens in two ways. The first is exemplified in the video, where a direct hit from a 37mm HE round surgically removes a flap by its attach points intact. Sure, the invisible details of that hit may have been calculated precisely based on available data, and that flap may be appropriately interacting with the air as it falls, but that isn't what should be happening in the first place. Computational power being spent to precisely calculate an immersion breaker. So people start to complain, as they did when the P-47 damage model had it made out of glass. A fix was duly issued, but I guarantee they didn't rewrite their whole physics model to account for it. Most likely they had to tweak some values away from what they calculated that they "should" be to get a more realistic end result. At that point, are you gaining anything over a simpler, more performance-friendly approach that is more oriented towards end result rather than process? We didn't get drop tanks in GB because they couldn't model the fuel behavior at the molecular level (or so I heard). Did we really need that level of detail? Could almost the same thing be modeled by tracking a few key parameters and throwing in a couple probability scales? Would anyone have been able to tell the difference?

 

The second way the experience can be degraded comes as a result of all those calculations, many of which are producing immersion-breaking results in the first place, using up available performance. It means you have scale the action down from Great Battle to Minor Skirmish. One of the things I'm most excited about for Korea is that they've taken steps against this in other areas, and the scale of what we see in the video is exactly what I would hope would be possible with modern computers. I'm hoping for more of this recognition that less can sometimes be more. 

 

It's not to say that there aren't places where the most detailed physics possible are appropriate - this is a flight simulator after all. But IMHO this isn't one of them. As one flight sim modder said a couple of decades ago, it doesn't matter what it is doing so much as what it looks like it's doing. As much as we don't want that to be true, it will be until our computers are much closer to being omniscient than they are today. Meanwhile attempts to faithfully model the butterfly effect in a combat environment are going to be exercises in frustration.

[Panzerlang]

My guess/assumption is that the code could be left exactly as-is except the affected parts never come off the plane. So if the effect of a detached control surface = no further control effect from that part, keep that the same except don't have the part detach from the plane. Maybe damage decals already get applied to detachable parts prior to them coming off but either way it seems to be an easy solution (assuming, again, that recoding every detachable part to no longer detach isn't a mountain of work).

[IckyAtlas]

In short we expect in Korea more realistic effects than GB of machine gun impacts on an airframe depending on caliber.

[LukeFF]

(ahem) 🙂 

 

 

[Leifr]

Aware of that Luke, but the gameplay video 1C decided to release demonstrated nothing of the proposed; same old entire surfaces popping off like GB once some high-explosive element is introduced.

[LukeFF]

Yes, and it was posted at the beginning of the video that what you see there is not the final product. Everyone needs to keep that in mind. 

[Leifr]

I suppose I am sticking to the adage of "show, don't tell" when it comes to asking for pre-order monies. 

Here's a screengrab someone made at IgroMir on the demo booth; entire surfaces just being clipped out of the airframe. I won't comment on this any more moving forwards, suppose I just want to know that my money is going in to the right project (when money is tight!). I look forward to more media content over the next couple of months as Korea moves closer to early access release. 🙂

 

[Avimimus]

10 minutes ago, LukeFF said:

Yes, and it was posted at the beginning of the video that what you see there is not the final product. Everyone needs to keep that in mind. 

Yes, very much! Not final.

I do think it would be good if control surfaces could be split into... well, if the attachment points are 'n', then 'n-1' pieces - to allow the area between any two hinges to come off separately.

However, the devs may have a better solution. Also, if development is already too far along... then it'll still be a pretty impressive improvement to the damage and physics model (even if entire control surfaces still get shot off as one piece)... I'll be quite happy in any case.

[IckyAtlas]

3 hours ago, LukeFF said:

(ahem) 🙂 

You are right. I did not see that video. So yes it is very very promising. Cross fingers.🤞

[FuriousMeow]

9 hours ago, Leifr said:

Spoiler

I suppose I am sticking to the adage of "show, don't tell" when it comes to asking for pre-order monies. 

Here's a screengrab someone made at IgroMir on the demo booth; entire surfaces just being clipped out of the airframe. I won't comment on this any more moving forwards, suppose I just want to know that my money is going in to the right project (when money is tight!). I look forward to more media content over the next couple of months as Korea moves closer to early access release. 🙂

 

 

 

I'm not sure what the issue is with that. I'd expect a damaged part of the wing to come off with the aileron still attached. Here's a series of screenshots showing a section of a 190's wing being shot clean off. It's WW2 guncam so we don't get the clarity of high res, but it still shows the wing coming off and falling away whole. And this isn't even the gun cam I was looking for, there's other footage of another 190 having its wing blown off. From this: https://youtu.be/UYvdRJAy8dE?si=e_UctxxD4trEmrEh&t=85

 

I guess there's a point in time where there's a return back to how it was originally done, who knew the 1990s games had aircraft damage more accurate when being shot down...

 

Edited December 17, 2025 by FuriousMeow

[Panzerlang]

22 minutes ago, FuriousMeow said:

 

I'm not sure what the issue is with that. I'd expect a damaged part of the wing to come off with the aileron still attached. Here's a series of screenshots showing a section of a 190's wing being shot clean off. It's WW2 guncam so we don't get the clarity of high res, but it still shows the wing coming off and falling away whole. And this isn't even the gun cam I was looking for, there's other footage of another 190 having its wing blown off. From this: https://youtu.be/UYvdRJAy8dE?si=e_UctxxD4trEmrEh&t=85

 

 

I guess there's a point in time where there's a return back to how it was originally done, who knew the 1990s games had aircraft damage more accurate when being shot down...

 

 

I wasn't talking about entire wings, it's components like ailerons, flaps, elevators, rudders and wheels etc. We know wings could be blown off by their own ammo going off (or the main spar being blown apart). Other parts, extremely rare (and I've never seen gun cam footage of it or pictures of planes with those parts missing. Shredded, yes but not entirely missing). It's just my personal take on it, though a lot of people above seem to agree; it looks cheesy and a better fit for a 90s era game than the latest greatest cutting edge tech. I hope they amend it. 🙂

[Aapje]

I'm pretty happy with the stuff that comes of the planes in GB. They already have small debris flying back at you and the occasional larger component. And failures due to high-G's of damaged components. Yesterday I had one of the horizontal stabilizers let go and felt it right away through the force feedback stick. It was very nice.

Edited December 17, 2025 by Aapje