Have you ever been in this situation? You are flying towards a ground target with some good ol' iron bombs, you spot a group of targets all clustered together, and you think to yourself: "Today's my lucky day!". As you think that, you enter your attack vector, you proceed to align yourself with your target and press the bomb release button, only to be received by a wave of disappointment as your 500lb bomb only managed to kill one of five soft vehicles in that cluster? Well, then you are not the only one.
High Explosives (HE) munitions in DCS are infamous for their lack of splash damage, to use video game terms, or any sort of complex overpressure mechanics. Sometimes you might drop a Mk.82 right next (100ft) of a Humvee, and it will not even get scratched. There will be times when you will send it to the next life, as scrap, but those are less common.
To test this for myself, I set a bulleye-like target comprised of only Humvees. This target had the vehicles set on a cross pattern, with vehicles on the diagonals. All of these vehicles were spaced out equally, with the first set of vehicles set 33ft away from the explosion center, and three other sets of vehicles set 100ft apart from the center with 100ft of difference between them, meaning the most distant vehicles were 300ft away from the explosion.
As expected of DCS explosions, only three out of the four targets that were on the 33ft radius range were damaged, with one of them being fully destroyed. According to Characteristics of Weapons of the GICHD, "A standard Mk 82 bomb body produces a lethal area of approximately 80 m / 262.47 ft (across) by 30 m / 98.43 ft (along)". While this lethal radius is not directly related to the size of the crater or the destructive power within a certain radius, it is clear that the Mk.82 bombs are very underpowered in game.
Players have taken it upon their own hands to improve this aspect of the game with thinsg such as the Splash Damage script, originally made by FrozenDroid and later modified by GRIMM and Kerv, which improves this aspect of the game in a very drastic way. While this script is technically no longer supported, that only means is that new weapons are no longer added as they come out. All that is needed to fix this is to go into the script and add them yourself, which is a simple task.
All we can do now is hope that ED fixes this core aspect of their product natively so that we do not have to rely on scripts to fix what should have been fixed years ago.
About the writer:
Santiago "Cubeboy" Cuberos
Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as the co-founder and writer ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy
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