Often in Hollywood you will see aerial or space dogfights in which a pilot will line up on a target’s 6 o’clock, destroy the target, and then fly straight through the cloud of smoke and fire and carry on. Is this realistic?? Aren’t there massive chunks of metal in this cloud waiting to chew up the insides of the attacker’s engines? Does this happen IRL?
In: 10
IRL There’s a lot of the room in the sky to just not fly through the fireball.
Most of the time the plane doesn’t instantly explode, you just shoot something important, like the pilot, engine, or control linkages.
Even if it does go up in a fireball, all the heavy bits keep moving in the direction they’re already moving.
If you’re on the tail of an enemy aircraft shooting guns at it, they’re going to be turning to avoid you, not just moving in a straight line, so all you’d have to do is stop leading the target. You’ll also be farther away if you’re shooting missiles at it.
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