Air Strikes

[snarre]

only what im wondered is can thous airplanes shoot down realy because now thous games what im played , im newer get shooted down any plane ? some one done that ?

[Skwabie]

68 SBDs completely unopposed in the air pushed over at 3 giant flattops 300 yards long and over 40 yards wide. They got 12 hits. And that was the biggest outlier success of dive bombing in the entire war, any theater, any mission or opponent.

uh... You're somehow discounting the enormous amount of AAA for any carrier battle group that surpasses any land based flak defense. Not an easy task to face that amount of anti-air for a pilot, at the least it's going to affect his release altitude and accuracy. Apparently by late 1944 it's virtually suicide to fly a prop driven fighter above a US CBG for they've turned into flak hedgehogs due to all the kamikazes.

That and despite carriers are huge targets, they have all the open sea to maneuver, at 30kts. Nothing like a zig-zagging carrier to throw off the pilot's aim, which to him is only pencil size. Tanks are tough and small but comparatively stationary, I can get close enough to see the TC's earphones on my bombing runs. When equipped with high power guns that can go thru some weak parts they're pretty much dead meat, if I RTB without a kill, I hang my head in shame.

[JonS]

68 SBDs completely unopposed in the air pushed over at 3 giant flattops 300 yards long and over 40 yards wide. They got 12 hits. And that was the biggest outlier success of dive bombing in the entire war, any theater, any mission or opponent.

Not really. On 3 April 1944, 40 divebombers scored 15 hits on a target 270 yards long by - at the widest - 39 yards.

But that isn't really important.

Your continued and continual conflation of the macro with the micro is boring. And wrong. This isn't WWII, or a thesis about WWII. It's a game about a small part of WWII. A highly realistic game, but still a game. Even using your macro figures, Lucas' micro test showed that the effects of CM air attacks are in the right order of magnitude.

Edit to add:

if you go 4/4 vs targets the size of a small gun position, we are in the twilight zone,

Why are you pretending that MG fire are bombs dropped?

[JasonC]

Why are you pretending that 4 Stukas knocking out 4 AA guns and 2 tanks in a few minutes is realistic and normal? Because you are tool, of course.

[JasonC]

Skwabie wrote "but they are small", as though it makes it easier to hit a tank with a 500 lb bomb in a dive from 10,000 to 3,000 feet. You can't make this crap up. You people are just silliest fanboys imaginable, and are making yourselves look utterly ridiculous.

[c3k]

The ad hominem vituperative comments do nothing except allow me to use high fallutin' words like "vituperative" and "ad hominem".

It really does not reflect well on the validity of the position you're espousing.

Just saying.

[YankeeDog]

Save your powder for a more important fight. IMHO, it's a silly test and not really worth arguing over.

If I understand the test conditions correctly, the closest real-world parallel would be if 4 Stukas were able to somehow surprise a company of static T-34s lined up on the parade ground with minimal AA protection.

You might be able to find an example of something like this happening in the early days of Barbarossa when Stukas attacked installations with almost total surprise, but otherwise it's a highly artificial test that tells you basically nothing about how tac air in CMRT compares to the real thing.

[Skwabie]

Skwabie wrote "but they are small", as though it makes it easier to hit a tank with a 500 lb bomb in a dive from 10,000 to 3,000 feet. You can't make this crap up. You people are just silliest fanboys imaginable, and are making yourselves look utterly ridiculous.

yep it's a mis-wording on my part but I think you need to calm down..

[Volksgrenadier]

CAS will find its targets by flying over, deciding what they just saw, attacking it, missing it wildly, and then go home and report complete success.

The Germans had a system that needed independent verification of claimed success, before it was accepted and counted as success ("bestätigte Abschüsse"). What someone claimed counted nothing, if there was no independent confirmation.

How was this handled in the US army?

[JonS]

Why are you pretending that 4 Stukas knocking out 4 AA guns and 2 tanks in a few minutes is realistic and normal?

Because I'm not?

It is plausible, and within an order of magnitude. Therefore good enough.

Why are you having so much trouble realising you're wrong. I mean, it's not like its a rare event. You've had plenty of practice.

[YankeeDog]

The Germans had a system that needed independent verification of claimed success, before it was accepted and counted as success ("bestätigte Abschüsse"). What someone claimed counted nothing, if there was no independent confirmation.

How was this handled in the US army?

Pretty much everybody did some version of this, for both air-to-air and air-to-ground. Even with independent verification, analysis of gun camera footage, post attack BDA flights, etc. claims to kills numbers are still off by a multiple if you look at actual opposing side loss stats. Air-to-air by a ratio of somewhere around 2:1, and usually much higher for air-to-ground -- as high as 10:1 in some contexts. Air attack on armor usually has one of the worst claims to kills ratios.

This is remarkably consistent across nationalities in WWII; pretty much everybody's air-to-ground claims were wildly inaccurate most of the time.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

The Germans had a system that needed independent verification of claimed success, before it was accepted and counted as success ("bestätigte Abschüsse"). What someone claimed counted nothing, if there was no independent confirmation.

How do explain Rudel getting credit for such a ridiculous number of tank kills then? Were they independently confirmed?

[Volksgrenadier]

How do explain Rudel getting credit for such a ridiculous number of tank kills then? Were they independently confirmed?

Ofcourse. This number is only the confirmed number, the kills that could not be confirmed are higher.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

[Volksgrenadier]

Pretty much everybody did some version of this, for both air-to-air and air-to-ground. Even with independent verification, analysis of gun camera footage, post attack BDA flights, etc. claims to kills numbers are still off by a multiple if you look at actual opposing side loss stats. Air-to-air by a ratio of somewhere around 2:1, and usually much higher for air-to-ground -- as high as 10:1 in some contexts. Air attack on armor usually has one of the worst claims to kills ratios.

This is remarkably consistent across nationalities in WWII; pretty much everybody's air-to-ground claims were wildly inaccurate most of the time.

Do you have any sources?

[YankeeDog]

The inherent problem with all of the "verified kill" claims is that there are simply too many for the number of tanks lost.

If you add up all of the Soviet tank "verified kills" by Rudel and his fellow Ju-87G pilots, all the similar claims by German tank & SP gun crews, AT Gun crews, infantry close assault, etc. you get a number far higher than the number of tanks the Soviets lost. This is true whether you look at the figures over the course of the entire war, or if you break it out and look at tank losses vs. kill claims over shorter time periods, and/or only specific fronts. And it continues to hold even if you assume a substantial number of "short term kills" -- i.e., tanks that were damaged by attack, and put out of action, but only temporarily. And this is without factoring in the fact that substantial number of tanks were lost to non-combat and non-direct action causes -- mines, lucky indirect fire artillery hits, breaking down and not being recovered for whatever reason, simply wearing out, etc.

So verified kill counts must be inflated. And if you assume that the verified kills of Stuka aces like Rudel are less inflated, then you have to take away actual kills from the Panzer Aces and AT Gun crews. It's a zero sum game.

Again, not necessarily singling out the Germans' numbers on this; everybody else is pretty much the same.

[JonS]

Own side kill claims are worthless. Have a search on these forums for sources, it's been debated here before. Often.

[YankeeDog]

Do you have any sources?

I'm not going to play this game with you again and do your work for you. I'm sure your Google-fu is adequate. There's tons of stuff on USAF and RAF WWII operating procedures available on the 'net. Soviet stuff is a little harder to find, but more discoverable nowadays than it used to be.

[TimoS.]

How long does it take for CAS to start doing their Work? is it totally Random? Anything mentioned in the Manual?

[Volksgrenadier]

YankeeDog,

you don't have any sources? Then you are just brabbling.

[YankeeDog]

I'm not sure what "brabbling" is, but fine. You can take a half hour to look up Soviet tank production & loss stats and compare them to German claims, or not. I'm not paid to organize and provide this information to people like you here on this forum so there's only so far I will go in casual discussion; the people who pay me to do research are unfortunately interested in much drier, uninteresting topics.

But I will give you a hint if you change your mind and actually feel like looking up the facts: You can find a fair amount of info on this topic if you just do a search for old posts of JasonC on these forums.

Your time, not mine.

[Apocal]

Tanks are tough and small but comparatively stationary, I can get close enough to see the TC's earphones on my bombing runs. When equipped with high power guns that can go thru some weak parts they're pretty much dead meat, if I RTB without a kill, I hang my head in shame.

You play too many flight sims.

[Skwabie]

You play too many flight sims.

That is a huge understatement. Well, was.

[YankeeDog]

You play too many flight sims.

Heck, just take a couple of private pilot lessons. A few minutes behind the control yoke of even a Cessna 150 will give you a much better appreciation of just how hard it is to perceive small details rushing by you on the ground as you attempt to control a single-engine piston plane at low altitude.

And this in a slow trainer with nobody shooting at you, or trying to actually hit something with aircraft-mounted weaponry.

[Skwabie]

Yep those chosen to fly combat sorties are damn few, and good eyesight is always a must. Also to fly good CAS must require a different mindset, the situation awareness is more geared towards the ground than air for the fighter jocks. So there's still the straight winged hog for the dirty work flying low and slow. But then again its old ways of doing CAS really doesn't stand a chance against anything that shoots skyward nowadays, it's the wild jungle below 10k feet. Compare that to the ww2 tree hoppers, much has changed!