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Aircraft experience?


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I took a look in the search topics but only found one other thread asking this question, and it kind of shifted off to discussion about how aircraft will often bomb your own units as well. Nobody seemed to answer the initial question though, and I'm curious myself. Does having a veteran fighter-bomber pose any difference as opposed to a green one? Has anybody done any tests in regards to this? I'm well aware from personal experience what can happen if the plane targets my own men, what I'm wondering though is what effect the experience level has on them. What am I supposed to be getting for those extra points?

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Experience will affect a unit's targetting and accuracy, so a vet FB will more often than not identify and hit an enemy unit.

That said, its really not worth the points to purchase airpower. For the price of a vet FB you can purchase a reg arty spotter in the 105/155mm range and a couple of TRPs.

[ December 25, 2005, 09:21 PM: Message edited by: Kingfish ]

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I've never done any detailed testing, but as a casual observer I've never seen any difference. The random factors around air power seem to trump experience. The relatively clunky spotting, friendly fire and targeting rules for airpower seem to make the random factor outweigh the bonuses in the die rolls for effects. My recommendation is to only buy when you have no armor of your own (if at all) and then to buy conscripts and hope for the best.

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If you know your opponent will have more than two pieces of armor, grab only the most cost effective airplane. Planes do not do so well against infantry, spotters are more effective in that role. Don't grab a plane when your opponent expects it, IE. you buy planes a lot so he'll know to buy AA. Avoid planes with really obscure or miniscule loadouts such as 48x 5lbs bombs or pure strafe loadouts.

AA isn't too effective against planes, but when the odds of a plane doing damage is tiny to begin with taking any chances is not worth it. I have seen a few planes break off or even get shot down, and although rare, it was a huge waste of points.

The russians get the IL2 which is probably the best airplane in the game. Simply put, a single regular IL2 can put almost any battle into your favor immediately. Out of the hundred of QB's and Coreforce campaigns I've played, I have used maybe 20 planes in my life time. Five of those planes were IL2's and every time I used them they decided the battle. 7+ strafes average, two massive bombs and typically great rockets. The aresenal is well worth its price tag in an armored battle regardless of what any vet will tell you. I've seen the IL2 do twice as much damage as it's worth in some scenarios.

I don't know if the germans have a suitable counter-part. They probably don't, and if they do the rarity probably sky rockets the price. This obviously isn't an issue on variable or no rarity.

Skill of the plane is absolutely crucial. I've only done some minor testing with green, vet and elite planes. Green pilots seemed to be way off with bombs while elite planes attacked with precision accuracy. Friendly fire issues seemed random but that was probably just luck of the draw during testing. I had a vet put a bomb right in a group of friendly troops (who were in the open), even when there was armor all over the field! Further testing would be greatly appreciated.

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The bombs are generally inaccurate, though sometimes they get lucky and hurt a fair number of infantry, even though typically targeted at a vehicle which they uniformly miss. The rockets are similar, not worth all that much because they are so randomly placed.

But strafing is a different story. Strafing in CM is ridiculously overmodeled and hideously effective. Go for the types with at least one cannon and lots of passes. They just plain fry things. The 23mms on Sturmoviks will kill full tanks and break tracks, firing twice per pass for half a dozen passes.

As for the value compared to FOs, there are quite a few 100-125 point fighter bombers that are perfectly reasonable buys, though better at messing up vehicles than infantry. Usually come with one decent sized bomb and up to 5 cannon-armed strafing passes.

The big ticket items - Sturms, Stukas, P-47s - are in the 150mm FO price range, and harder to justify. They pay for themselves if they take out a couple of tanks, which the Sturm is much more likely to accomplish than the other expensive types.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Aircraft experience is crucial when it comes to telling friend from foe.

The more experience, the more likely it is the flyguy correctly id's the enemy. But if your elite flyguy errs on who is who, he will more likely hit at what he is aiming.

So whether you have an experienced flyguy or not, the danger for your own assets is the same. However an experienced pilot might cause more harm to the enemy.

Gruß

Joachim

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  • 3 weeks later...

I recently started a QB with a couple of Stukas just for fun. Well, I thought it would be fun, but they have only appeared once a piece, on turns 2 and 3 (we're now in 18 of 40) and have yet to return. Is this the norm for airplanes????

Is there anyway to view the status of these a/c?

Thanks,

jet

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no you can't view their status, and a plane that has attacked and used its ammow or been damaged or shot down never returns.

Sounds like you've had 1 plane attack - the other may or may not turn up at some stage smile.gif

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Not nearly modelled enough IMO, in terms of effcts on tanks - tiger crews would abandon perfectly good vehicles under air attack, but this was hardly ever done in such close proximity to the battlefield as is depicted in the CM version of air support.

A more accurate model would be that yuor air support prevents the othe guy from actually fielding all the troops and equipment he has bought - but that's not nearly as satisfying as blowing it up!! smile.gif

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Moronic Max asked how effective strafing was in the actual war. We've had very long threads on the subject which he can look up if he likes. The bottom line is strafing was ineffective against full tanks but effective against soft skinned vehicles - trucks and railway cars, to a lesser extent light armor.

The average FB in CM can take out 1-3 armored vehicles in a single sortie. If the real planes did that, they would have decided the war in less than a month. In reality, the average fighter bomber did not succeed in taking out a single enemy tank (fully armored, gun armed AFV, turreted or not) over its entire operational life. They were lost themselves in numbers higher than any full AFVs they took out, by at least 2 orders of magnitude. As an example, the Germans may have lost 50-100 AFVs in the campaign in France to air attack, start to finish. Under the heaviest tac air of the war.

Own side claims of air to ground kills are notoriously the least reliable in all of warfare. Pilots routinely claim kills that other side reports prove are inflated by 10 to 50 times. The only significant losses to tac air that can be verified by reports of the equipment losing side, are soft skinned transport.

The net effect of strong tac air is to reduce the operational mobility of enemy forces, by physically taking out soft skinned vehicles, by restricting times and routes of movement and causing disruption to existing traffic, by blocking roads with traffic jams and wrecks, supplimented by occasional bridge busting and the like. There is also a morale effect, though typically a passing one.

That is a real effect, but not a major one, and definitely not a decisive tactical one.

The first truely effective air to ground munition for AT use was napalm. This was not realized at the time, and was only discovered by operations researchers after the fact in Korea. The pilots themselves did not know how much more effective it was. While only 20% of air to ground AFV kill claims in Korea were napalm (most were rockets or cannons, some from bombs), detailed surveys of the actual wrecks showed that 80% of the real AFV kills from air to ground were from napalm canisters.

It is much harder to hit small point targets from the air than the pilots estimate. Napalm works because it has a large splash area in which the munition is effective. Pilots think their rockets and strafing are hitting things precisely, when in fact they rockets are just getting close enough for the explosions to obscure view of the target, and the strafing is hitting the target with only a few rounds, thus doing little to fully armored vehicles.

Soft vehicles are hurt by fragments from bombs and rockets, and more readily damaged (or men in them hit directly) by strafing. But the behind armor effect of small airborne armament on most vehicles is quite small, until many hits have added up.

Per unit of resources invested, there is no serious question that light flak gets vastly higher returns shooting down expensive fighter bombers, than fighter bombers get blowing up stuff on the ground. Even though the kills per engagement are low, the flak gets lots of chances at practically no danger to itself. Heavy flak had a similar relation to large bombers.

Most of the return from FBs blowing stuff up on the ground comes in the form of trucks, wagons, and railroad box cars disabled. Even those average well under 1 per sortie - they just add up lots of sorties. A typical FB flew from 25 to 50 missions over its operational life, before being lost itself. In that time it might take out 5-10 trucks or railway boxcars. Only outlier successful ones would get even a single full AFV or locomotive.

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Jason C, I think you are wrong. During the German campaign in France the German Stuka bombers had great success against French and British tanks. That’s one of the reasons the blitz was so effective. Now I’m not saying they knocked out 85% of the vehicles in the campaign that were knocked out. But to say the plane had little effect in WW2 against heavy armor is wrong.

I read a book last year titled Stuka. It was written by Ruedel, I think, any way the highest decorated German Soldier of WW2. He was a Stuka pilot and he personally knocked out a great number of T-34’s and various other Russian heavy armor. I don’t know the exact number but I would say he alone KO’ed over 500 Russian tanks in the course of the war.

In France in 44-45 when the allies recaptured France, the Germans tried to keep their armor in cover during the day light hours and only moved at night or bad weather. I don’t think they did this to keep their tanks out of sight from our Shermans. They did this because our pilots would fly over the area just looking for targets of opportunities. Tanks were high on the list of targets of opportunity.

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zmoney - no I am not wrong. Rudel is writing propaganda, deliberately. And all he and those like him can give is more own side pilot reports, the same that are found on testing, in every instance, to inflate actual air to ground achievements by 10 to 50 times. The only proof of effective air attacks is the owning side reporting its destroyed equipment with the cause, or elaborate survey work by operations researchers. "I blew up 43 tanks today with 2 rounds apiece" doesn't remotely cut it. And we know to a certainty those claims are untrue, because the dead tanks on the other side do not exist.

As for France, the only important effect air had *tactically* was not against armor, but suppressing French artillery fire in support of the Meuse crossing. Which relied not on actual air to ground fire effects, but on the tendency of artillerymen to avoid firing "during an air raid" to avoid disclosing their location. Which makes sense when air raids last 15 minutes. The Germans exploited that and deliberately stretched out quite weak attacks over hours. This amounts to a clever ruse, and was effective. But not because bombs dropped actually silenced guns.

Allied tanks were not rendered ineffective in 1940 France by German air. They were ineffective due to doctrine and lack of skill using them, lack of all arms support, lack of communications and command. If you look at tactical fights you find the larger the engaged armored forces the better the Germans do. While there is rough equality in fights between just a few tanks, at company level the Germans win lopsidedly, and at battalion they mop the floor with the French, even though the French have a superior mix in armor and gun terms. It was soft systems dominance, not air, that won the armor part of the war in France.

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I agree with JasonC. Tactically, unlike today, airpower was relatively ineffective against armor and in other CAS roles. Where airpower proved its worth, particularly later in the war, was attacking imeediately behind enemy lines, or what is called battlefield air interdiction, attacking supply lines, marshalling yards, trains and fuel dumps.

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Originally posted by JasonC:

As for France, the only important effect air had *tactically* was not against armor, but suppressing French artillery fire in support of the Meuse crossing. Which relied not on actual air to ground fire effects, but on the tendency of artillerymen to avoid firing "during an air raid" to avoid disclosing their location. Which makes sense when air raids last 15 minutes. The Germans exploited that and deliberately stretched out quite weak attacks over hours. This amounts to a clever ruse, and was effective. But not because bombs dropped actually silenced guns.

I hadn't heard of that effect by the twice & trice passing and empty Stukas at the Meuse crossings. I had only thought (and read) of the the effect upon the French Infantry in their trenches etc, being unnerved as much by the Stukas screaching sirens as the bombs that they had dropped. What you are saying makes sense though, however AIUI the intended purpose was only to surpress French Infantry fire, at least as much as I remember it. It may well have been to silence the French artillerymens' fire as well, or even more so. I'll do a check of a few sources, but I was wondering if the suppression of French artillery fire at the Meuse crossings sites by this tactic was both a deliberately intended aim and if it was the key to the success of the crossings?

Allied tanks were not rendered ineffective in 1940 France by German air. They were ineffective due to doctrine and lack of skill using them, lack of all arms support, lack of communications and command. If you look at tactical fights you find the larger the engaged armored forces the better the Germans do. While there is rough equality in fights between just a few tanks, at company level the Germans win lopsidedly, and at battalion they mop the floor with the French, even though the French have a superior mix in armor and gun terms. It was soft systems dominance, not air, that won the armor part of the war in France.
I agree with this line, the French tanks weren't designed for handliability by their crews. One-man turretts, no radios and for many tanks they included a standing position only feature! Not only were most French tanks dysfuntional tactically, they were even more so on an opperational level as well.

This does remind me of an incident where I think Rommell used flare pistols against attacking Char Bs on the 13th of May IIRC, apparently the smoking rounds convinced the French heavy tankers that they were being marked out for an air strike or an artillery barrage, so they turned back!

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