I flew a couple of bombing missions last night in 17's. The first thing I think we have to remember is that the E6B has the wind direction and speed for what ever altitude you are flying. Did not appear to be any wind below 10,000 feet, but was blowing from different directions at different altitudes from there on up. If you consult your E6B prior to bomb drop and the wind is from 270 degrees at 20, then you had better plan your approach track on a heading of 270 degrees or 090 degrees. Did this twice from 17,000 feet and dead on target. Another thing you may want to consider: we, or most pilots set their salvo's on 3, considering 500lbers, using the default delay of 0.05. Works OK with no wind, but now you have a wind helping to disperse your bombs on the way down to target. I used salvo 5, with a delay of 0.10 and seemed to work just fine. That is a lot of bomb weight to put on a target for sure, but if I am going to the trouble of taking off, climbing out, setting up a target run, I want to make sure I didn't waste my time by missing the target!
Bottom line is this: We are going to have to do a little more pre-flight planning, run "path finder" aircraft over target to access wind direction and speed and last but not least, have plenty of bombers in formation so that one element of bombers is assigned to only one hangar. Same thing with the towns, instead of cruising around at 30 to 35 thousand, porking towns for points, now you are going to have to do a little more planning. I introduced my squad to the H2X "Micky" radar bombing method on towns and it works wonders on shutting down a town with one pass, including in most cases, complete de-acking and white flag. Now we are going to have to take the wind direction in to consideration.
Not sure how programmer for AH computed wind resistance during a headwind and the increase in forward speed of bombs during a tailwind, but I suspect its one of those things we will have to experiment with to learn if you have to drop early or late to compensate for the wind. I noticed no difference in the head wind last night, but downwind seemed to make a slight difference.
Another thing you might want to consider is this: at full power, as most people do, your ground speed is going to be higher than at normal E6B cruise speed. I always seemed to have better bomb accuracy with my power setup at normal cruise power settings.
