GCI argument is valid...to a point. Ground controllers did give vector/course/speed of targets to airborne fighters (so long as a friendly radar had contact with the target), but did not and could not give the airborn pilot precise location info, and certainly not on ALL contacts in theater. So, the dots should go unless you're in the tower...period.
While in the air, my preference would be to use friendly and enemy bearing-arrows, along with radar bar. However, I also feel the bandit vectors should only work if a con is being tracked by YOUR radar. You should be able to select whether the arrow points at the "nearest threat" or the "largest threat within XX miles" using a dot-command. I also feel strongly that if you are below radar and not transmitting over the radio, you should not show up on the enemy's radar bar either.
Automated GCI messages generated by the Host could be used to announce the location and heading of large enemy formations spotted by your radar-- killing the HQ should disable these Otto-GCI messages for the owning country. There are a number of variations on these ideas that could be implemented, of cours.
Historical Note: GCI in WWII was nowhere near infallible or omnisceint. It could give fairly accurate bearing and target speed, but was incapable of giving anything but the grossest estimate of the size of a raid or it's altitude. The point of having radar in AH is to help you find a fight, and to allow organized resistance to attacks on your homeland. It should not take the place of good pilot SA. The fact is, most of the kills in real life came as a surprise to the victim, because the poor, overworked GCI director could not be on the horn to every pilot in the air. During the BoB, more intercepts failed than succeeded, simply because of the time lag involved in taking all the different inputs from radar, radio intercept, and visual sightings and peicing together a semi-coherent picture of the threat and getting that info to the pointy-end of the spear (the pilot in the cocpit). Over the Continent, the Germans had somewhat better results, but mainly because the Allied formations were so huge.
A final word on night-fighter ops: The radar on these aircraft were of comparitively short range, and could essentially only point in the forward direction (with a "spot-light" or acquisition cone of a realatively narrow arc). GCI was used to place the night-fighter close enough -- and point him in the right direction -- to place the intruder inside the rather narrow detection envelope of the airborn radar. The radar was kept on "stand-by mode until GCI told them to "light-up;" this kept their presence a secret from their intended victims.
Sorry for the long post, but radar and radar signatures were my business once upon a time.
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Sabre, a.k.a. Rojo
(S-2, The Buccaneers)
[This message has been edited by Rojo (edited 08-15-2000).]
