Currently in FSO, radar is off for all countries. The idea is it makes things harder not knowing where the enemy is, or even where your friends are. Thought has to go into patrolling, guessing the enemy's flight routes and planning accordingly. This I get. It's part of the challenge and fun, not knowing when and where you'll run into the enemy. You have to work for it.
However I WAS curious if as an experiment radar could be tried under these conditions:
1) Carriers: Carrier groups, especially late in the war, were seldom blind like they are in FSO.
2) Facilities that WOULD have had radar. I'm not talking ever airfield, vehicle base, or port. But if an airfield is located where a radar station would have been located historically, turn it on for THAT base only (this would particularly apply to BoB and other Western European setups where radar installations were active all across the coasts, and possibly if we run another PTO campaign over mainland Japan)
3) Allied aircraft ONLY appear in radar if they are within radar coverage. This would be more interesting if it could be set up so they only appear as a blip and not color coded Allied/Friendly (not sure if that's possible, tho).
So just as an example:
There's a PTO campaign set in the South Pacific of 1943/1944. Most of the facilities here were unfinished strips of dirt, coral and pierced steel planking. Their radar would be disabled (say, radar tower destroyed) by the CM. American and Japanese carriers operating in the region would have their radar on. Now, the campaign happens to be centered around the USAAF, USN and USMC raids on Rabaul. This was one of Japan's major bases in the area and would have been covered by radar, so while the smaller satellite fields have theirs disabled, the ports, V-bases and airfields representing Rabaul itself are left active.
New strategy introduced: As it stands, strikes must plan their flight plans based around whether or not flashing bases and factories is worthwhile en-route to target. Now the question is do they reveal themselves on radar?
I'll go slip into my asbestos overalls now.
