F4C Strafing Hangars

[Blue Mako]

Just a question:  Why can the F4C strafe down fighter and bomber hangars?

Wouldn't the hangars be virtually impervious to aircraft cannon and machine gun fire?

I saw this happening last night and it seems odd to me...  I would expect a hangar to survive without much in the way of structural damage from a strafing attack.

[Pongo]

well it couldnt level the building . But that is just a graphic to show that the bases ability to launch aircraft has been impaired. 800 rounds of 20mm hispano in the right places could sure do that.

[MiG Eater]

I've long thought that it not the hanger that is being destroyed, per se, but the contents within:  ie, airplanes.  There are several WW2 era hangers on the airfield where I am as I type this and they are mostly steel girder reinforced shells of a building.  High velocity cannon shells would have no problem penetrating the outer walls to reak havoc within on people, planes and materials.

MiG

[Toad]

The storage/tool bench part of my hangar usually looks as if 800 rounds of 20mm just landed.  

But the airplane part is CLEAN.

[Blue Mako]

Guys you are prolly right, for gameplay you need to be able to stop planes launching and you need to represent that with the hangar blowing up.  Still just think they are too soft if: it takes 3k of bombs to destroy them why can you strafe them down?

I used the 1C strafe-the-hangar-down capability myself last night and I must say it is very easy to destroy a hangar.  You only need to lob a couple of hundred rounds into one to bring it down...  Oh well, I guess I'll just use it and be happy...  

P.S. I don't often fly F4C, just when jabo needed and cv only base nearby...

[Yello1]

Hmmm ONLY a coupl hundred rounds - per gun - of 20 mm ammo.  Heh that would ruin most folks day guys.  The Hangar modeling is like everything else a representation and generalization.  Although the 3 k limit would make you think that this is a thick concrete of the NATO variety, they didn't have much of that sort of hardened target in WWII - don't think they had any hangars like that really. Most hangars are tin over girders, and some fields didn't have any hangars at all, just parking areas - often on dirt or grass - and the tools of the trade in tents or huts. I think the idea is if you were to make a field inoperable you had to drop X amount of Ordnance into the plane hangars, shops and runways to knock the field off line.  Nine one thousand pound bombs aimed at these features on a smallish field would do the trick in HT's opinion, so 3 k takes out a hangar (9 k for all three). Well, you say, is 600 rounds per 20 mm gun the same explosive force of a 1 k bomb? No. But the strafing ammo isnt being dropped willy nilly as a bomb is - even a dive bomb.  Strafing is a much more precise allocation of ammunition.  Thus you get more bang for your buck.  HT basically thinks a pair of B17s with aimed bombing can knock out a small field and a trio of F4s strafing could do the same, all assuming no losses to flak. Thus he modeled the hangars to require X amount of bombs or x amount of MG ammo. I think thats a fair assumption, tad optimistic but fair.

[Yello1]

By The way if you want my opinion of a better way to represent an Airfield, make the targets what they were.  Fuel ammo etc should be as it is BUT fuel should have more units and more steps (ie ten fuel lose ten percent per one lost) and fuel should be able to go to Zero, then you can't fly at all.  Next, you can have hangars and sheds. Each one represents a percentage of the fields ability to work on planes. If thats damaged the time to rearm on the runway increases (instead of 30 seconds may be as long as five minutes if field totally beat down) and when you hit Take Off in tower you get a message Time to Take Off X Minutes, which counts down and gives you an option to cancel. This would vary from zero on untouched field to ten minutes in a beat down field, adding a minute per level of damage to the hangars and huts. Next you would have to have runway damage.  Runway craters would need to be regular damage - 30 minutes to repair (or better yet vary the time on the size of the bomb - 100 lber 5 minutes, 1000 pounder half hour, 4000 pounder heh well say an hour just for playability).  If you roll over a crater, you prang.  If a runway has more than 10 K of ordnance in it the Button for it dissapears from the Take Off button area. Here the ONLY thing that will work is Bombs and Naval bombardment - no runway cratering with MG, Cannon or Tank Guns. Now finally you need to represent available aircraft. Have ten planes (15 for medium field, twenty or more for large field) parked around the field. You could break em up to types (e.g. three buffs seven fighters). If these are all destroyed, you can't fly from the field (or again break it into types).  There are no planes there to fly. These would regenerate quickly, like hangars. AND could be regenerated faster by landing planes on the field (ie flying up replacements or sortied planes returning). Say add thirty seconds of regeneration per plane landed successfully.  These steps would add alot to the sim of attacking a field. You would be looking to crater runways and strafe planes and blow up fuel tanks mainly, while hitting whatever else you could.  Now the fact that many fields had grass runways that were hard to Knock out due to size adds an issue here, but that is simmed to some extent by the fact that if runway is cratered but not all runways destroyed you could still fly, just do so on the grass off runway.