Nah, that's just beyond the scope of this discussion - you're talking about which FHs to bomb, not whether to bomb them at all, or when. And it depends on the situation. If a base is already isolated by geography it's best to hammer it directly, and if it has several large and medium fields nearby, isolating it is doomed to failure.
See Saxman's post, he covered this...
Not true. The closer base always has the advantage, because as you mention below, time is everything; if you have time, you have alt. A defender can up, HO one attacker, die, and be up again inside 20 seconds; even if he only kills one attacker every 3-4 times he ups, he's doing more damage than a pilot who kills 2-3 enemies but is out of the fight for 10+ minutes when he dies. If the defenders manage to gain a numerical edge it's very difficult to lose it, beause at any given time half or more of the attackers are in transit. If the hangers are flat and the attackers have a CV a mile offshore, the reverse is true - the attackers can both gang up on defenders and climb at their leisure when the defenders are dead.
The closer base only has the advantage if they can take off and fight, and if they have to quickly get wheels up and deal with vulchers, they aren't going to be effective. If they can take off in an La-7, K4, Spit 16, or other fast-climbing, fast-accelerating aircraft from a further base, they can very quickly arrive at an alt and speed which will allow them to get your goon (unless the base is already taken before they can arrive... Which requires the town down). You are not stopping them if they know what they are doing.
True, to some degree, but it's easier and just as effective (see above) to take out the hangars. Give me two other good buff pilots and a formation of Lancs and we can flatten a small base in one run and the town in a second (one if the angle permits one run for both). Two or three fighters can deack a port or V-base, but not an airfield and town, and some of them are likely to be crippled or shot down in the process.
With the same two good bomber pilots you can almost wipe out the town in a few passes (the better the bomber pilot, the quicker the subsequent passes). Bring along a heavy-cannon fighter to clean up, and time the goon to drop just as the town is cleared, and you have a fully functional field to continue operations from.
Sometimes killing two goons is enough, if it's a long flight. But more impotant, precisely: it's all about attrition. But why does attrition work against the attacker? Because he has to spend time coming back and the defender can use that delay to his advantage. If your contention above were true, that would be an advantage, because the attacker has all that time to grab alt. But it isn't, because the defender can spend that same time shooting the remaining attackers down and then grabbing alt, or having several planers do each.
Attrition isn't just a numbers game in here. It's also energy. From my experience, I'd say energy is more useful. Much more so, if you know what you're doing. If you give people the option to up from the attacked field, they don't have energy. If you force them to up from another, they will have that. Combine that with the fact that the attacker (except for level bombers) must, by default, go low to carry out there attacks, and you will soon be faced with a major problem.
I don't think anyone who's played the game more than a month would dispute that the VH is the first priority (with the possible exception of ords, if you're attacking from a CV close by). As for ack, as I said, taking down six hangers is quicker, safer, and requires fewer people. Sure, if you have 15 or 20 attackers, de-ack and vulch, but who needs 15-20 people to capture a base? And unless you've got 20 attackers capping, in which case it's a moot point, ten or twenty uppers are better for the defense than reinforcements coming in high one at a time.
Who needs 15-20 people to vulch? On a small field you only need three to cover all options... Deacking is also quite doable by a small group of people, working in concert.
Your second statement does not follow from the first, because however you slice it it is necessary to take the town down and suppress the defenders to take a base, and because bombing six neatly lined-up hangars is quicker and more foolproof than hitting 20 scattered acks and quicker than bombing 12 or 18 hangars at nearby bases.
Vulching suppresses. Destroying the FHs funnels them to new locations. The only way this is not a problem is if you can capture the base before they arrive, but if you can already do that, why did you need to knock down the FHs?
(It is possible to take a base by having 3 sets of buffs come in NOE and pop at the last second to flatten the town without going near the field, and having a goon follow immediately behind, but that depends absolutely on surprise and few or no defenders being up when you get there. It's also possible to take it in a GV rush without touching the field, and we do that sometimes, but if the defenders are even mildly alert it's a low-odds proposition for the same reason given above re: attrition - attackers who die take much longer to return than defenders.)
NOE missions require surprise because NOE missions, by default, surrender any chance of an energy advantage from the get-go. If there is the slightest warning of an attack (ie, a chance for the defender to gain energy), you are done for.
Judging by the number of players who act that way, especially in the giant endless furballs, I don't think that is any more common among those who like base-taking than anyone else.
More common or not, it's more detrimental to the base-takers' aims. Note the giant friendly cluster around the attacker's home base when a single con shows up nearby. Really, the quickest way to disrupt a base capture is to roll a fairly fast plane (perked spinner baits are best) near the attacker's ingress route. "Mine mine mine!" takes over.
The bottom line is that the base captures that fail do not fail because a FH was left up, or taken down. They fail because the guys who harp "teamwork, strategy, and tactics" rarely practice them. If they were as into that sort of thing as they profess, they'd be near unstoppable. There are certainly enough mega squads that have the #s to pull off a major FSO-styled attack...
