PLEASE ... someone point me to some documentation that describes, during WWII, actual dog fighting at night took place. Is there any recorded event that P-51s/P-47s/Spitfires slugged it out in a furball with 190s/109s at night? Please show me where protracted dog fighting took place in the dark of night.
For the life of me, I can't imagine a flight of P-51s or P-47s escorting a night time bomber raid over France or Germany ... because if the Germans were to send a group of 109s/190s to intercept the bombers, how in the hell could any of those fighter planes actually see each other with enough detail and depth perception to actually dog fight to either defend or attack.
True "fighter" planes were not equipt to fight in darkness.
As far as I am concerned, the term "night fighter" is misinterpreted. These planes did not actually "fight", at least from what I have read. They were more like "night hunters" that used radar to find their prey and then ambushed them.
If we did have "night", the only reason why we could even begin to fight in a true "fighter" plane would be because AH does not properly render "night" conditions, or people are tweaking their monitor's gamma to allow them to properly see under those conditions.
That's pretty much it in my mind, night fighting in WW2 was a totally different affair, while there was a lot of cat and mouse type maneuvering the dogfight in the classic WW2 sense just didn't happen. AH isn't a WW2 simulation however I do think HTC strives to make it approximate WW2 combat within in the context of a game that will appeal to a large enough audience (hence why we don't have an Axis vs Allies main arena).
We had night in the MA's a long time ago and once the novelty wore off it was kind of boring if you were a fighter pilot because you had a real hard time seeing and finding someone to shoot at. I think a good bomber analogy would be to imagine all your bomb targets were covered by low thick fog, sure you could get in the general vicinity of your target but would have no way of seeing the target itself to try and hit it with a bomb. Cloud cover obscured targets in WW2 all the time, which was why they had secondary and even tertiary targets as part of the mission profile but that would get pretty frustrating in the MA as well once the novelty wore off.
