Opinions wanted on possible special event

[Brooke]

I'm reading Whirlwind, by Tillman, about the air-war against Japan in WWII.  I had previously thought of B-29 missions as hundreds of B-29's vs. very few Japanese fighters, and so not a fit for a special event.  However, among other things, the book covers the early B-29 missions, some of which involved unescorted B-29's at high alt vs. somewhat comparable numbers of late-war Japanese fighters, with outcomes not being lopsided for either side.

Do you think that it would be fun to have a special event of B-29's vs. late-war Japanese fighters where everyone is using air spawns to get up to higher alts?

Do you think it would be relatively balanced, with the altitude helping to offset that the B-29's have no escort?  Do you think it would work best with B-29's without formations if the side balance were to be 50:50 or still with formations enabled?

[Brooke]

If it seemed fun enough as a special event, I'd run it during one of the "This Day in WWII" slots.

[Lusche]

Altitude is more than just an offset for no escorts. High altitude B-29s are more than a handfull for even the specialised  high alt late war monsters, Japanese fighter simply don't have enough performance up there, facing the enormous firepower of a B-29 formation with little to no speed advantage. With air starts and proper positioning, they can hope to do maybe 1 pass at most.
I'd rather suggest an altitude limit for the B-29s (and still no escorts).





As you can see, even as low as 20k the N1K has only a ~35 mph advantage over the B-29, which is next to nothing when attacking Superfortresses

[Brooke]

There would indeed be altitude limits for the bombers.  I do that even for B-17's vs. German planes.  I did a "This Day in WWII:  Black Thusday" event once where the B-17's went up to about 32k, and the Germans could do very little in the fight.

I was thinking something like B-29's at 20-22k, no formations, vs. Ki-61, Ki-84, N1K, and A6M5b (where players can pick whichever they want to fly).  Maybe throw in the Bf 110C as a Ki-45.

[Scherf]

Begs the question, what *was* the typical bombing height / speed for B-29s over Japan? I personally haven't a clue.

[lyric1]

Begs the question, what *was* the typical bombing height / speed for B-29s over Japan? I personally haven't a clue.

Depends on time frame.

[Krusty]

Back when the B-29 was first released, I helped do some testing with Sled and somebody else from the FSO team (or somebody pretty active on the FSO side, but I don't recall who). We had the B-29 air spawn and get to 20-25K and fly level, and we had the other two players spawn in japanese aircraft. I don't think in our first 10 tests any of the fighters got a single bomber. The fighters started with plenty of alt advantage to play with. When they could get to the bombers they had only 1, maybe 2 passes if they were lucky. And we weren't even running WEP on the B-29s.


I know that ***I***, one of the worst gunners in the game, ***I*** waxed sled twice in a row as he dove in on me in Ki84s and Ki61s, popping him at 1k out. I remind you *I cannot gun to save my life* and I popped him before he could fire twice. I also shot down the other guy several times. This was with me making turns to repeatedly fly under their air spawn. When the bombers kept going there was not a snowball's chance in hell of the fighters catching up. It would be a prolonged tail chase where the fighters would fly below the bomber for more speed, but if they closed at 10-20mph they could never nose up to fire at them because the B29s can shoot straight down at them as they tried.

I'm not saying B-29s are indestructible, but I am saying as bomber throttles are modeled in this game they hold ALL the cards. It's the equivelant of the B-1 supersonic bomber when you compare it to Japanese planes that try to intercept it.

[bj229r]

To be historic, there would have to be a huge amount of wind, forcing the bombers to fly lower to have any accuracy, giving the fighters a chance (unless HT is gonna give us incendiaries to turn the cities into ash trays)

[VonMessa]

Something without score.

Or clear-cut goals

or objectives

anything that will not create a stir to offend players other than flying around and drinking beer...

[bj229r]

You're instigating!

[VonMessa]

Sadly, I was being serious...

[Karnak]

The B-29s would need to be limited to historical cruise settings or it is all pointless to even try.  At full throttle the Japanese fighters don't have a realistic chance.

[Brooke]

For the first deployments of B-29's into China and India for attacks on Japan, the B-29's flew very high (27-32k), were not able to hit the targets with bombs, and suffered more casualties to mechanical failures of the B-29 than to enemy aircraft.

There were some missions, though, where the Japanese launched 100 fighters to intercept 100 or so B-29's where some B-29's were shot down.

After these early days of B-29 use, the B-29's moved to Pacific islands, flew in increasing numbers, and the ratio of Japanese fighters to B-29's decreased greatly.  They still used high-altitude bombing, and still mostly missed targets, so they moved from trying to hit industrial and military targets to use of incindiaries and area bombing of cities.

After that, LeMay tried a gamble/test of B-29's at 9k at night.  That's as far into the book as I am at the moment regarding B-29 missions. 

Now I'm in the part about the first carrier-based aircraft attacks on Japan.  (The first CV attacks are definitely good for special events, as many of those fights were fairly even in numbers with the Japanese pilots having late-war aircraft.)

[Brooke]

Something without score.

Or clear-cut goals

or objectives

anything that will not create a stir to offend players other than flying around and drinking beer...

"This Day in WWII" events have no rules to memorize (whatever the arena let's you do is OK to do) and very simple scoring. Objectives are "kill enemy aircraft and bomb enemy ground objects" and scoring is "1 point per kill and 0.1 points per object destroyed".

They are designed so that people can jump in at any time during the event, immediately take off, and go attack things, needing no prior preparation or knowledge.  I get almost no complaints about things being too structured.

The next one up is Operation Torch -- here is a description of the event:
http://ahevents.org/events/this-day-in-wwii/607.html?task=view

[Brooke]

Krusty, were your tests with a single B-29 or a formation?  Do you think it would be any fun if it were single B-29's at 20k?