Red, please explain to me how you are going to get the defenders to fly when they are down 3 planes to 1 and then can only used half of them to defend. In your thinking, 300 LW planes are fighting 100 RAF planes, with only 50 of those RAF planes available to defend the island. So in essence you are asking cartoon pilots without any sense of the history to up into a horde at 6-1 odds with little chance of survival.
Outside of myself, maybe you and a few others, who is going to want to fly that scenario? Would the LW have shown up in DGS and been ok with those odds? I kinda doubt it. There is a reason bombers didn't survive well without overwhelming escort. It's going to be an issue in scenarios unless you can find guys willing to fight against the odds that allow for that kind of escort. I can think of a few who'd love the challenge as well as the chance to see what it must have looked like as much as a computer game can allow, but I doubt it would be a big seller
I could care less about points and 'winning' in a scenario as what I'm after is a chance to step back in time as much as a computer flight sim will allow. If it connects me to the history that way, then I'm fine. So that being said, as far as I'm concerned you could set any of the targets to fall over in a strong breeze. All targets do is provide a place for cartoon bomber guys to try and hit, and for cartoon fighter guys to rally to defend.
So the question I have, is did the bombers get to the targets and drop bombs? Did the escorts drive off the defenders? Did the defenders stop the attack?
Red lets also be clear. This is May 42 to August 42. So nothing was 'missed' as you put it. It was all Spitfires and mainly Spitfire Vc with double the ammo load of the AH Vb the defenders had. over 230 Spitfires had arrived by March of 42 with more on the way. So your 1941 argument doesn't hold. Your numbers balance isn't accurate as the Germans had siphoned of a large amount of their units to support North Africa and elsewhere. During the time frame of the scenario the Italians were much bigger players.
No design is ever going to be perfect. That being said, what also needs to be looked at is how the CO's recruited, what the tone was after having a frame not go the way it was supposed to, how was the planning, did the other CO out plan me and did his guys out perform mine.
Red, you were there last scenario when we had that frame where the bombers got clobbered. There was a small contingent that immediately wanted to blame the design, the plan, or whatever they could find outside of the fact that the other guy did their job better then we did. We killed that talk fast. A lot of folks wanted to take their ball and go home cause it 'wasn't fun'.
We wouldn't let it go that way. We credited the other guys for a better job, and worked at doing ours better the next frame which we did. We also beat the bushes for pilots so that we had as many as we could to help the cause. And you know how hard we worked from long before the scenario ran to every day while it ran to keep our guys engaged and invested.
This isn't an FSO, and it shouldn't be perceived as such. These things take a lot of personal investment to make them work. And you get out of them what you put into them. FSO approaches that a different way and does it well for FSO. But FSO's aren't scenarios any more then scenarios are not FSO's.
