Bomber Drones

[earl1937]

  One of the things which I have noticed a good bit here lately, is a fighter making one pass at a flight of 3 Bombers, (1 Pilot), and all three going down after only one pass.
I think Hi Tech or whom ever does these things, should consider moving the drones a little further away from the "Mother ship", in order to stop that nonsense!
I was up the other night in my B-17's and a KI84 shot down all three in one pass! Game or no game, that should not be allowed to happen!
I would also like to see, in the formation box area, a choice of the standard "3 finger" bomber formation, a right echelon or a left echelon, with the same drones used by the mother ship.

[Zimme83]

-1. Separating the drones means that u cannot drop bombs from all 3 planes at a small target like Hangars. It would also have a negative effect on your abillity to defend yourself if a fighter can attack one plane w/o getting in firing range of the other two.

[Blinder]

Back when I left Warbirds in 2004 there were a whole slew of dot commands for the manipulation of the drone formation. You could separate their distance and even send them off to attack the closest target without you. I did this often with flights of SBDs back then.

Why can't it be done now in this game here a decade later?

[Zimme83]

Back when I left Warbirds in 2004 there were a whole slew of dot commands for the manipulation of the drone formation. You could separate their distance and even send them off to attack the closest target without you. I did this often with flights of SBDs back then.

Why can't it be done now in this game here a decade later?

That is a better idea.

[Volron]

I would love the ability to change my set's formation.

[Xavier]

Just allow me to set turret convergence on formations and I'm set! 

Not really 

[bozon]

-1. Separating the drones means that u cannot drop bombs from all 3 planes at a small target like Hangars. It would also have a negative effect on your abillity to defend yourself if a fighter can attack one plane w/o getting in firing range of the other two.

The purpose of the formation is to increase your chances of hitting, not to triple the amount of damage you can cause to one point. When one can snipe GVs from 5000 feet with a single 250/500 lbs bomb, you know that it is too accurate. Ironically, level bombing is more accurate than dive bombing in AH. 

Formations were added together with the full manual calibration system to compensate for the lowered accuracy by hitting a larger area. Since bomber players cannot stand to miss, that system was changed to the current "hold button for perfect calibration" system, but the formations stayed and thus a bomber player now commands 3 times the destructive power to point targets - which should not be. 3 times the destructive power to area targets (factories, towns) is fine by me.

[Zimme83]

The purpose of the formation is to increase your chances of hitting, not to triple the amount of damage you can cause to one point. When one can snipe GVs from 5000 feet with a single 250/500 lbs bomb, you know that it is too accurate. Ironically, level bombing is more accurate than dive bombing in AH. 

Formations were added together with the full manual calibration system to compensate for the lowered accuracy by hitting a larger area. Since bomber players cannot stand to miss, that system was changed to the current "hold button for perfect calibration" system, but the formations stayed and thus a bomber player now commands 3 times the destructive power to point targets - which should not be. 3 times the destructive power to area targets (factories, towns) is fine by me.

I know.  killing hangars from 25k w a single bomb is a litle too accurate. Its eliminate the need for large bomb formarion, a single player can kill a town, base or factory by himself. Its a little too much. But decreasing accuracy for buffs only leads to that people will use jabos instead.

[DubiousKB]

The purpose of the formation is to increase your chances of hitting, not to triple the amount of damage you can cause to one point. When one can snipe GVs from 5000 feet with a single 250/500 lbs bomb, you know that it is too accurate. Ironically, level bombing is more accurate than dive bombing in AH. 

Formations were added together with the full manual calibration system to compensate for the lowered accuracy by hitting a larger area. Since bomber players cannot stand to miss, that system was changed to the current "hold button for perfect calibration" system, but the formations stayed and thus a bomber player now commands 3 times the destructive power to point targets - which should not be. 3 times the destructive power to area targets (factories, towns) is fine by me.

Correct me if I'm wrong....    but didn't the addition of wind layers affect bombing accuracy. I have learned, as i'm sure many others have to properly compensate using our wonderful bombsight, but i thought they DID make it a bit more difficult.

I mean, it's easy to bomb something highly visible when i am allowed to line up on it and calibrate my bomb sight for 40 seconds. tough to miss with an autopilot so finely tuned! 


  Also.....  For me to expend the time it takes to properly produce a decent bomb run on specific targets and to only miss because of "randomization in the drop" or "variance", would be as frustrating to a buff pilot as a fighter interceptor climbing to a set of buffs only to have them bail out.... 

[Slade]

-1

IRL they stayed tight to protect each other.  As a bomber hunter I very rarely can take two.  I am 100% happy to get just one on a pass.

Now those 262 guys...

[Lusche]

Correct me if I'm wrong....    but didn't the addition of wind layers affect bombing accuracy.

No, it didn't. Correctly calibrated (and thus compensating for wind), the patterns are about the same they used to be. The only real 'difficulty' added by it was the requirement of recalibrating your bombsight if you came around for another pass, thus requiring somewhat longer extending distance.

[DubiousKB]

No, it didn't. Correctly calibrated (and thus compensating for wind), the patterns are about the same they used to be. The only real 'difficulty' added by it was the requirement of recalibrating your bombsight if you came around for another pass, thus requiring somewhat longer extending distance.

that's what I'm referring too though. if you make a course correction you would have to re-calibrate to ensure proper alignment with new heading vs wind.  Perhaps it's not the hindrance I thought it was. (not all of us are grizzled veterans of the game and it's progress  )

I wouldn't mind seeing different formations, but maintaining separation as is. Now what would be REALLY cool, was an additional .dt command to determine position in a larger formation.

example .wingman leader POSITION 1  .wingman leader POSITION 2  and so on, this wouldn't remove the standard wingman command, but would provide additional data to auto-pilot to attempt to maintain a specific relationship to the leader.

This would have to be a set formation (historical gents educate me on standard bomber formations) and your flight would simply attempt to maintain a specific location near your flight leader. From this we would see tighter overall formations of players in the historically accurate formations (to an extend).

Not sure I like the idea of moving drones around, may be more coding work than necassary... Is the juice worth the squeeze sorta thing on that... 

Still think it'd be cool to be able to slide into a set formation on wingman setup. 

[Zimme83]

Correct me if I'm wrong....    but didn't the addition of wind layers affect bombing accuracy. I have learned, as i'm sure many others have to properly compensate using our wonderful bombsight, but i thought they DID make it a bit more difficult.

I mean, it's easy to bomb something highly visible when i am allowed to line up on it and calibrate my bomb sight for 40 seconds. tough to miss with an autopilot so finely tuned! 


  Also.....  For me to expend the time it takes to properly produce a decent bomb run on specific targets and to only miss because of "randomization in the drop" or "variance", would be as frustrating to a buff pilot as a fighter interceptor climbing to a set of buffs only to have them bail out.... 

Do a rough calibration (+/- 5mph) and use trottle to match true and calibrated speed....

[bozon]

Also.....  For me to expend the time it takes to properly produce a decent bomb run on specific targets and to only miss because of "randomization in the drop" or "variance", would be as frustrating to a buff pilot as a fighter interceptor climbing to a set of buffs only to have them bail out.... 

"Time expended" should never be a parameter to determine success. Unfortunately, it currently is for bomber because if one takes the time to climb to 20+k, he will rarely be met by fighters over bases (strats may be a different story). The bombs however will hit the target just as accurately as if he was flying at 15k. I don't understand the mentality of some bomber pilots - fighter and JABO pilots often get blasted out of the skies within 10 seconds of enemy contact after flying for 10 minutes to the target.

"randomization in the drop" perhaps should not be increased (in spite of historical accuracy), however "randomization in the calibration" should (in the semi-auto calib. method used now). This opens the door to expert bomber pilots to opt for a full manual calibration which will not introduce randomization, but instead introduce the inaccuracy of the skill of the player in performing the calibration (this involves holding the cross hairs on a fixed point in the terrain for a few seconds).

I may actually post a wish about this now.

[Lusche]

"Time expended" should never be a parameter to determine success. Unfortunately, it currently is for bomber because if one takes the time to climb to 20+k, he will rarely be met by fighters over bases (strats may be a different story). The bombs however will hit the target just as accurately as if he was flying at 15k. I don't understand the mentality of some bomber pilots - fighter and JABO pilots often get blasted out of the skies within 10 seconds of enemy contact after flying for 10 minutes to the target.

"Time expended" is a huge factor for the players in this game. Whe hauling bombs, it's often all about a) time efficiency and b) absolute time spend. That's why you see so much more jabos porking fields than bombers, and so many more low-med altitude bombers than high altitude ones.
Even a close frontline, single field pork run in the rocket-like climbing G4M at 20k does take me 40 minutes to execute (t/o to landing), same for a B-26 version at 13k. You can do that much faster in a Jabo, and with not much more risk of being stopped before you reach your target.
A 50% fuel B-17 takes about 25 minutes to reach 20k. Then you have to get to speed and take time to calibrate. And over contested bases you still will have to face bomber hunters.
Much easier and faster to bring a Jug to 15k race to the target and come down screaming on it. Such jabos are actually quite difficult to stop unless you catch them near their climbout area.