"Snailman in a bomber!? What's the world coming to?"
This was a comment I read during my last AH tour. I found that a bit strange, as I have been a prolific bomber pilot in AH over much of my career - in fact, for many years I spent more time in bombers than in any other game mode. But I guess It's just not that fancy going on regular bombing sorties than blasting bombers out of the sky, which gave me some very modest notoriety back in the day.
I was so serious about bombing, that I made a lot of charts, climb profiles, target maps and of course: Stats, which I felt were very much lacking from AH for the bombing part of the game.
So when the central strats were introduced in 2012 (and the B-29 was still new), I decided to log all my bomber sorties in detail, like this:
So here a few facts & charts from eleven years of flying bombers in the MA:
The machines and their missions:
A mission is one flight by me, which could be either one or three AH sorties (when choosing formation). Total 2980 combat missions with 8504 AH sorties (excluding the C-47 runs)
Strategic: All attacks on City, HQ and factories
Tactical: Attacks on bases and towns: Porking fields, smashing hangars, killing towns for capturing purposes.
Anti-Ship: Bombing fleets or naval recce
Terror: 'Morale bombing' of towns. Actually milking town centres for score.
Supply: When our AA factory was down to 10% again...
Troop transport: As you can see, never cared much for that.
Some missions were not entirely pure, often I would bomb several radar stations on my way to the strats or put a leftover bomb on an innocent town. I categorized the sorties by 'main intent' and mostly by whatever target type I put most bombs on)
Tonnage dropped by plane type. Total: 26,319 tons
Tons dropped by target country
Average mission duration
In total, I spent ~2500 hours in bombers during that 11 years, averaging to about 40 hours in bombers each tour. For comparison, the average AH playtime for a single pilot is about 24 hours per tour, all modes combined.
Average mission/bombing altitudes by type
And what did I kill?
4 HQ
7,670 city buildings, most of them being the city blocks of the old central strat target.
41,917 factory buildings:
36,395 town buildings
890 hangars
17,657 guns (a lot of them coming from attacks on ships and to a lesser extent from deacking AA towers in the Ki-67)
279 ships (mostly CV and CA)
968 ammo bunkers
1,073 barracks
854 radar towers
502 fuel bunkers
(I also killed 37 vehicles, but that was always a by-product of smashing hangars and such. Dedicated GV hunting did always happen in attack mode)
Plane in Focus: B-29 SuperfortressAs I spent most of my time in this magnificent machine, here some more details about it:
Loadouts used:
The 250 & 100 lb loadouts had been quite useful with the old central strats, basically didn't use them anymore after the strats were split. The 4x4k was great for sinking CVs, as my aim against turning task groups really sucked. But even then, I remember that one time where I flew 3 missions vs a task group and failed to sink the battleship even after dropping 36 4,000lbs bombs...
Attack altitudes
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The really high altidudes were usually only used when coming near the Komet bases - not so much as to avoid them entirely, but to help fighting them.
Combat in the B-29
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I really, really really dreaded Me 410s. Whenever I spotted one coming after me, I immediately tried to outclimb it. Didn't always work, tho...
That's all I have for now. Still wondering if I should post a total AH career stats roundup at some point.
Hope I didn't distract too much from the mudfights.
