Since this an unofficial fresh start for online flight simming I wanted to ask a few things about high altitude level bombing.
When I played warbirds I liked flying the bombers. Dogfighting is fun, but I like winning the "war" instead of unending fighter engagments that produced no effect. I liked the warbirds bombers, particularily when maned gunning was added.
Some people asked for mid-flight gunner sign ups. Thats nice, but cannot be counted on. I also like to man the guns too. Since flying a bomber is mostly flying an airliner (you keep the pointy end into the forward and the oily side down) it wasn't too difficult to fly one. There are really only two areas of interest when talking high alt bombing...the bomb run, and the air to air combat with the machine guns. Doing those things is why I want to fly a bomber.
What I would like to see are three things. An autopilot that will follow pre-mission set of waypoints you designate on a map with speeds and altitudes, a master gun turret control, and targets that need to be carpet bombed (large in size but needing litterally tons of ordnance to demolish....aka factory zones in citys).
First, bombing targets. Once near the target you go off autopilot and into the bombadier position to manually bomb the target (autopilot gets you there, but you need to do the bomb run yourself). No more single bomb per target please. I want to drop an entire stick of bombs all at once and see those long multiple explosion craterfests that result. Maybe even add in a slight bomb spread to the bombs to prevent truely pinpoint acurate bombing (bombs spreading out left and right after they drop). Another thing I wanted to see was a ground target thats tailor made for carpet bombing. In other words one that would take alot more damage when hit multiple times in rapid succession (aka seconds between hits) than getting bombed lightly over a long period of time. This promotes large formations bombing the same target. Its not enough to just put four bombs thru the roof and disrupt the enemy during the time they need to put plywood over the holes....its better to overwhelm them with impossible levels of damage to control at once. Even if it is a target that requires three plane loads of bombs in a few minutes time, or it is not destroyed. Anything less than what is needed means you wasted your time and should have bombed a smaller, secondary target.
When it comes to maning the guns, if we had a master gun control and autopilot/copilot we can trust, then we wouldn't necessarily need otto. Basically you get a full 360 degree panning turret that can also aim straight up and down. If a gun turret can fire in the current aim point....it does. B29s had this sort of gun control setup (except the tail gun which was a seperate gun point). Even if this was simply gun grouping from the current turret it would be enough (aka top turret firing up and to the 5 oclock position also fires the tail turret and right waist gun of a B-17). This sort of thing means we probably won't need multiple people crewing a single bomber, but thats the way it usually works anyways in the game. Why gun, when you can bring your own bomber with?
Maybe I am asking alot? Maybe this is already the way it is going to be? I don't know. I do know that is what I thought WWII bombing was. I hope to see it.
Hans, CO of the Mercenries sqaudron.
