I hear quite some complaining about the "Awac" radar system. I agree that the radar seems somewhat overdone, but there has to be a compromise between gameplay and realism. Now I thought that maybe we could combine what we have now with some historical data...
During the battle of Brittain, the Brits had a war room with a big map on a table, and pretty ladies who were moving small planes over that map, indicating where friendly and enemy fighters were. What if we had something like this in the maproom or in the tower? When still on the ground it will be realtime, up to date. But when you step into a plane, you will get a map with all the last-known aircraft locations.
Then when airborne, your map will get an update every 5-10-15 minutes or whatever you think would work. This simulates the aircontrol giving you new enemy aircraft locations. Like a luftwaffe pilot said: "When we arrived over England, our briefings were three hours old. Theirs (the RAF) were three minutes old."
This way it may also be possible to fool the enemy, by making direction changes from time to time. But you can take it one step further: once an enemy aircraft has been identified, or a plane has been as close as 4K from it, the plane type will now appear on the map. So when I get a map update and I see that three planes have been reported in my sector, I fly to the location where I think they will be when I get there. Their aircraft are still marked as "unknown". I see them, zoom by and see that it are two B17's and a Pony. Now with the next update, could be in 5 minutes, everyone will see on his map that a bomberformation has been spotted at that location, heading in that direction. I think this is more historicly arrucate because of in WW2 they often knew what type of planes was coming in.
What about it? Do I earn a cookie?
