Battle of Britain coming, Thursday Aug. 14

[Brooke]

Battle of Britain tomorrow, folks.

Please help recruit so that we can have lots of players. 

[Brooke]

The battle starts tonight at 10 pm Eastern, folks. 

[danny76]

I hate to be disparaging of the work some guys have put into this, nevertheless this was dreadful, icon ranges all over the place, barely a contact, fact is, England could accurately determine height, range and comm ops  in the Battle of Britain, yet we do not hve this facility in modern culture. The Battle of Britain, is possibly the single most important use of air power in the history of mankind.

[LLv34_Dictonius]

Well... we had some good time out there, thank you all!!!

[Brooke]

In this one, the RAF has tower radar (full radar when a person is in the tower) to use as it sees fit, and of course plenty of radio comm capability.  But coordination is up to the sides in "This Day in WWII" events.

Danny, did you try taking command or helping to coordinate for your side?  Sometimes that helps a lot, although there are times when one tries that and no one listens.  Usually, at least some of the player base is willing to get coordinated.

[715]

Are there really enough people taking part that one on each side can be saddled with sitting in the tower constantly telling others where the dots are?  Why not automate RAF control, i.e. show the dots to the pilots.  I kind of got tired traipsing about towards flashing bases only to find Ju88s that were faster than me, already had destroyed their targets, and are nearly impossible to kill with 0.303s anyway.  Even with dots visible the radar range is so much shorter than the real BoB radar that it is impossible to intercept incoming bombers before they drop anyway.  At least give us the dots so we can waste our time trying?

[Brooke]

I haven't had complaints about the radar setup before, but based on the above comments, I think that it might be better to change to sector counters for the RAF instead of tower-only radar.

For any interested, when I was designing it, here is what I was thinking.

-- The LW would likely go for things on the coast near the RAF airfields (like the p105 and p106 area), and LW airfields are 1-1.5 sectors from targets, so I figured that the fighting would be relatively confined.

-- In the real BoB, the LW had large numerical superiority, but that's not workable in AH.  In BoB scenarios, we can adjust it more finely (like 1.35 LW to 1 RAF or whatever).  In Scenarios, for bombers to have a shot at getting to target, you usually need 1:1 on fighters one side vs. the other, then the side with bombers gets bombers in addition to that.  but In "This Day" events, they are more informal, less controlled, and it is much easier to have 1:1 than 1.35:1 or something like that.  That's favorable to the RAF, but I suspected that command and control would be significantly worse in "This Day" than in Scenarios and that it would thus balance out.

-- Throughout the 2 hours of the event, there would be pilots taking off from time to time.  Before takeoff, a pilot could take 20 seconds or so to look at radar and let folks know what he sees, then take off.  The next guy up could do the same, and so on, giving the RAF a view of things.  I didn't think anyone would want to sit in the tower the whole time or need to do so.

-- I thought that tower-only radar would be more powerful to a side than sector counters.