Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: el cid again

Regretfully, we can't use a formula with "number of combats survived"

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(or "number of combats" of any sort) because we must enter a single value for the airframe - regardless of the experiene of the pilot! Pilot experience is a different function - and IS present in WITP - but not in the maneuverability rating of the airframe.

I have begun to see that the issue of roll overcoming angular momentum is a justification for the formula we presently use. To the extent that roll rate matters, multi-engine planes don't do it. Our formula gives them credit for their speed and ROC - but penalizes them for (in effect) poor roll rates - by making the penalty inversely proportional to the number of engines.

Now the formula Herwin proposes above is very interesting - but attributes far too little of the rating to speed. The WITP code may originally have expected purely speed for maneuverability (one programmer guessed that was the case - and some of the data supports the theory in the form of speed/10). It appears later to have included ROC - and possibly other factors (in particular double wings on biplanes).

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Now speed and ROC really do matter a lot - so much that the Japanese insistence on extreme "maneuverability" in the sense we usually think of it was not as important as faster and fater climbing planes - at least eventually (when we figured out a thing or two). To the extent we modify our rating in favor of planes with less wing loading (etc), we are going to make things like Ki-27 and A5M4 (and Zero) look better. And we are going to make F3Fs and F4Fs and many P-xx planes look worse. I am not sure this is really the intent the critics of the rating system have in mind. Worse, we may find P-38 fares worse as well.

Running the numbers a variety of different ways produces this remarkable conclusion: one can do a lot of math to come to very similar results with what we have right now. I DO think that biplanes are not well represented in the RHS formula - and wing loading will help address that - but I suspect that power loading is more or less going to be very similar (relatively speaking) to ROC values. So increasing the non-speed part of the function is likely to benefit biplanes to a degree, and all fighters vs dogs (in terms of ROC and power loading). That may be exactly what we want to do - for relative to true bombers and transports - P-38 (and other 2E fighters) are going to look better. But they really are not going to look better relative to Zeros and other 1E planes - and in fact worse compared to a Pete - which I fear may be both accurate and unpopular.
P-38s could not really dog fight with Zeros very well - and were much better advised to dive on them from above - gaining still more speed in the dive - and not attempting to continue the fight after the firing pass.
Zeros in particular were not very good at diving, had no armor to protect against hits, making any guns (and guns in numbers on US planes) always effective. If something went wrong, the P-38 had armor - and the Zero's only rapid fire guns were .30 cals - which the armor often could stop. It may be a problem in the WITP air model is that players cannot specify any sort of tactics (other than altitude). This forces a P-38 into an extended combat it may not be wise to engage in. On the other hand, given its armor - and ability to go home after losing an engine on occasion - it may be that extended combats actually hurt Zeros even more? Testing will tell.

Oh - for testing - run the test bed through turn one BEFORE saving it for test use. That way you get a common seed for all tests. A new seed is generated on turn 1 - but the Japanese "player" always starts with the same seed on every turn after turn 1. [That is, in any particular game, the seed is handed on from turn to turn, and you can restart a turn and get the same results because the same turn will always start with the same seed]. This way, test results are not affected by different random number seeds. [There are enough variables to worry about without that to confuse things]

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ORIGINAL: Nicholas Bell

Oh let me add this for your consideration of how hopeless this is:  Aircraft do not need weapons to shoot each other down.  Remove all devices from aircraft and casualties are just as bad as ever.  Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

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ORIGINAL: Nicholas Bell

Oh let me add this for your consideration of how hopeless this is:  Aircraft do not need weapons to shoot each other down.  Remove all devices from aircraft and casualties are just as bad as ever.  Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

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ORIGINAL: el cid again

Mike: There is one other factor that outweighs all you wrote: surprise.
Surprise conveys the initiative - and is 90% successful in air combat situations both for offense and defense - regardless of airframe statistics.
In fact, achieving surprise is slightly easier for a large aircraft than for a small one - for the one thing a large airplane theoretically has is more eyes searching the sky. Detecting the enemy first means that you can elect to engage or not - and if you elect to engage you can usually elect to do so from an angle that will not be detected. In fact, most losers in air combat NEVER saw their attacker. In which case, their ability to maneuver to evade never mattered a whit. A variation on this is the impact of spotting training: IJN invented a way to spot planes "invisible" to normal humans - and I successfully used that way to spot incoming missiles and even shells normally "invisible" to normal humans. [Having just trained this, it was truly magnificent to watch USS New Jersey, first firing practice off San Clemente - then firing for real off the DMZ - we being her protection from ASCM attacks. My spotters and I were amazed we could see individual shells - something not often reported by real world observers in naval combats - not at impact - but at launch - when they are the fastest. In that case it was very easy - she only fired one tube at a time at a very low ROF - and these are positively huge shells - so I came to regard it as very good practice for spotting missiles of similar size - but nothing like as much speed. We came to regard missile spotting as "easy" - for the same reason a Zero pilot would see his opponent at ranges most Americans regard as "impossible."] This is probably not in the designed air combat routine - but we already can put it in if we can figure out what field is critical to determining initiative in air combat?

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ORIGINAL: Nicholas Bell
Oh let me add this for your consideration of how hopeless this is: Aircraft do not need weapons to shoot each other down. Remove all devices from aircraft and casualties are just as bad as ever. Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

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Yes, the die rolls for losses must be initially based on plane type.
Here is a test game I've setup just for aircombat - ignore the dates and locations, I've attempted to match something historical.

These are the results with NO DEVICES, SPEED SET TO ZERO (just for kickers)...................