mdiehl
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Joined: 10/21/2000
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quote:
My recollection from reading many books about GCanal is that many Wildcats came in for dead stick landings. If these had the range to be flying from Rabaul they never would have made it home. This should be taken into account for any Zero/Wcat comparison. This would be a 'real history' observation.
Agreed. As I record these, dead sticked a.c. that land at their own base are recorded as "shot down."
quote:
From a game observation the aircraft stats seem to play too much of a role in the outcome of a2a battles - there should be more bias given to pilot skill - pilots have always been able to use lessor planes to win a2a battles in real life.
I disagree. Here's why. The "skill" assessment made by game designers is arbitrary. Try to find an "index of skill rating" applied consistently across the board, or rationalized by any real world data (hours of flight time, hours of advanced combat training time, hours of actual combat time, never mind intangibles such as "tendency to be alert") and you won't find such an index. The whole history of the thread (at least in re me vs the usual Axis Fanboys) is the AF's claim that in 1942 the Zeros were better planes than the Allied planes, that the Zeroes were flown by better pilots, and that the Zeroes usually swept the skies of all opfor until suddenly the Thach Weave showed up.
Factually, the actual kill ratio was about 1:1, when the "Beam Defense" was not used. You can look in the Appendix of Richard Frank's Guadalcanal for combat losses to get a crude kill ratio. (2:1 overall favoring the Allies for losses of all a.c. of all types, about 1:1 for F4Fs and A6Ms, a little higher overall favoring the Japanese if you throw in P-39s, but again about 1:1 if you throw in Petes and such). In Lundstrom's work, you get much more detail and in some cases you can id who shot down what kind of a.c. when. For Coral Sea and Midway, the loss ratio overall is somewhat in favor of the USN.
Which leads one to ask, "If the Zero was so much better, and their pilots so much better, and if having a better a.c. and more experience means you are more likely to dominate, how come the Japanese didn't actually dominate?" The answer, and the only correct answer, is that the presumed superiority of Japanese naval pilots or their aircraft (potentially both) is an exaggeration.
I have all along argued that a good consim should have a very strong central tendency towards a 1:1 loss ratio (statistically, as measured over campaigns, when A6Ms confront F4Fs) in 1942. Big B and others have convinced me that in some circumstances that sort of campaign loss ratio can be achieved. But my impression is that it is achieved by saturation of Japanese units by Allied LBA, especially tactical medium bombers, and heavies, and that in 1942, a clever USN player refuses combat with a roughly equal number of Japanese CVs. I think this is what Jap Fanboys mean when they say "Well the KBDS only works if the Allied player impales himself on the Japanese sword." The underlying problem with that mentality was that in the instances where KB went up against the USN, in terms of ships lost there was a draw at Coral Sea and a big instance of the Japanese "impaling themselves on the American lance" at Midway. In the AARs, I don't see that happening much.
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Yes - I know it had no armor/ss fuel tanks etc but it did take quite a toll on its opponents.
The Finnish F2s were arguably more useful because of their lack of armor and self-sealing tanks. The F2A minus that weight was a competent if underarmed little fighter. Against the a.c. fielded by the USSR, which were also underarmed and largely inferior to the F2, the Buffalo was not so horrid. The F2A3s at Midway, however, were iron dogs. Despite that, they did substantial damage to the Japanese strike force.
One of the complicating factors in researching all this is to determine the effect of mission complexity. Acknowledging the A6M to be vastly better than the F2A, what does it say about the F2As that despite their inferiority vs Zeros, the Zeros could not stop them from shooting down Japanese strike a.c.? If the F2As had flown defensively, would more Zeros have been shot down, fewer F2As shot down, and fewer Japanese strike a.c. shot down?
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In terms of real life - if F4F was so equivalent/better than Zero then why did the real life war take so long?
Several potential reasons. Foremost, the US was fighting a four front war. Let's call the PTO one front, the North Atlantic a second front, the strategic bomber campaign a third front, and the Africa/Italy/France ground campaigns the fourth front. The Allied Strategic plan for the war called for the US and UK to defeat Germany first, because some pretty good economic modeling indicated that the Japanese weren't going to be an economic power in any great hurry. Of course, Britain being under siege had something to do with that priority too. To make life better for Britons, the bulk of United States shipbuilding outlay had to be dedicated to victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Even the US could not indefinitely suffer the loss of 200-450 thousand tons of merchant shipping every month.
So the effect of the BoA was that most US ship production went to the ETO, rather than the PTO. As a consequence, Operation Watchtower (Guadalcanal invasion and campaign) went in with the minumum set of transports available. It was all the US could to to put a single USMC division there. The logistical shipping for this operation was only grudgingly conceded to the PTO, and then only because people began to be concerned that with the Japanese at Tulagi, they might then consider trying to seize New Caledonia; Betties stationed at New Caledonia would make life inconvenient for the supply pipeline to Australia. Absent the Japanese move on Tulagi, I doubt the US would have even attempted major operations in the SOPac until mid-1943.
As it stood, the Allied war plan for Europe had the US dedicating most of its sealift capacity to the ETO/North Africa campaign until late 1943, even though the problem with German submarines was substantially solved in May 1943. That's because there was a need to relieve German pressure on the Soviets by engaging Axis ground units, somewhere, anywhere, in the ETO/North Africa.
But if you posit no war with Germany, or a limited war conducted by the Allies against Germany and Italy with a "Japan First" strategy, it is within the realm of reason that the Japanese would have surrendered in late 1943. Albeit, probably after higher casualty rates in the USN. The USN made MAJOR improvements in Combat Air Patrol command and control as a result of analyses of the SoPac campaign -- one of the reasons why in real life "ubercap" became a viable strategy for the USN, where it was at no point during WW2 a viable strategy for the IJN. The other major improvements were in Radar. In 1942 a big Japanese BB with 16" or better guns was arguably an even match for a SoDak class BB. By late 1944, the SoDaks had a huge advantage in main battery gunlaying. Likewise, by 1944, radar had transformed the 5"L38 DP gun from an ordinary (but well designed) anti-aircraft platform into a kamikaze killer. In contrast, Japanese AAA design and performance was, throughout the war, anemic.
In sum: no war in Europe or limited war in Europe, the Allies achieve victory in Japan by late 1943, but at higher cost in casualties. Otherwise, you take the historical path, in which the Allies (in my view, inevitably) would outclass, out-train, out design, out tactic, out-strategy, out bomb, and outproduce the Japanese in 1944, and finish the job in 1945.
< Message edited by mdiehl -- 9/12/2007 9:57:00 PM >
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Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics.
Didn't we have this conversation already?
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RE: Übercorsair and übercap - 
than we seen in this thread. But I'm also a member on the SH and the culture there is a bit different, more like "toss your arguments on the table" (and dispense with the lace!) so we've allowed this discussion to "blossom" as an excercise in "cultural diversity" 
)... 
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