Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: koniu

I have few time situations with such training units.

Most annoying is when you send heavy sweeps above enemy base and they finding empty air.
But when bombers arrive suddenly 50 enemy fighters jumping from clouds shotting down half of your planes.

I can understand that even in training mission fighters will attack bombers but it should work in both ways, also sweeps should have chance to intercept those training missions.

If player decide to train in range of enemy he should take all risk of doing that not only advantage of selective CAP( when only enemy fighters in air planes on training mission will not intercept - at least i have never seen it)

quote:

ORIGINAL: dr.hal

Well in truth, looking at your screen captures, I don't see the outcome as all that odd, lucky yes, but not all that odd. First you had altitude advantage, which is a big plus on first pass and your pilots are no amateurs. They may not be as hot as the Jap pilots, but your chaps did have positional advantage which given the first pass many have then given them great numbers advantage. My surprise is that no Kates were knocked out of the sky. I would wonder what results you would get if you reran the turn... Hal

quote:

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

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quote:

ORIGINAL: vontiger
Sorry I didn't post earlier my daughter is sick.

On this screen shot it says that the group alt for Kittyhawks is 12000 and the raid is overhead (I gather that is the Japanese raid?).
The 16 zeros are made up from 3 separate zero sqns at different heights. 1 group is at 10000(took losses), the 2nd is at 12000 (took no losses) and the last group and the group that lost the most planes is at 20000(also the group with the best pilots).

Thoughts?

quote:

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

Oooh, I've been told (that doesn't mean it's true, necessarily) that fighters assigned to escort automatically go to an altitude 2000 feet above the planes they're escorting, regardless of any altitude orders you give them. There is something else going on here that I didn't think of earlier, which is that the training squadron arrived at intercept complete. Usually a few show up (in the case of CAP), then a few more, then a few more etc.. The entire squadron of Kittyhawks pounced as a unit, this may explain some of this, but I'm still suspicious. That does not obviate the fact that your escort was also complete, but as has been noted, fighters are somewhat more vulnerable when they are escorting than otherwise.

Tell your daughter you're handing me my butt, she'll at least get a little better I think. Go team!

quote:

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

quote:

ORIGINAL: vontiger
Sorry I didn't post earlier my daughter is sick.

On this screen shot it says that the group alt for Kittyhawks is 12000 and the raid is overhead (I gather that is the Japanese raid?).
The 16 zeros are made up from 3 separate zero sqns at different heights. 1 group is at 10000(took losses), the 2nd is at 12000 (took no losses) and the last group and the group that lost the most planes is at 20000(also the group with the best pilots).

Thoughts?

quote:

ORIGINAL: geofflambert

Oooh, I've been told (that doesn't mean it's true, necessarily) that fighters assigned to escort automatically go to an altitude 2000 feet above the planes they're escorting, regardless of any altitude orders you give them. There is something else going on here that I didn't think of earlier, which is that the training squadron arrived at intercept complete. Usually a few show up (in the case of CAP), then a few more, then a few more etc.. The entire squadron of Kittyhawks pounced as a unit, this may explain some of this, but I'm still suspicious. That does not obviate the fact that your escort was also complete, but as has been noted, fighters are somewhat more vulnerable when they are escorting than otherwise.

Tell your daughter you're handing me my butt, she'll at least get a little better I think. Go team!

geoff you hit the nail about escort alt.

vontiger, if you get a coordinated (escorted) raid over target, the escorts are always bombers´ altitude +2000. It does not matter whether you set the escorts on 5k or at 30k,
this only affects coordination chances (lower if not set to the bombers altitude). The altitude setting only affects the remaining part of the squad assigned to CAP duty.
If you want this to be different you have to mix in sweeps.

Hope your daughter gets well soon!


All in all these results are ok concerning the battle setup BUT what interests me though, is that with regards to the Darwin attack, ALL Kittyhawks of the 75th (a 16 plane squad) were
airborne.



This is a bit unusual. If pilot training results in all units being airborne constantly this explains the edge over comparable CAP, at least as long as a single strike is concerned.

Had the 75th been on normal CAP duty, maybe only 4-6 planes had been airborne with the rest on different states of readiness.

Could be a coincidence and bad luck, also it is entirely possible to get this result when setting CAP @ 100% as well, the strike just has to arrive at the "right" time.
So as a single result it does not meanvery much. The second strike mentioned in more detail in this thread only had 4 escorting fighters, so that explains the result
without questions left open.

As for the other examples here there is not enough data for analysis.

I shot down 12-15 unescorted Betties and another 4-5 Frances over Marcus Island, with exactly 6 outdated (P40E) operational fighters on 100% CAP, and had similar results several times.
So don´t start thinking such rather extreme results are only the byproduct of training flights being caught up in attacks.