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Nikademus -> Precious (7/17/2003 12:07:08 AM)
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We hatz the Baggins........wants the precious back we does...
LBA strike effectiveness against moving ships seems to be well balanced now. The only problem there is that flak effectiveness and disruption could be better. at least against the big level bombers. ship based flak vs tactical bombers is another issue.
But as mentioned by a few others its base and achorage effectiveness that needs addressing. Ironically this is not a B-17 issue.
I had a PBEM with Soulblazer where i found my transports bedeveled by a string of penny packet attacks by twin engine level bombers. avg # 4-6 per raid. The first couple of times they struck home, i wrote it off to bad luck. As others have said, LBA were indeed capable of hitting ships, more so if stationary. However after the next raid, and the next and the next and the next (some with multiple bomb hits!) both us began to see a problem.
In comparison, SB sent in some dive bombers to further muddle things up. Dive bombing of course is inherently a more precise method of delivering ordinance, doubly so against stationary targets. They scored zip on a frequent basis in comparison. Yet the lumbering bombers, attacking at 6k+, scored extremely consistantly. Now one can of course, find examples of ships struck by LBA. This is not the issue...the issue was the frequencey and consistancy of the hits. Had our game continued i think he would have had a book's worth of reported "hits" vs the smattering we have in the history books
Yes both sides kept valauble ships away from LBA. This to me is a no brainer. They were not playing a game. The stakes were higher, the risks real. Therefore you dont take chances. Even one hit on a carrier at anchor, even if 1000 other attempts miss, can ruin an operation or upset a timetable.
Achored ship.....airbase, ground units....all the same problem in my book. LBA is a tad bit too accurate for my tastes against all of them, and it gets exponentially worse as raid sizes increase until you get 100+ raids that can do something like this all at the same time:
Airbase hits 7
Airbase supply hits 4
Runway hits 110
Port Hits 12
Port Supply hits 4
Ship A 2 bomb hits, captain has fit
Ship B
Ship C 1 bomb hit, heavy damage, crew gets shore leave
Ship D
Ship E
Ship F 4 bomb hits, vegetable locker suffers critcal hit, captain grabs history book to check for historcal poss that he now must go swimming :)
When one considers the square milage of an average sized base, results such as the above would make a 1991 air force whistle in appreciation. And since there are no "smart" weapons employed here the bombers must have litterally saturated the base and achorage with bombs. Shore bombardments as i always say, produce consistantly similar results. The disabling and killing of guns and soldiers regardless of size of base or entrenchments exaserbates the issue further
side note: 2000LB GP bombs btw were a rare commodity and were seldom used in AS attacks.
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