mind_messing
Posts: 3393
Joined: 10/28/2013 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lowpe quote:
ORIGINAL: mind_messing quote:
ORIGINAL: John 3rd My initial thoughts along that line would be placing Tokyo, Maebishi, and Osaka as the priority defensive locations. Opinions on others? The key cities are your big light industry centres, as it's these that keep your planes flying when 1945 rolls around. As such, these are your priority defensive locations. The secret to a really effective air defence network is that it needs to be holistic. It's not simply a case of having night fighters. You need all of the following: - Strong day-time CAP - Traditional fighters on night CAP to bulk up your numbers. - High forts, both to minimise damage and force bombers away from barrage balloons. - Dedicated night fighters to rotate in anticipation/response to Allied raids. - Heavy duty flak. The IJ 8cm guns don't cut it much, you need the 12cm stuff as a minimum. This is probably the key point, as flak is the real passive attrition of 4E's. The number of bases that you can defend along these lines is small, so you need to make sure that they'll be the bases that are critical to your economy. For all the other bases, it's a case of token night CAP with whatever you can spare. At worst it throws off the aim of the raids, at best you might damage a few that crash on the way home. What the 4E menace boils down to is that you don't shoot them down in raids, you damage them and they crash on the way home or you damage them and they take two weeks to repair. Both of these outcomes slowly attrition down the Allied force. M-M you left out mentioning radar, search lights. People pooh-pooh searchlights, but I have seen how early on in the war they are very important before radar takes over, but I expect they still act as a minor force multiplier even late in the game. You are the expert on balloons, but isn't it both forts and size of the base that contribute? Haven't looked at that in a while... I've never seen any real effect of radar at night, to be fair. It seems to make a great deal of difference in daylight, but night raids all seem to be detected at very short times to interception. Searchlights I cannot comment on, I've thought they were a filler item to give IJ AF units an upgrade path into radars? Balloon effectiveness is based on fort level of any base with port + AF greater than 6. They're pretty effective at making sure that 2/4E bombers stay above 6000ft, at least during the day. Less effective at night, but still the odd damage to aircraft here and there. It really just forces raids to fly at 7k ft, which can be helpful in setting your CAP to maximise intercepts if your opponent is bothered about the extra OPS losses. With B-29's I think they're critical, as a damaged B-29 is in the shops for days at a time.
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