geofflambert
Posts: 14863
Joined: 12/23/2010 From: St. Louis Status: offline
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We have a lot of new players and I haven't seen this covered in a while so I thought I'd bring it up. First, Allied players, do not put the first model of Corsairs on one of your carriers. They are not carrier capable and will turn your carrier into a floating parking lot. Second, you can actually fit 115% of capacity on your carrier and still operate, but that is the absolute tippy top maximum. Figure it out like you would a 15% tip at a restaurant (cheapskates!). Let's say you have a CVL with a capacity of 27 planes. Take 10% of that (2.7), add 5% (1.3, do not round that up) to the capacity. You can safely operate 31 planes on that carrier. Third, you must count reserve aircraft into that number, and the carrier capacity used field may not show that, so do it in your head and don't trust what the computer says, if you have any reserves on board. The reason for this is that even though the game engine is happy (for now) and your carrier will operate just fine, if any aircraft get damaged or go into maintenance some of those reserves may become active and if the number of active planes plus damaged/in maintenance planes exceeds your capacity your whole carrier will shut down. Once reserve planes become active the engine will not put planes back in reserve and you cannot do it manually either. Fourth, some will counsel that you leave some room on your carriers to account for lost capacity due to sunk friendly (or on fire and inoperable) carriers so your returning from mission aircraft have a flat top to land on. In my view that's all a crapshoot and don't do it. If you get into a carrier battle you are going to lose some planes and probably a lot of planes anyway. If at worst part of each returning squadron is able to land you won't have lost the entire squadron and will have a cadre to rebuild from. There are two other ways to play it safe on this: keep a couple of empty CVEs at a safe distance back (but in range) for those orphans to land on, or, and better still, keep your carrier battles within range of friendly airbases. You can lose battles in at least two ways: get out in front of your land based search planes (so the enemy sees you first) or too far away from air base support.
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