Slitherine

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mdiehl - you've been claiming a 1.2 zero to 1 f4f loss rate for CV 42 battles and someone posted a batttle by battle tally that does not support that claim. Off the top of my head those numbers look right and I did not see you dispute them - care to comment on why

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You misquoted him again he did not say that!. He said an 1100 mile round trip and you keep quoting him as say an 1100 mile trip. The last time I checked 565 plus 565 = 1130 miles pretty close to 1100.

But you keep forgetting that these Zero also had to fly 565 miles back to base...

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ORIGINAL: mdiehl

@treespider

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You miss quoted him again...
He said round trip.

That is incorrect. I did not misquote him. His claim is that fatigue from an 1100 mile trip caused increased losses. The distance from Rabaul to Lunga is 565 miles. It logically follows (to anyone except those who try to avoid the point) that a pilot flying from Rabaul to Lunga, and then engaging in combat, has only flown 565 miles. 565 miles is not a "round trip." It's a "half trip." That pilot has logged only about 3 hours of flight time, and this after a fine night's rest, prior to combat. Of that 3 hours, about 2.5 hours of it is routine flying with no threat of contact prior to the engagement, and 2.5 hours of routine flying (if the aircraft has not suffered substantial damage) after the combat.

If one wishes to claim that fatigue induced by more than 565 miles worth of flight time affected Zero losses on a day to day basis, then one has to assume that substantial numbers of pilots were lost after breaking off combat at Lunga and on the way home to Rabaul.

The thing is, that is a logical (it would seem straightforward) implication of what Nickledimus writes. But as he has made pretense of being a victim of "distortions" of his claim, it seems reasonable to ask him or anyone else who holds that pov to state directly how that 2.5 hours of flying prior to combat equates with higher losses concomitant with 5 hours of flying.

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ORIGINAL: 11Bravo

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ORIGINAL: castor troy

Living in OLD EUROPE (thatīs a term only an American president can come up with) people here are always confrontated by the American thought that all and everything in America was and is the best. Iīm sure thatīs not the way every American thinks but isnīt that the opinion of the majority? Most people here think that in the US there has to be a process started to change the way of common thinking. No matter if itīs about the change in climate (Kyoto), terrorism, or rogue states (itīs called "Schurkenstaaten" here, no clue what you call it in English),...

No offense so I hope people donīt get me wrong. Iīve got no problem with the US or the people over there! Iīve been there for holiday, I use American products and watch American films (okay, the films would be another thread about the way of sight ) So Iīm not an anti America extremist. NOT AT ALL! But it seems to me that "American" and "overrated" just goes hand in hand.

Okay, now you all can beat me up!

Like an Anschluss?

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ORIGINAL: 11Bravo

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ORIGINAL: castor troy

Living in OLD EUROPE (thatīs a term only an American president can come up with) people here are always confrontated by the American thought that all and everything in America was and is the best. Iīm sure thatīs not the way every American thinks but isnīt that the opinion of the majority? Most people here think that in the US there has to be a process started to change the way of common thinking. No matter if itīs about the change in climate (Kyoto), terrorism, or rogue states (itīs called "Schurkenstaaten" here, no clue what you call it in English),...

No offense so I hope people donīt get me wrong. Iīve got no problem with the US or the people over there! Iīve been there for holiday, I use American products and watch American films (okay, the films would be another thread about the way of sight ) So Iīm not an anti America extremist. NOT AT ALL! But it seems to me that "American" and "overrated" just goes hand in hand.

Okay, now you all can beat me up!

Like an Anschluss?

Iīm sorry sir! Never seen such an idiotic reply! Just one fact about me: one of my grandfathers was Jewish so if I would like an Anschluss I would probably land in a KZ. But that post is probably of a person I described above. And sorry this was 60 years ago but watch CNN and change the flag and it looks like a election campaign of your president nowadays.

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ORIGINAL: Terminus

You'd have to define a Japanese Wildcat and a US Zero in the database editor, with the appropriate graphics, but there's no problem with it from a game mechanics PoV.

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ORIGINAL: mlees

Well, it seems to me that the original poster was stating that he had preserved his airgroups into the late(r) war period, and was dissapointed with his kill ratio. So, he started tinkering with the weapon values to try to acheive a kill ratio that he felt was more realistic.

I have a couple questions with that:
1) There are many factors in game that decide combat results: Weather, leadership, fatigue, coordination, pilot experience, aircraft values, and I think I forgot some. But why did the OP pick weapons?

2) Since in real life the Japanese late-war airgroups were not nearly as effective as they might have been, at what point will the OP think that the air to air results are accurate? This seems a little subjective...

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ORIGINAL: Brausepaul

@ treespider

Sorry, but this "account" can't be taken serious, it's fiction, isn't it? Who wrote it?

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especially since the 13mm guns of the enemy had a flatter trajectory and longer effective range than their own short barrelled 20mms....."

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ORIGINAL: treespider


You misquoted him again he did not say that!. He said an 1100 mile round trip and you keep quoting him as say an 1100 mile trip. The last time I checked 565 plus 565 = 1130 miles pretty close to 1100.

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ORIGINAL: Brausepaul

@ treespider

Sorry, but this "account" can't be taken serious, it's fiction, isn't it? Who wrote it?

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ORIGINAL: treespider

This is from the Osprey book:

Imperial Japanese Aviator 1937-45 by Osamu Tagaya

In the chapter The Imperial Japanese Naval Aviator in Combat....p54

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ORIGINAL: treespider

I noticed range is a factor with aircraft weapons ...how accurately are they reflected in the game?

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ORIGINAL: Brausepaul

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ORIGINAL: treespider

This is from the Osprey book:

Imperial Japanese Aviator 1937-45 by Osamu Tagaya

In the chapter The Imperial Japanese Naval Aviator in Combat....p54

The author being Japanese might make the statement more trustworthy, but if I did understand you correctly, it's still a fictious story. If I write a hypothetical account about a German fighter pilot with a sentance like the one you highlighted the sentence wouldn't still be a self-evident eternal truth.

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They could see everything, you know. And they strafed, and there's nothing we could do. Absolutely we were pinned down, and the anti-aircraft weren't that good, and I can imagine it could make you nervous if you're under that kind of blitz. You wouldn't want to stand up there and man your gun too well, because it wasn't too safe.

There was no safe place on the island there. And [the Japanese] thought, in both cases, that they could come in on there, but they'd have gotten a good reception of course. Then they better have some tough bozos leading the attack, but they really thought they had us at that time.

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We couldn't, number one, start back on the ground. If the airplane was shot up, you aren't going to go anyplace, and those guys fixed those suckers so that they would go. They would have to change the engine, which in those days only lasted 70-some hours, because you were flying full throttle and on take-off and anytime the plane was running it would suck that coral into the tank, and that would just like filing the cylinders, your piston rings and all would go out in a hurry.

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Yeah. You see, on a scramble, you go full speed. Altitude advantage was the name of the game. And if you didn't get up there they were coming down on you, and they did. We went at it day after day, where they had the advantage…. The only thing we had to let us know they were coming was the coast watchers up the line. See, there's a great story about that. There's a book called The Coast Watchers. Ever read that?

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My CO, Major Davis, Duke Davis flew the same day he was wounded in the morning, and he flew that same day. He got hit on the side of the face, the right arm, and the right leg a little bit. The shrapnel was dug out and he had all this swelling, and taped up face, and here he was went right back up in combat, the same day.

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I think that the biggest problem was that I had at least, and I think a lot of others have the same thing, we shot out of range. The airplane looked bigger, and if you shot at a Zero out of range, on a deflection shot, he was gone. He just saw those tracers, see, we loaded one tracer, one armor piercing and two incendiary. Any way you wanted to load.

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So whenever we'd see about six [Japanese] planes that seemed to want to engage us, we were quite sure they had plenty of high cover. If the fighting was on even terms, they weren't at all anxious to engage us. But whenever they had the long end of the deal, they were anxious to engage. Along with the bombers there would be six to eight more Zeros. They'd fly to the rear and above, about 3,000 feet above the bombers, doing loops and slow rolls, to slow them down so they could stay with the bombers. They were usually up around 30,000 feet. Then there were another six just prowling around. You never could tell where they were; they would circle wide and try to come in from the opposite direction.

When I got there, we seemed to be getting off late. The [Japanese] got wise to the fact that if they made a circle and came in over the mountains we couldn't pick them up on the Radar as soon as we used to when they came right down the channel. With the mountain interference on the Radar we hadn't quite enough warning to make it up there. On several occasions I reached the same altitude as the bombers, a bad situation. We didn't have time to climb into a position to get a pass at the bombers. Sometimes my outfit made a parallel run to the bombing formation but couldn't gain a bit on them; we stayed right there just out of range. Their gunners would be shooting at us while Zeros stayed up and didn't seem to want to come down. Finally they could come down, and then we'd get to fight the Zeros. One reason why my squadron had [a] lot of Zeros to its credit is that we always wanted to get into a scrap. When there was nothing else around, we always went after the Zeros, if they didn't come after us.

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[JAPANESE] TACTICS
They have a rather unusual way in their attacks. The leader always shies around; his wing mate flies back far enough so you can hit him off without the leader's ever knowing it. They fly more or less in a column -- the wing man is supposed to stay with that leader. How he does it I don't know. When you stay 200 or 300 yards behind your leader and try to follow him, you've really got something on your hands. The wing man has a tough time of it. I talked to some of the Japanese through an interpreter, some of the Japanese pilots, and they'd always shake their heads about following their leader, and talk about their heads going around and around. I see their point.