Well, in single player you could pause and switch cockpits if you want to do everything manually. However, since SoW will feature multiple players in a single aircraft for multiplayer, why not extend this to a possible Vietnam add-on?
Ok, you could still fly online with a AI weapons officer in your plane and switch cockpits as necessary, but imagine the thrill of going SAM hunting with another human in the second cockpit. SA-2s flying around your F-105, the backseater trying his best to help with SA and call out incoming missiles, flak and maybe even hostile jets while searching for those radar emissions, while the pilot focuses on flying the aircraft according to his feedback/instructions and bring weapons on the target. If the sim has a built in intercomm feature to avoid cluttering up Teamspeak that would be pretty sweet.
And then let's not forget the variety of aircraft and missions either. There were prop planes in Vietnam too. Imagine flying a Skyraider on a CAS mission or even a rescue scenario, crawling along at 100mph marking targets with that bullet magnet, the O-1 Bird Dog, so that the F-4s can swoop in at 500 knots and drop napalm without having to go around and visually ID targets, or even flying AC-47 gunships and A-26s at night, armed with flares and searchlights over the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The possible scenarios are endless. I am getting impatient because my PC is getting too old to run today's software adequately and i'd like to have some specs to upgrade to, but in the end i think it's good they are taking their time with SoW. If they make a robust software base with a secure (anti-cheat) mod foundation, there's no limit to what we might see. They did some of that with IL-2 as well, coding stuff that couldn't run on PCs of that time and they enabled it gradually along the way, so i guess they will do it again. The biggest challenge is to make the design modular so that you can add things in the future without too much hassle.
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