Ideas for Night ops in the future ....

[Ian Boys]

Hi TD,


I realise night operations are a niche past-time but I understand that you will be introducing Night radar in 4.11 (or later) and that therefore it will become more important.

Anyway, I am loving them now and have spent a long time flying over various maps at night in various weathers and here are some thoughts for the future ...

1) Searchlights: at present searchlights only work properly under clear/good weather and a bit under hazy conditions. I am talking about when the aircraft is above the clouds. It would be very good if the aircraft is within a certain range if the searchlights turned on and thereby illuminated the clouds, giving the night fighter a chance to see the bomber's silhouette against the cloud. This is of course realistic and is the reason planes operating over Germany at night were painted light grey instead of black.

2) Target areas: at the moment it is basically impossible to see the target areas at night. The best way around this that I can see is to increase the visibility distance of the large fire object to 15km or so, so that it is visible in the bombsight of an aircraft at 6km alt. Can this be done without making the fires illuminate a huge area?

3) Another idea is to create a new bigger fire object that will indeed illuminate not only some area but most importantly also the clouds above. The idea is to provide some localised light and to lighten the clouds in one area to give aircraft above a chance to see bombers as with clouds lit by searchlights.

4) The Germans had an IFF device (FuG25) and the British developed the passive "Perfectos" device to interrogate this and home in on these signals from 80km away. Perhaps the German player could choose to switch it off (and happened in real life) and would then be a target for his own searchlights and flak as well as appearing Red on the in-game map. If he keeps it switched on he will not be engaged from the ground but will give his position away to the Mosquitos!

5) British night fighters had Serrate, which was a radar detector. If a German flew up behind them using the radar the pilot would be warned.

Anyway, some thoughts ....

ian

p.s. ..... and a Russian night light bomber like the R-5 or Po-2?

OK, I'll shut up for a bit