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

[Aviar]

Love those searchlights. These are from one of my MTO coops:

Aviar

[Aviar]

Some more:

Aviar

[bolox]

some good thoughts Ian,
the possibilities for night flying have been given a boost with 4.10 and 4.11 will hopefully maintain the momentum

couple of other things spring to mind:-

Flares as an object that can appear at specific times- target marking/illumination of bomber stream. 15km visibility (of object) would be good here

Burning cities- the ability to simulate this would be great- possibly as an additional destruction 'brush' in fmb???. whether it's possible to achieve a suitable viewing distance with game engine could be a problem

Bombsight illumination- if we ever get flyable bombers whose main role is night bombing (we can dream of Lancs but Do217 is possible???) the ability to read the bombsight against 'black' ground becomes rather important

[Ian Boys]

Another idea - night fighters often dropped air flares to highlight the enemy. This would be GREAT. However they'd have to be proper light emitters, not just providers of a ground texture.

Speaking of which, the Swordfish flare looks bad over the sea. Isn't there a way to make it an actual light soiurce?

[Azimech]

On the searchlights, I experimented with them and it seems they're activated on altitude above ground level, I believe 250 meters. At first I thought they were activated on sound, which would be quite realistic, because when I instructed the automatic pilot to land while a few enemy searchlights placed in the vicinity of the airfield stopped searching and switched off, when my engines where idling while on decent. Imagine trying to evade searchlights by switching off your engines. I know there were german AA guns that used sound to aim, right now they all seem to use some kind of inaccurate "radar", while I can't imagine all stations having them in those days. But switching off engines in flight is probably not realistic, I haven't read or heard of any occasion, except of course gliders. And I can imagine some aircraft having great difficulties restarting them in flight, not to mention shock cooling being a problem.

This is nice if it could be incorporated in SOW and IL2.
Sandra:
Three search lights positioned around an airfield and directed skyward to form a cone, the glow of which could be seen by planes trying to find the airfield

from this page: http://www.lancasterdiary.net/terms_and_slang.php

[Ian Boys]

Sometimes the light night bombers such as the Po-2 would switch off and glide into the attack and drop their bombs without warning.