Any chance for implementing Night Fighting?

[Avimimus]

Originally Posted by Viking

This was discussed some time ago and Oleg didn’t think the interest for night fighting with all the long eventless flights in pit black nights would justify the time to make it possible.
I find the topic interesting myself but for how long? Seriously?

Viking

Actually, SWOTN (a mod for SWOTL) was the last great mod for that game. It is still one of the best depictions of night combat.

There are real challenges to navigation and vectoring at night. Combat between small aircraft is especially challenging. Atmospheric conditions are very important for navigation. The actual bombers had more flexibility, with each bomber crew charting a course and conducting the final run using their own bombsight.

The variety of missions is also much greater than people expect (flying decoy using chaff was dangerous as it drew fighters, pathfinders conducting target marking, attacks on naval targets, lone aircraft conducting harassment flights, German fighters ambushing bombers while they were landing etc.)

The fact is, Oleg doesn't know much about night combat for two reasons:
- It wasn't as developed on the Eastern Front
- On the western front the majority of night bombers were drawn from the Commonwealth not the United States (and thus, despite being equal in size, draws little international press and has never been modeled in a professional sim)

I'm personally hoping that 3rd party mods will convince Oleg to support night bombing through creating a radar operator who vectors the pilot (like the Chain radar stations except that the operator is in the aircraft - this means that Oleg would only have to model the radar's performance, not the actual interface and design)

[Viking]

I was thinking about something in the same lane today. If it is possible to use the ingredients in the existing (or future as we refer to SoW here) sim in order to do night fighting possible so why not. Instead of calling to the tower to find direction home we will get vector and height of bombers etc. Perhaps just a little bit of extra work but justified in the end for the result.

Just my 0.2€

Viking

[Blackdog_kt]

This will be a sensitive subject but bear with me. If there's a possibility for night operations, maybe we'd need a way to set area targets on the mission builder. I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of indiscriminate area bombing here, but the historical truth is that it was used by all combatants in various theaters. Germans bombed London, the RAF bombed the German cities into oblivion and even the US who was usually more careful in the ETO, carried out attacks with incendaries against Japanese residential areas.

I know there's a pressure to keep ratings for the game favorable though, so it could be masked the same way it was masked in wartime. For example, some pilots claimed they didn't know they were sent to bomb residential areas, but were briefed to hit a "small weapons factory that's camouflaged as a post office in such and such district". Then it was the difficulties of night navigation and accurate bomb drops at zero visibility that exacerbated the effect.

All i'm saying is that it would be nice to have something that's historically accurate. Debating the actual morality of the action should be an individual process for each one of us and in fact, it would serve to highlight the horrors of war to every adult playing the game. Younger players on the other hand would be just getting points for bombing what they were briefed to bomb, a "camouflaged weapons factory".

Presently, when people want to keep scores in an online map involving carpet bombing in IL2, they have to "hide" vehicles inside buildings. Since individual buildings might be too much to keep a tally of and present unnecessary load on the PCs, maybe setting area specific targets in the mission builder would be a good alternative. This will also serve the mission builders well in creating all sorts of flexible historical objectives that don't involve dubious morality as well. I think it's easier to calculate a score based on % of bomb load that falls inside a designated area, than calculating a score for each building that's destroyed in a factory complex. It could also be useful for airfield denial missions, where the aim would be to crater the runways, taxiways and parking areas and not just blow up some hangars.

It's also more fair to the player, as cratering the roads between the factories would be hampering their production anyway and bombs were also dropped on runways, whereas a separate tally for each building would only award points for direct hits, something that's not always feasible when you are bombing on a leader's command from a certain position in the formation.

[Avimimus]

Il2 currently allows the setting of area targets (and some campaign generators will do so at certain points). Often bomber crews would be given specific targets like churches as aiming points. Recon was used to identify which areas weren't hit so that the sector could be targeted in the run the next night. It wasn't discriminant it was methodical targeting of civilian areas.

I personally, don't see it as being a political problem. The debate is around 1) whether it was a crime against humanity and/or warcrime to target civilians 2) whether it was necessary and/or effective. Almost everyone accepts that it took place.

The biggest difficulty is probably in modeling fire storms (which illuminated aircraft from below, generated columns of hot air and enough IR radiation to warm bomber crews over the target).