[Wutz]

Originally Posted by vparez

Yes, and how many escort ships were there around it?

A typical skip bombing action is much like a torpedo run, only you have to come in very, very close to the target. We all know how usually torpedo runs ended up against heavily defended warships, and that's even when the torpedo planes released their payload a long way away from the target (thus a very poor hit ratio).

What we have now in IL2 is that you can fly in the middle of a convoy of 10 merchants + 10 warships (from DD to CV), you can jink like crazy and evade the naval gunfire, and during a jink you can just throw your bombs, when you are close enough, and you'll hit the target.

At the moment of release, you may be jinking quite hard and still your bombs don't care... if you hit the target they will explode, no matter what you altitude or pitch was.

Now, the bomb fuse of 2 seconds forces you only to have a stable level flight until release, which doesn't make it almost at all harder to hit a lone merchant (which was a realistic attack method as in the picture); but when that merchant is a part of the convoy, with escorts, it gets much harder, but still not impossible.

Anyway, the objective of this fix is to make it hard for players to use this attack profile in the situation when it wouldn't be used in RL (i.e. against defended targets).

Maybe this is too much realism for some people, indeed.

EDIT: so how will you suppress the AA gunners from the ships in IL-2? That is an engine limitation that TD had to work around to bring more realism, and they found a very good solution. So if the fusing needs to be an option, then I guess ships firing needs to be an option too

That picture is from the battle of the Bismarck Sea, and there where armed ships there:




Also have a look at this article, at what distance to the target bombs where released? Try that with 4.10 bet you it won´t work. as that is no 2 sec falling time at all.

When General Kenney took command of the 5th Air Force, he explained to MacArthur that his primary mission was to take out Japanese air power "until we owned the air over New Guinea. There was no use talking about playing across the street until we got the Nips off our front lawn"1

Doing this with Japanese air power dependent on its Navy bringing supplies and reinforcements in a part of the world covered with wide-open sea required that Kenney devise effective ways of bombing Japanese ships, something that had been ineffective using high-altitude bombing. Imagine trying to hit a ship with a bomb dropped from an altitude of 25,000 feet! The standard technique was so ineffective that , for example, less than 1% of of bombs dropped by the 19th Bomb Group's B-17s hit their ship-targets2. The answer: low-altitude bombing. What may sound like an obvious thing was not so easy to effect in real life; the British tried minimal altitude bombing and couldn't make it work. Something more was needed, something was missing.

Discussing the situation with Major Bill Benn, Kenney suggested the idea of 'skip bombing': dropping a bomb such that it literally skipped off the water like a stone, hitting its target from the side. To do this, the bombs, set with delayed fuzes so the plane would have time to clear the detonation, must be dropped at an extremely (dangerously!) low altitude and at the right speed and from the right distance. The bomber for the job must have enough fire power in the nose to defend itself from enemy flak at such low heights. The man for the job of making it work was Major Bill Benn, so Kenney fired him as his assistant and assigned him to command the 63rd Squadron and undertake the perfection of 'skip bombing'.

Major Benn then gathered together some of the best pilots in the 43rd --1st Lt. James T. Murphy, Capt. Ken McCullar, Lt. Folmer "The Swede" Sogaard, Capt. Ed Scott, Lt. Glenn Lewis-- who set about the task. Many hours of practice taught them that approaching the ship from 2,000 ft., then dropping down to an altitude of 200 to 250 ft. (maintaining the air speed of 200 to 250 m.p.h.) and releasing the bomb --equipped with a 4 to 5 second delay fuze-- 60 to 100 ft. away from the target was the way to do it.2 Thanks to the efforts of these men, the percentage of targets hit increased from less than 1% to 72%.

But I am certain some "smart" people are going to disagree, and one can only say "sure you are right, and I have my peace"