Green Dye for Downed Airmen?

[Blackdog_kt]

I don't know if it would be worth the development time to have single player campaigns for auxiliary roles, as the appeal might not be too much for the combat oriented folks, but on the other hand i still support the inclusion of the ability to have such flights, even if only for single player missions and multiplayer scenarios.

For example, i doubt many people would want to fly a campaign in a coastal command Catalina. These things were used post war in Australia as airliners and they were flown in some of the longest duration scheduled airliner flights ever, with 20 hours of non-stop flying or more between airports. Imagine a single player campaign where you would take off from a coastal command base and fly 10 hour patrols over the western approaches in search of U-boats. To keep things realistic, you wouldn't even encounter them in every mission. A guy used to to boom and zooming in a P51 or 190 would be hard to convince to sign up for something like that, not to mention the virtual pilots who enjoy flying furballs on the deck.

However, if aircraft systems modelling interacted well with the dynamic weather engine to give you a whole new set of realistic problems to face, it would be another story. Battling poor visibility and weather along with the catalina's pitiful de-icing equipment, navigation difficulties and strict operating limits of an aircraft that does maybe a 120mph IAS cruise on a good day, it suddenly becomes quite the challenge managing to reach that convoy under attack 50 miles away which just radioed in for help.
Add to that meeting prowling luftwaffe long-range aircraft and a mid-flight save feature and it would have the potential to draw quite a bunch of the civilian crowd who are interested in WW2 and want a taste of combat simming, but at the same time prefer slightly more relaxed flying instead of frantic paced dogfights. Once again, more variety=more potential customers and the good thing is, it's still perfectly within the scope of a WW2 combat simulator instead of having to make an entire civilian flight sim of the 30s-40s on the new engine to draw these customers in.

As for the people with stronger nerves who do want the added danger, flying Lysanders at night and landing agents in occupied Europe, or unarmed recon flights in broad daylight would be a whole new type of challenge. I remember reading an account about PR Spitfire pilots years ago , saying that "when you were flying at 28000 feet over the Netherlands on a good day you could see half way into Germany, that is until the canopy started fogging up...then one would have the constant sinking feeling that the air around was filled with Messerschmits".

I don't know about you, but the prospect of relying on stealth, positioning, energy-conserving maneuvering and deep knowledge of the airframe in order to squeeze out every last bit of performance available at the right time without having a single gun on your airplane, to me it's very exciting.

So in summary, maybe it's early to have single player campaigns for such roles, but there should be the appropriate mission types or triggers to support them for custom single missions and online play. Especially if the 3rd type of online mode is a built-in dynamic campaign where resources matter, it would be all the more important for each team to rescue downed pilots, attack enemy supplies while protecting their own and having accurate recon data to make sure which target is sufficiently damaged to stop wasting bombs on and which one needs a follow-up raid to ensure it will stop supplying the other team with fuel.

The more roles that are added, the more "periphery" the multiplayer experience gains and this gives people both new areas to operate as well as a false sense of security to be exploited when these areas suddenly become unsafe.
If we sometime have a 41-43 channel front add-on, i'd love to be flying those coastal command patrols in a persistent server running a multiplayer dynamic campaign between flying fighters on normal combat sorties.
Ok, i wouldn't be doing that every single day and i certainly wouldn't fly for 10 hours (maybe 2-3 would be manageable), however if i wanted to join my favorite online campaign server and help out my team but wasn't in the mood for fast paced action-filled flying, i'd have the option to do something else. Sometimes you want to fire up your favorite game or simulator but you are tired due to real life and have second thoughts. Well, it would be perfect for such days to have something slow-paced to do that still has an impact on the way the campaign plays out.

I'd also love to load up a flight of 110s or Ju88Cs and go prowling against those same coastal command flying boats because the last thing these guys would be expecting to see is a flight of Ju88Cs daring enough to duck under the radar all the way to the straight between the UK and Ireland. Sure, it might be a mere 1-2 kills for a couple of hours of flying and maybe getting lucky and sinking some concoy ships, but just the fact that i managed to get an 88 all the way up there without getting detected and intercepted would be satisfaction enough.

Other scenarios for multiplayer? Plentiful if you ask me. While everyone is busy duking it out over the main targets, you form up a small group of long-ranged aircraft that can fly fast at a sufficiently wide band of altitudes, sneak around to a secondary objective at high speed on the deck, pop up some miles away to attack the target, climb to high altitude after attacking and make the return trip via the normal route.
You'd be undetected by radar on the way in and your smaller numbers flying at wide spacing would probably present a less enticing target for the opposing team than the flock of bombers and escorts attacking the main target at 20000 feet.
You'd also be untouchable on the return as most of the enemy interceptors encountered during your return would be flying lower, be low on ammo and far too low on fuel to climb and catch up to you, or even damaged. You would have reduced your fuel supply as well, but not to the point of being unable to RTB...just to the point of being able to fly faster.

Specifically speaking? When you see your team forming a big bomber raid at medium to high altitudes with accompanying escorts, use that raid as a diversion to draw the enemy away from you. Say you have 10 people in your group, get 5 fighter-bomber mosquitos and one with a glass nose to act as lead bomber, add 4 P51Bs to act as scouts and advise you on threats during the ingress and go blast another target to smithereens, then if you feel lucky on your return trip bounce the damaged/low on fuel and ammo enemy interceptors as they are circling their airfield to land

In short, more "commando" style missions with the potential for fluid pacing (it could turn from serene to hectic in seconds) would be awesome for multiplayer and provide for more "whoah, how did that happen?!" moments.

And here i go getting a perfectly good thread off its rails again...sorry to the original poster for the hijack, i'll shut up now