Friday Update, April 13, 2012

[klem]

Originally Posted by zapatista

yes you need that type of "wearing value", plus...

a "memory" associated with each plane as to how much it was "worn", damaged, or abused/stressed during flight (all numbers which the game already computes and records during the duration of a flight), we now just need this information to stay with the plane for a duration of time determined by:
- normal service time/hrs/days needed for a plane (usually just a few hrs, and many went on a 2e or 3e flight of the same day after just re-arming and re-fueling, with maintenance crews working overnight to service it for the next day again)
- "repair time penalty" for major structural or engine damage, with same plane being unavailable for a few days
- airfields that only have a specific number of new and ready planes available should be directly affected by the above, and not perpetually have available new lanes to respawn to. limits should be placed on availability determined by, planes ready and present, repair time needed, and rate of resupply to each airbase with new planes (as occurred during wartime)

pilots should even have a "track record", where careless pilots who damage a number of planes (or cause friendly fire incidents) are relegated to rear airfields for training purposes only, or fly other missions from other airfields that dont drain the limited supply of good aircraft from frontline airfields (for ex online the player il number could be used for this)

I think this could be made to work for off-line play just as it is in the MSFS Spitfire by A2ASimulations.

For on-line play it seems to me, logically, that the aircraft 'state' would have to be attached to the player, simulating his use of the aircraft over a period of time. It would be tricky to tie his use of a particular aircraft to someone else's use of it unless there was some cleverly scripted tracking of the airfield's aircraft and use. Of course new and/or partially worn aircraft could be made available for a player when he 'reports' to an airfield.

This could be made effective over the period of the server's mission map or even a continuing campaign with, as someone said, a time penalty for servicing needs or a resource tracker if a replacement aircraft is used and a repair time penalty applied to the original aircraft before it became available again.

Food for thought, I doubt there's time for the dev team to even glance at this just now.