Developer Diary | Plane Designer

[Wombat69]

At least from my reading, there are plenty of examples of 20-30 aircraft at least attacking a capital ship and it surviving (sometimes with only minimal damage, depending on the training of the pilot). Even when X Fliegercorps (a unit trained in attacking shipping) attacked Illustrious with at least that many aircraft, with Illustrious as the primary target, the ship survived (And then survived further bomb damage when docked in Malta, although there's no question after all that it was quite battered!) - see the Armoured Carriers website for a detailed description of the attack. Air attacks on ships were all over the place - they could be very effective, or completely ineffective, or anywhere in-between.

More aircraft helped increase the odds of success, as did training, and there was no question that sailing under air attack for long enough wouldn't end well, but from my reading I wouldn't say that 20-30 is enough for a guaranteed capital ship kill. Noting that not all capital ships were created equal as well, but for argument's sake let's say a late-1930s battleship, so a KGV, Bismarck, Littorio, Richelieu or South Dakota/North Carolina or thereabouts - I'd probably say (wet thumb in the air) you'd want 50 aircraft for something approaching a guaranteed kill - as the "statistical dispersion" on aircraft effectiveness was quite high, even for skilled crews.

Weapons do play a role though - from the simple "drop a bomb" to the Fritz X (one of if not the first MCLOS) was quite a step. On the attack on the Italien Fleet by the Germans on 09SEP43, it took only two hits to sink the Roma. The attack was executed with 12 Do217. Tests in Peenemünde indicated that from a drop height of 4000m to 8000m 50% hit their mark in a circle of 26m diameter.
Even more successful was the Hs293 - as the hit tally on Wikipedia shows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henschel_Hs_293). At tests in Peenemünde, the glide bomb hit a circle of 25m in diameter 12 out of 12 times.

 

[Sourlol]

I'm not a huge fan of losing the "armor/agility/reliability/range" stat choices,

The first two utility modules are armor plates and self sealing fuel tanks. There are other utility modules that would directly effect the other stats. Those are gone, you just fiddle with them via modules, not a completely abstracted 5 point stat++ button.

The thing is, the same can be said of the navy part of the armed forces and no one is currently (AFAIK) complaining about a separate pool of seamen.
Maybe because single ships take incredibly long to be built, but it's not like the crew is being trained in parallel with the ships, right?
Like, I get it, we could have a whole complex minigame just to take care of all the training aspects of all aspects of your armed forces but a balance must be made between overall fun and "simulationism".

There is very little of being a mariner that requires exacting physical traits, like being a pilot does.

anyone of adequate intelligence and the ability to maneuver through ship passages can do the work needed on a ship.
While being an officer or manning the radar or being the ship doctor all require specialized training, they don’t require you to be of a certain height window, have good vision, good reaction times, understand lift, and be in your late teens early 20s.

beyond that the training pipeline for being a pilot takes a long time.

being a mechanic for the engine room is hard work, loading munitions on planes is hard work, doing calculations to fire 18” guns 20miles and hit what you want is difficult work…but it not as singularly complex dangerous or difficult as flying a fighter and engaging in a dog fight and not dying.

There’s a reason every major was limited on the pilots they had, but no one really had issues getting a million guys into the army or getting sailors onto ships

 

[Wombat69]

The UK had a shortage during the Battle of Britain and its partly due to that harsh lesson that the Commonwealth Air Training Plan was set up. Pilots take a while to learn to fly - never mind how to fight in the air - just learning how to not become a smear on the tarmac takes time. During the Battle of Britain the RAF was getting more airframes than they had pilots to fly them.

Same 1944 onwards for the Germans...

 

[Axe99]

Weapons do play a role though - from the simple "drop a bomb" to the Fritz X (one of if not the first MCLOS) was quite a step. On the attack on the Italien Fleet by the Germans on 09SEP43, it took only two hits to sink the Roma. The attack was executed with 12 Do217. Tests in Peenemünde indicated that from a drop height of 4000m to 8000m 50% hit their mark in a circle of 26m diameter.
Even more successful was the Hs293 - as the hit tally on Wikipedia shows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henschel_Hs_293). At tests in Peenemünde, the glide bomb hit a circle of 25m in diameter 12 out of 12 times.

There's no question they have an impact, but in this context I'd highly recommend reading Bollinger's Warriors and Wizards for a broader understanding of their capacity (and the quickly-implemented countermeasures) - the stats you've quoted there rather overstate their impact, even taking into account the difference between tests and the operational application of weapons (tests tend to be a good deal more accurate, both because the tests are usually there to validate something, and because they'll often not take into account all the factors that influence operational situations).

All that being said, there's absolutely no question that radio-guided and then radar-guided weapons changed the metric substantially - my thoughts quoted earlier are only in the context of unguided bombs and torpedoes

 

[ShinogiSatou]

what about Jet CV planes (such like Forrestal class' planes)

 

[LordWahu]

what about Jet CV planes (such like Forrestal class' planes)

Jet engines are an auxiliary module now, so carrier jets are possible

 

[DukofDeth]

As they pointed out in the DD you may make a rocket powered torpedo bomber [so why not also a rocket powered CV torpedo-bomber] if you hate your aircrews enough to do so.

 

[Anaraxes]

[so why not also a rocket powered CV torpedo-bomber]

At that point, might as well make it a rocket-powered kamikaze CV torpedo bomber. Call it "ASROC".

 

[xtfoster]

I think they answered that a wing only ever performs one mission at a time.

Yes. And that has actually always been true. Which is why you are wasting your time giving a Fighter/Bomber both Air Superiority and Ground Support (Bombing) missions. Since they Air Superiority can always run, the Ground Support never will. There are some other combinations that might work (Interception and Ground Support is the only one I can think of).

 

[xtfoster]

The UK had a shortage during the Battle of Britain and its partly due to that harsh lesson that the Commonwealth Air Training Plan was set up. Pilots take a while to learn to fly - never mind how to fight in the air - just learning how to not become a smear on the tarmac takes time. During the Battle of Britain the RAF was getting more airframes than they had pilots to fly them.

Yes, but that argument does nothing to further an argument that there should be a separate pilot pool.

Study after Study has shown that contrary to the beliefs of Air Force Academies (and the pilots themselves) pretty much anyone who could normally serve in the military was capable of learning to fly in combat. No fancy college degree required.

It should take longer to create a new air wing (or require splitting a cadre from an existing wing), but there is no need to create a separate pool when (maybe barring "Scraping the Barrel") there is no difference between the people that would populate the pools.

 

[Sourlol]

Yes, but that argument does nothing to further an argument that there should be a separate pilot pool.

Study after Study has shown that contrary to the beliefs of Air Force Academies (and the pilots themselves) pretty much anyone who could normally serve in the military was capable of learning to fly in combat. No fancy college degree required.

It should take longer to create a new air wing (or require splitting a cadre from an existing wing), but there is no need to create a separate pool when (maybe barring "Scraping the Barrel") there is no difference between the people that would populate the pools.

the pilot pool would be less representative of how many people in your country can become pilots, but rather how many in your country are pilots.

Ideally, you’d be able to change your pilot training laws to shorten or lengthen your training time in order to grow or shrink the pool and to influence the starting experience of said plane/squadron.

you’d even be able to make it so you can rotate your experienced pilots (maybe your aces?) out of combat in order to influence training of new ones to have them deploy with a higher base experience

Japan shortened their pipeline considerably during the war in order to keep planes in the sky.

the Germans kept their aces on the front lines till their died, slowly eroding the institutional knowledge as losses mounted, depriving new pilots-in-training valuable training time with combat vets.

the Americans were able to rotate their veterans off the front to help train new pilots. Which contributed to a high number of well trained pilots, consistently becoming available to be strapped into combat aircraft.

during the Battle of Britain, the biggest issue was the British pilots were becoming exhausted and dead. Given the pipeline, those that died couldn’t be readily replaced, and those that were left, had to fly more with less time to rest and thus more mistakes and more died. many who were shot down and lived, found themselves with a new plane quite quickly—I’ve seen some anecdotes that it was the next day.

Even today, whether it’s Ukraine or the us or Russia or china, losing the pilot is more crippling than losing the airframe. With the exception of Ukraine, the plane can be more readily replaced than the pilot.

 

[Balesir]

Yes, but that argument does nothing to further an argument that there should be a separate pilot pool.

Study after Study has shown that contrary to the beliefs of Air Force Academies (and the pilots themselves) pretty much anyone who could normally serve in the military was capable of learning to fly in combat. No fancy college degree required.

It should take longer to create a new air wing (or require splitting a cadre from an existing wing), but there is no need to create a separate pool when (maybe barring "Scraping the Barrel") there is no difference between the people that would populate the pools.

It's absolutely not about the number of people who might become pilots - it's about the number who already are pilots and about how fast pilots can be trained to fly (not fast - it's a pretty hard limitation). The key element that feeds through to the game is that old planes were scrapped because they weren't needed. The materials from them were actually worth more than the plane itself (and they weren't worth much!) Pilots and (for many aircraft types) their flight crews still needed training to do their missions well - without this they were just green crews and pilots - but the pilot being able to fly a plane was a prerequisite to this even starting.

It's made even more interesting because an important thing you need to teach people to fly is... pilots! Ideally you should need to dedicate a number of your pilots to train new pilots - with more dedicated training pilots giving a higher number of pilots produced. It also needs facilities and trainer (non-combat) aircraft - but those could and should be abstracted into simple IC need. An airforce unit is then 1 plane plus 1 air crew. The air crew gains experience etc. but doesn't change in technology (so it just remains with the unit throughout), whereas the planes get upgraded as newer models come out.

Edit: it's an extra boost of the "Women in the Workforce" decision that it should give a one-off boost in pilot numbers - women who could already fly were swiftly recruited to fly military planes even if, as in the UK RAF, they were limited to delivering them to frontline squadrons. This duty freed up the (male) pilots who had been delivering planes to train for combat roles.

 

[DukofDeth]

Yes, but that argument does nothing to further an argument that there should be a separate pilot pool.

Study after Study has shown that contrary to the beliefs of Air Force Academies (and the pilots themselves) pretty much anyone who could normally serve in the military was capable of learning to fly in combat. No fancy college degree required.

It should take longer to create a new air wing (or require splitting a cadre from an existing wing), but there is no need to create a separate pool when (maybe barring "Scraping the Barrel") there is no difference between the people that would populate the pools.

We have to build everything that goes into a division and then we have to train the soldiers to the bare minimum level. With air units the aircraft are built and then we throw people into the pilot seats and magically they can fly right away. It doesn't matter if you are only building one air unit at a time or dumping out an entire air-force of thousands of aircraft all at once - the present system assumes that everyone in the manpower pool can at least take-off and land an aircraft no matter the complexity.

The lack of a separate pilot pool doesn't break anything aside from immersion. It would be a pleasant addition but I do not consider it a necessity. There are far more important things to sort out add or improve upon. However, if they were to add it it would simply be another resource to manage. You'd plug in a batch of trainees and after a certain period you'd have some pilots. Maybe it uses fuel to simulate the time in trainer aircraft, maybe not. We don't need to simulate every expenditure.

To an extent the same could be said of the navy, but there the reality would be that a small number of crew from other already trained vessels would be tapped to form the cadre for a new crew complement and the rest is filled out with new sailors. Pilot training involves a lot of things from getting the bird in the air and back on the ground to how to manage various in-flight crises. Cutting pilot training short would allow more faster but your accident rate should soar. Running it longer means you'd have more capable pilots to put into air combat training. As for the training we put them through once they're in an aircraft - that I see as air combat training and air-ground combat training. Before we were only able to gain experience through combat so it can't be said that they learn to basics of handling an aircraft from the moment they're put into the pilot's seat.

 

[Xerberous]

Short question:

Is the possible missionen type restricted to certain airframe-sizes? As a practical example you may think of a "Gunship-Type" airplane (Large airframe with CAS mission).

 

[wagnerleung0079]

Weapons do play a role though - from the simple "drop a bomb" to the Fritz X (one of if not the first MCLOS) was quite a step. On the attack on the Italien Fleet by the Germans on 09SEP43, it took only two hits to sink the Roma. The attack was executed with 12 Do217. Tests in Peenemünde indicated that from a drop height of 4000m to 8000m 50% hit their mark in a circle of 26m diameter.
Even more successful was the Hs293 - as the hit tally on Wikipedia shows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henschel_Hs_293). At tests in Peenemünde, the glide bomb hit a circle of 25m in diameter 12 out of 12 times.

There's no question they have an impact, but in this context I'd highly recommend reading Bollinger's Warriors and Wizards for a broader understanding of their capacity (and the quickly-implemented countermeasures) - the stats you've quoted there rather overstate their impact, even taking into account the difference between tests and the operational application of weapons (tests tend to be a good deal more accurate, both because the tests are usually there to validate something, and because they'll often not take into account all the factors that influence operational situations).

All that being said, there's absolutely no question that radio-guided and then radar-guided weapons changed the metric substantially - my thoughts quoted earlier are only in the context of unguided bombs and torpedoes

That why I believe allowing different air wings can choose different attacking tactics in different missions. For example to overcoming the accuracy problem of conducting naval strike with level bombing. Without modified the plane (adding air brake), player can choose to increase the accuracy with skip-bombing or mast-height bombing, but it will increase the chances of being hit by AA and accident, or using guided bomb, but it would increase the ammo/supply consumption for each mission.

PS: I know that currently in game other than fuel air mission would not consume anything ( except plane by attrition), but as there were different kinds of bombs ( guided bomb, napalm, tallboy or skipping bomb) for different specific missions. Even without implementing the mission tactics feature, the devs should really consider adding a “bomb” resource to simulation the consumption of different kinds of bomb when Bombing different target. Player can then consumption “bomb” to add buffing modifier for conducting air mission.

Like
consuming 1 “bomb” per navy strike mission to use radio guided bomb to increase the “naval targeting”;

consuming 1 “bomb” per logistic strike mission to use skipping bomb to increase the “Ground Attack”.

 

[Balesir]

PS: I know that currently in game other than fuel air mission would not consume anything ( except plane by attrition), but as there were different kinds of bombs ( guided bomb, napalm, tallboy or skipping bomb) for different specific missions. Even without implementing the mission tactics feature, the devs should really consider adding a “bomb” resource to simulation the consumption of different kinds of bomb when Bombing different target. Player can then consumption “bomb” to add buffing modifier for conducting air mission.

It is possible to charge command points for specific air missions, though; maybe certain missions could be gated by CP expenditure to boost effectiveness by using "special" munitions?

 

[Duke_Dave]

Short question:

Is the possible missionen type restricted to certain airframe-sizes? As a practical example you may think of a "Gunship-Type" airplane (Large airframe with CAS mission).

I don't see why this won't be possible.

 

[wagnerleung0079]

It is possible to charge command points for specific air missions, though; maybe certain missions could be gated by CP expenditure to boost effectiveness by using "special" munitions?

I don't know how the dev would think, but "special" munitions are developed through research and built in factories instead of trained through missions like experience. It is not up to me to decide how would this feature be implemented, but I personally believe the "special point" to unlock "special" munitions should only be accessible through factory production.

 

[Anaraxes]

Is the possible missionen type restricted to certain airframe-sizes?

The statement so far was that mission types are determined by the modules (weapons) in the design. They might restrict missions based on the airframe -- do you want light "strategic bombers", or four-engine Flying Fortresses on air superiority? But they might not code a restriction, and just let you fly any plane on any mission, whether or not it will do anything useful.

(It would probably be sufficient to let terrible stats for inappropriate missions serve as the "soft" deterrent from choosing those missions. But no doubt someone would prefer to be protected from accidents, especially since you can currently select groups of wings that don't all have the same aircraft type. Currently you'll only get a choice of the missions those wings have in common -- but if the implementation allowed any plane on any mission, the selected group would always have all missions in common, so you might accidentally put your escorts on strat bombing or the bombers on escort duty with a mis-click. A hypothetical implementation in between would be for the aircraft design to have a set of checkboxes for the allowed missions. The designer could default those to "enabled" based on installed equipment / stats for convenience; the player could enable or disable possible missions as they desire -- no air xp cost, so you can change it on a whim for deployed equipment should your circumstances change and you feel desperate enough. The scenario where you've won the air war and want to repurpose some of those thousands of extra fighters you have to CAS duty (or whatever) would call for a trip back to the air designer to create a variant that changes the weapons loadout to be more suitable for the new intended mission, then upgrade whatever of your existing stock you might want to that purpose. Also would preserve factory specialization, which might be a motivation to emulate, say, the Fw-190 F series of ground attack and torpedo bomber aircraft.)

 

[Balesir]

I don't know how the dev would think, but "special" munitions are developed through research and built in factories instead of trained through missions like experience. It is not up to me to decide how would this feature be implemented, but I personally believe the "special point" to unlock "special" munitions should only be accessible through factory production.

Special munitions would need to be unlocked by some tech box first, for sure, but munitions in general are already accounted for (inasmuch as they are) by supplies and attrition, so I don't think it would be useful to make special munitions the only sort of munitions that take IC to build... Setting up the necessary special orders, supply routings and use releases for the special munitions to be used, however, seems to me to be just the sort of thing that would take "command points". Don't nukes already work this way? There's a fairly clear analogy there.

Edit: the real practicality of this might depend on whether mission types are expandable to subtypes of the existing types. If so, then some good variants to allow for altitude and munitions variants would be moddable, if nothing else. Otherwise it might just be infeasible.