Yeah. Aside from reducing combat effectiveness, I've never felt that the spring thaws in Barbarossa immobilized the German army that badly, even as half the countryside is mired in mud.
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
- Status
Yeah. Aside from reducing combat effectiveness, I've never felt that the spring thaws in Barbarossa immobilized the German army that badly, even as half the countryside is mired in mud.
The classic example of that was the mosquito bomber it was cheap to build, a crew of only 2. But depending on the model it could get the same weight of bombs to Berlin as a B-17 for only a fraction of the casualties. Piston engine fighters simply couldnt catch it.
-as for the OP's question I agree that the Rockets should have an extremly poor strat bombing effect. For strategic bombing to be effective you either had to do area carpet bombing like the british night raids, or precision bombing of critical targets like the american daylight raids. Untill rockets were nuclear armed all they could do was put a huge hole in the wrong place.
100% mud should be like Korsun '44. Sure the tracked forces on both sides made some very limited progress but they spent huge amount of fuel and supply was a nightmare to begin with.
Horses are actually not that bad when it comes to mud. They do tire quickly but they can make helluva lot more progress than most motorized forces during those conditions.
On the other hand, any form of pavement is going to almost completely negate normal movement restrictions due to mud.
Per pilot? Per crewman, perhaps, but there's a big difference between the aptitude and training required to jockey an M2 as an air gunner and a high performance twin-engined fighter-bomber. And it could get there okay, but if it stayed as high and fast as it would need to to avoid hostile attention, it'd hit even less than the B-17s did. If it came down to the same altitude and flew straight and level to get accurate bombing, it'd get chopped into sawdust by the defenders. Were there any proposals to switch Bomber Command over to light bombers? Or even studies done?
I couldn't have phrased it better
Ehh, even the videos I see of horses in the thick Russian mud did not really fair better than a tracked vehicle. The big difference is you could unhook the horse and get it out of the mud, but then you still have whatever it was carrying stuck in there.
Well the MK XVI mosquito could actually carry a 4000 lb bomb to berlin but a normal load was 4 500lb bombs. B17's prior to the G model could only get 4000lb to berlin but the B17 G could carry 4500lb on a long range mission. A Lancaster could carried a typical load of 14000lb to berlin or with a modified bomb door it could carry the 22000lb Grand Slam bomb.
The mosquito was often used for low altitude precision bombings where it suffered very low casualties because it was faster than the german fighters.
The US strategic bomber design philosopy was for powerful defensive armament but a small bombload for precision daylight bombings. The UK went for light defensive armament but heavy bombloads for night area bombings. To simulate that choice strategic bomber armament should really give a penalty to strategic attack. That would mean you would have to choose between a bomber with better stategic attack that you could only safely use at night when bombing is less effective, or a daylight bomber with lower strategic attack.
Last edited:
Where are you getting the figures from. I can't find anything more than a vague 9000lb, rising to 20000lb 'late in the war' and no ranges are given for either of these. If that's max. payload, what was the heaviest load a mossie could carry (to the next field...
)?
Well good luck finding guys who would want to fly those planes deep into Germany or even across the channel unarmed.
I suspect you'd still get your pilots. (If not, get some long range fighter escorts to fly higher and behind your bombers...) And also, consider the reduced loss of life of having fewer crewmen on the plane in case of a crash. Funny timing, I just had a random conversation today with a pilot who commented on exactly this topic (defensive guns on bombers), mentioning how ineffective and wasteful they were.
Well, honestly, the Germans put far too much faith in their intelligence arms (to the point that they were fooled by Double Cross agents that the rockets were going long over London, and thus lowered the range) for BDA. Given proper attention to the math and development of un-jammable guidance systems, they could have done far better. Recall that Germany had the first "precision-guided" munitions, and scored several near-catastrophic hits with them.
This is what I don't understand. I read some people on the forum saying that V-2s should be next to worthless, but from what I've read, their poor performance in the war was due in no small part to Double Cross agents and ENIGMA decoding that let them fool, not just partially, but completely fool German leadership into thinking they were scoring hits, when, in fact, they were missing badly.
Does anyone really know how effective V-2s would have been if they had been hitting their damn targets? After all, in HOI3, there is no guarantee that the UK will ever duplicate their intelligence successes (in fact, they almost never do; when was the last time Germany was ever completely blinded by any other power in the espionage game?).
It wasn't that they were fooled into thinking they were scoring hits--it was that they were fooled into thinking they were overshooting... then they shorted their rounds.
That said, the V2s have the same problem MIRVs do against dense-packed targets: you can't fire a whole bunch of them at one point target because the explosions from rockets coming in just a bit faster will fratricide their own other rockets. They should be more than effective (together with V1s) against installations; the old saying "If you can see it, you can hit it; if you hit it, you can kill it." The other issue is the problem of fuses: Germany was way behind the Allies in the development of delayed, variable time, and proximity fuses--thus their attempts at SAMs were CCTV-guided affairs.
They should be at least fairly effective--2k lbs of HE hitting anything is guaranteed to make a significant dent in whatever you're shooting at. That's enough punch to cripple capital ships and other large-building-sized objects. Imagine if the Germans had a Luftwaffe with properly kitted-out Fritz-X guided bombs, V1s and V2s targeting RADAR and airfields prior to air raids against the RN.... You'd have "Shock and Awe/HyperWar" 70 years early.
If I remember correctly, the German's initial tests and the results of post-war testing on captured V2s showed that the rockets fired at London should have had a CEP (the radius within which 50% of the rockets fall) of 6 km. British intelligence efforts artificially increased this to about 12 km.
Though it was rarely measured this way, a B-17 at 15,000 ft had a CEP of about 500m. So ideally, a single bomber could deliver twice the payload (4,000 lbs of bombs vs. 2,000 lbs V2 warhead) at 12x the accuracy.
So even if we take British intelligence spoofing German aim out of the equation, strategic bombers could deliver more concentration of force. The cost is that a V-2 is disposable, while a B-17 and its crew are not.
You can set your interceptors to work in an area, select the circle button in the mission screen at top right when you have the mission screen opened, it's pretty simple and works VERY effectively. 2 interceptor groups working around that area will intercept any bombers that come there, no idea why you're failing at intercepting, probably you have 1918 air doctrine and 1918 fighter technology.
Replying to a whole series of points
The main purpose of defensive armament on bombers is not to shoot down interceptors, it is to discourage them and generally resulted in interceptor pilots using up their ammunition taking "difficult" shots at the enemy bombers. This reduces bomber casualties which is what makes the defensive armament valuable. Of course, if you can achieve total air superiority the story changes.
On general strategic bombing effectiveness the biggest problem is that if you destroy infrastructure down to zero everything takes forever to come back. I've carried out a strategic bombing campaign of the UK until the luftwaffe had to go east for Barbarossa, defeated Russia, come back and invaded the UK only to find my invasion sabotaged by the unrepaired destruction of UK infrastructure. The slowness of repairs is really the biggest problem.
On V weapons in turns out that their real effect is dominated by the "air raid" effect. Every time a V1 flies over a target there is an air raid reaction and productivity drops. The biggest problem from V weapon attacks was the reduction in productivity rather than damage to factories. This effect is achieved by sending them over in a steady stream rather than a massive raid - something most profoundly not simulated in the game. The V2, with its "silent" approach actually started to cause major disruption due to "bombing fear" shortly before allied action intervened against the launch sites.
The main purpose of defensive armament on bombers is not to shoot down interceptors, it is to discourage them and generally resulted in interceptor pilots using up their ammunition taking "difficult" shots at the enemy bombers. This reduces bomber casualties which is what makes the defensive armament valuable. Of course, if you can achieve total air superiority the story changes.
On general strategic bombing effectiveness the biggest problem is that if you destroy infrastructure down to zero everything takes forever to come back. I've carried out a strategic bombing campaign of the UK until the luftwaffe had to go east for Barbarossa, defeated Russia, come back and invaded the UK only to find my invasion sabotaged by the unrepaired destruction of UK infrastructure. The slowness of repairs is really the biggest problem.
On V weapons in turns out that their real effect is dominated by the "air raid" effect. Every time a V1 flies over a target there is an air raid reaction and productivity drops. The biggest problem from V weapon attacks was the reduction in productivity rather than damage to factories. This effect is achieved by sending them over in a steady stream rather than a massive raid - something most profoundly not simulated in the game. The V2, with its "silent" approach actually started to cause major disruption due to "bombing fear" shortly before allied action intervened against the launch sites.
Some defensive armament was essential to keep the fighters from just sitting back at a convenient distance and tearing the bombers apart at their leisure. Arming them to the teeth was probably counter-productive.
Late war B-25s were known to engage novice Luftwaffe fighter pilots in "turning duels". There was no way that a twin-engined bomber could out-turn a fighter plane (although the B-25 came reasonably close to it), but during the turn, the fighter's armament was mostly facing outward at a tangent, while the bomber's top and rear turrets were enjoying a field day "air conditioning" the fighter. I know one B-25 bombardier whose crew was credited with three kills that way.
The biggest reason why Strat bombing is so effective in this game is that the provincial AA is so ineffective. AA didn't "kill" a lot of planes, but it forced them to drop from a much greater altitude, and did a lot of shrapnel damage and injury to the crews, both effects sharply reducing the effectiveness of the raids.
Late war B-25s were known to engage novice Luftwaffe fighter pilots in "turning duels". There was no way that a twin-engined bomber could out-turn a fighter plane (although the B-25 came reasonably close to it), but during the turn, the fighter's armament was mostly facing outward at a tangent, while the bomber's top and rear turrets were enjoying a field day "air conditioning" the fighter. I know one B-25 bombardier whose crew was credited with three kills that way.
The biggest reason why Strat bombing is so effective in this game is that the provincial AA is so ineffective. AA didn't "kill" a lot of planes, but it forced them to drop from a much greater altitude, and did a lot of shrapnel damage and injury to the crews, both effects sharply reducing the effectiveness of the raids.
I think people are confused about why ditching the defensive armament would have made an impact: with no defensive armament, there's nothing increasing the drag of the aircraft (open windows, guns sticking out at all angles, etc). The weight saved would allow the bombers to fly faster and higher, thus restricting fighter's capability to attack.
It is worth saying that the vulnerability of bombers to interception depends on a range of factors. The V1 was in some senses an unarmed bomber and yet was difficult to intercept specifically because of the issue of speed. Unfortunately making a bomber faster and higher flying, whilst effective, tends to undermine, and be undermined by, the bombers intended purpose which is to cart a lot of bombs to the target and drop them on it (rather than nearby). High flying, high speed reconnaissance bombers existed for both sides and for the mosquito it worked well enough to be a real bomber as well but generally this approach was a non-starter for a practical effective bomber.
Well, the issue with the V1 was that it is a cruise missile. It didn't travel all that far, all that fast. It did, however, fly high enough to be caught on radar, and thus could be intercepted. If the V1 had been able to fly at 100 feet or lower, it might have proven to be far more effective in the tactical attack role.
I'm actually no longer sure just how effective provincial AA is anymore.
I used to think it was total crap until you got SAMs researched. Then I ran some games as Germany where I beefed up AA in the Allies favorite targets (Dortmund and Leipzig... Why do you make it easy for me to intercept there?). It looked like the AA actually made some kind of difference. But was it enough difference for the small amount of IC I spent? Would it have been a better investment if I teched AA much better? I'm not really sure.
I'm still not even sure just how effective AA was during the war. It had a real impact, but was that impact more of a "damaged units" type or a "lowered combat efficiency because the bombers had to fly differently" type.
The only thing I do know is that you really have to contest the air to even have a hope of stopping raids on your IC. I just don't know if the IC-Supply-Fuel equation in terms of costs for INT vs. AA ever swings in favor of AA at some point. Maybe there is a magic point where the extra fuel for yet another squadron of INT could be saved by just building some AA in a city that keeps getting bombed. I suspect, however, that as of FtM, it is still usually better to spend the IC on another wing of INTs than to build AA, if only for the same reason that I prefer building units to forts. The wings can go do something else, while the AA is stuck there forever.
I used to think it was total crap until you got SAMs researched. Then I ran some games as Germany where I beefed up AA in the Allies favorite targets (Dortmund and Leipzig... Why do you make it easy for me to intercept there?). It looked like the AA actually made some kind of difference. But was it enough difference for the small amount of IC I spent? Would it have been a better investment if I teched AA much better? I'm not really sure.
I'm still not even sure just how effective AA was during the war. It had a real impact, but was that impact more of a "damaged units" type or a "lowered combat efficiency because the bombers had to fly differently" type.
The only thing I do know is that you really have to contest the air to even have a hope of stopping raids on your IC. I just don't know if the IC-Supply-Fuel equation in terms of costs for INT vs. AA ever swings in favor of AA at some point. Maybe there is a magic point where the extra fuel for yet another squadron of INT could be saved by just building some AA in a city that keeps getting bombed. I suspect, however, that as of FtM, it is still usually better to spend the IC on another wing of INTs than to build AA, if only for the same reason that I prefer building units to forts. The wings can go do something else, while the AA is stuck there forever.
- Status