S3 Series

This is a frustrating post so no replies are necessary.

I just want to know why we mess with things all the time in the S3, especially mid series. AUGH!!!

So last night I was running behind the strike group so I sat out circling in the ocean off DAR until Dawger called that the 475th was in the box. I then headed north.

In the middle of the 4,8 grid I found 2 troop transports just tooling along on a south heading with no DD's. I avoid the DD's like the plague, I have been killed enough times by the super DD's. I come to a perfect broadside approach and fire rockets and sink one and boom, my engine is leaking oil, lost my flaps and landing gear and am loosing gas. I figure I must have hit a mast so jump to one of my wingmen. I immediately notice his right engine in on fire? WTF? AI don't collide.

So I jump to another wingman (as the previous two planes crash into the ocean) Circle around fro the last transport and notice the damn thing is shooting at me. As I come around to make a pass on it, it shoots down my wingman and PK's me. Un-fricking believable.

Since when are the non-DD ships set to fire and what are they shooting with? What kind of crap is it that 2 troop transports can take out 4 B25's?

We know the ship accuracy is way to high even on the min. settings. it's hard enough with DD's out there but now we can't attack anything?

My guess is that what happened to Dew that caused him to post:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1569

Dew and Cool lost all 4 planes (8 total B25's) to ships. Cool thought they were the DD's and Dew thought it was a mast, I am guessing that it was the other ships, not the DD's, that got them.

We are loosing strike pilots because we do everything we can to drive them (us) away. I fly strike because I love to fly low and blow crap up. Ships, up until now, have ALWAYS been my favorite things to attack. Now what do we have? I am going to get replies, "we should be dropping bombs on them from 5K", "we don't have control over the AI", "try different tactics"......................

Why have we totally thrown out all low level attacks? My favorite stories of WW2 are the low level strike attacks. Some sneaky group comes in at tree top level and takes out a target, B25's flying tree top to take out oil fields, navy pilots flying support for the troops....... not in the S3 anymore.

I have gotten killed in frames 2, 3 and 4 and have yet to see a IJ fighter.

MuskieZZ,

You are not alone. Some of us only got 1 AI because the other 2 were stuck at the base. We were in B25D's and after we dropped, I pulled the power and started a gentle descent from 10k. I did a shallow bank to the left and watched my wing break off. I transferred to my only AI and did the same thing but even more shallow, but the same thing happen.

With my other 2 AI's stuck at the field I was out of the game.

This has to be fixed before the next frame in my opinion.

Some of the non-warship boats have multiple selectable weapons loadouts, some of which are deadly.

I imagine that Jabo, in his never ending quest to make frame 5 matter, put plenty of DD's and plenty of 20 MM armed trannies in the fleet.

Frame 5 I think we will just stick to high altitude bombing of stuff on the ground.

The IJ finally got a Frame CO with a clue and concentrated their force.

And for all the hullabaloo about the UBER P38 the Ki44 is clearly superior at low altitudes.

The fighters paid a high price for not sticking together and letting the fight get outside the favorable envelope.

I do not expect Bluzoo to start a diatribe about the Ki44 until he gets killed by one.

Bomber guys need to participate in the development process. You have to be part of the solution.

The ONLY way to fix the spawn issue for frame 5 is airstarts for bombers.

The problem is the off runway spawn points and that wont be fixed before next week.

We have found that if you spawn (at least at 80 and 81) facing the ocean, then the AIs in there never ending quest to be first, fly straight out to the ocean, if you face the mountains then they get stuck in the hills. They do not (AI's) have to taxi to the main runway as do the human operated strike plans, This is true for both the mossie as well as the Mitchell.

AA did seem to be particularly tough last frame, Beaver and myself had a short night also,. One other thing we noticed is when we found the transports or rather when they first rendered to us we were on a 090ish heading, lining up they suddenly turned from a 180 heading to 090 and began to steam away, not sure if they can be programmed to start from the "A" box and continue running in a set pattern before the arrival of the strike packages.
Luckily or rather unluckily some of us aborted our initial run and turned to get a broadside view which put us into the line of the escorting DDs longer then we should have.
A couple of our strike pilots (deak and yukone) managed to avoid the DDs better and ended up with two sorties accounting for at least 7 possibly eight freighters. Think beaver and muzz also had one or two ships.

Not being a "formal" strike squadron we are enjoying the new found trials and tribulations of practicing skip bombing, AI commands and all the while trying to maintain a course heading and a pivot head.
I don't think we have really encountered any enemy aircraft with the exception of the second sortie in mossies when we followed the buffs into Rabaul
So our hats are off to the fighters for keeping the enemy off our tails.

We will leave the FM debate up to those who fly these beasts more then we do but thank all involved for the opportunity and privilege of learning the other side of WBs. It has also been great to learn from the best of them as we share out TS channel with those that are assigned to us.

Swede- CO 416 RCAF-127 Wing

Dawger,

I reported this problem with the AI during frame 1 and nothing was done about it. Now you know about the weak wings, they need to fix it. I know not sure what you meant about being part of the solution. I don't have anything to do with the code and have no knowledge on how to fix it. I just fly them and report the problems per the statements on this forum.

Swede we took off from SP2 which faces us to the ocean. The spawn point unfortunately doesn't and have to taxi to it.

Hawk <S>

Understood, everything about this is new to us. Was not implying you were at the wrong spawn. Just what we found worked for us. and for any who have not flown the mossie yet, watch the left hand torque
we aborted many take offs with this one.

Swede-

Dawger, Muzz did alot of testing on the B25H and found that it fell apart at 3G's if loaded with bombs, 4G's once the bombs were dropped. I don't know if that is realistic or not, just pointing out what we found.

i just ran the numbers a few days ago and the b25 is set for 3.5 G at 38,000 lbs with a relatively small safety margin.

The margin may need to be higher than it is and I need to check the max gross weight.

In the real world the B25 was limited to 2.67 G at high weight and 3.67 G at low weight. The safety margin is unknown, in which case one would assume 50%, giving it a structural failure at 3.9 G at high weights.

The game is pretty close to this but may need some tweaking.

So why are they suddenly breaking? They now have full control deflection and you need to be less aggressive on the elevator and keep the G under 3 at all times. Before the new FM, you didn't have the elevator authority to generate 4 G.

No problem Swede. I was agreeing with you on the take off path. Still the AI's hung around for a pizza party.