S3 Series

gums... you did land successfully without the rudder. Yes? It was painful watching you crawl home across all that open water with that big smoking white fuel stream of a billboard behind you that said "Defenseless Bomber Ahead". Watched you bolter a couple of times trying to land, but I think you wound up successfully putting her on the deck?

I got a great picture of your beat up aircraft. I should be a photographer or something!

If guess I need a definition of "deeply embedded". A fighter sitting in formation with buffs isn't going to do s*** for protection. We saw this in BBD. Closer proximity would probably help, but still talking 1,000s of feet apart for manuever. Granted this series is a bit easier to catch up and fly in and out of buffs with the speed difference. I would also consider raising the flying altitude as well if we can make it work in the plan. They know what you fly at so they will probably not go higher than 16-17k ft. We saw this when we pushed the fighters down from 32k ft in the first sortie we ran into a hard deck of zeros sitting around 15k ft, waiting for you. At that time the 23rd let 352 and 4th pay while they did an end around.

Need better timing and cannot afford to wait on "malfunctions". Suggest protection box as dawger describes.

Deeply Embedded, yes it may not do much to protect but I think I know what Gums is referring to. I was only 5 K above his two ship and I noticed a smaller con swirling near him...I dove down. it was a friendly, OK...20 seconds later , same small con or so I thought, this time it was an enemy, I was right there but I had no idea until almost too late. So, maybe one or two guys with eyes on the buffs and ears on TS with the fighters would probably be ideal.

Yea, the NS had 5 ships 5K above the buffs and same thing. just couldn't tell the bad guys until smoke started to roll.

As for alt, the TBD can't get above 12~13K and then only flies at about 120MPH.

Protecting a TBD formation is VASTLY different from a heavy bomber formation.

there will only be slashing attacks on the heavies because there is a lot of defensive firepower.

A TBD will go down right away to a concentrated burst of fire, there is nothing to deter the enemy from hovering in the formation for a well aimed shot.


The TBDs need the fighters there to keep from being killed right away.

Granted, you would not want all the fighters right there but having some with the buffs will spread the voice coms better as well as have some type of defense.


my $.02

So, if we are dedicating some to close escort, you need to think about a few things.

Fuel being the biggest.

Need to roll fighters later then buffs...know what time hack/RP to join the buffs at and plan your launch accordingly.

Once rejoined..you'll need a high 4 ship and a low 4 ship. I recommend 2 2 ships (one either side of the buffs and slightly higher but icon or close to icon for the low 4 ship, and high can do same....just not in icon. Need both 4 ships in Voice comm with each other.

All of these fighters will need to weave...45 left and right....flying X's across the bombers.
Not a bad thing as it helps clear 6, but think that you will be flying much longer path than the buffs...and fuel plan accordingly. If you don't do this, you'll be low and slow and not much help...yes it is easier to throttle back and plod along, but not tactically sound.

Need turnpoints with time hacks...and need buffs to call them. "Buff flight. Turnpoint 3, 30 seconds late."

Just pointing out the obvious, but Fuel will be a problem if the escort is forced defensive early and have to jett tanks.

Dobs

Muskyzz,

You did a great job in frame 4. We closed 23 and 25 and sank some ships. Not everything goes as plan as we all know. What I did in Frame 2 was to have a group sweep in front, the rear and above while we had our Knight fighters imbedded with the package. The results speaks for it's self.

If you need close escort, or really close 127 wing would be happy to provide cover. We have done this before, except gums kept shooting at us, took a lot of control not to shoot back
Believe there was some glitch that allowed his B 25 to shoot at anything.

Swede- S/L 416 RCAF, 127 Wing.

Salute!

Yeah Dazed, made it back two times.

Hey, Swede, my gunner was No fly. OTOH , I would have personally been hosing away at any dot due the icon and other limits we have.

Trust us, a few lites flying close will have kills. The lites out there a mile away are too easy to ID as escort. All I know is what we saw in frame 2 when you guys were on the other side.

Gums opines....

The Knight Fighters were embedded with the bombers for the last 2 frames. (first frame the bombers went in under dar and we ran a decoy route)
We faired well in frame 2 and the first mission of frame 3 on Sunday, got a few kills with minimum losses and the bombers got their job done.
Misson 2 this last Sunday was a different story as we got bounced by a squadron of Zekes from high above us. The difference this time is we lacked the higher cover from other squads that we had the previous missions.

Typically the KoN fighters, usually being about 4 or 5 of us, fly about 5k above the bomber group and follow their same route from start to finish in a mission of this sort.

Fuel in the missions we flew with the bombers has never been an issue so far. We roll at the same time as the bombers. We roll with external tank 100% internal.
Keep in mind we haven't had to jettison the external until we were close to target area.
I prefer to burn off the internal first, down to about 85% before switching to external.
Since the bombers fly so slow, we are at about 60% throttle on the ingress and we don't burn through fuel as quickly as in a max climb out.

Both missions I was involved with where we returned to the carrier, I had 20 minutes fuel left, and that was all the way to the target, loitering to help bombers, and rtb.