ayyy-ayyy-ayyy.... Night Bombing!

[fbs]

About the paragraph "accurate celestial navigation was possible at night", that has quite a bit of caveats. It requires very specialized training, and a good crew can get it right to +/- 2 miles (which, by the way, are covered in 30 seconds flying at 200 mph). So it is good enough to get to an illuminated target, or perhaps to do area bombing.

But as to find a blacked-out island, and then find an airfield within the island, and then find the camouflaged aircrafts within the airfield, that I think requires some 1960s technology.

This is a result of a night attack by 11 Bettys: 4 P-35A destroyed and 1 damaged. That is a result that many air forces would be proud to achieve in 2000.

[LoBaron]

ORIGINAL: michaelm

Night bombing takes accuracy hits from plane damage, weather/clouds, pilot skill, group morale, flight disruption, non-city attack.
There is an increase in accuracy if target has a high Max DL.

The later is most likely the culprit for any excess in night bombing as we know that the max DL seems to be a runaway figure; the max DL check against the random 10 will always be true in these cases.

michaelm thank you! This is very informative.

So are you saying, since I remember the team is working on a solution for the mdl > 10 issue, that this solution could also lead to night bombing accuracy reduced and working fine then?

[treespider]

ORIGINAL: fbs


About the paragraph "accurate celestial navigation was possible at night", that has quite a bit of caveats. It requires very specialized training, and a good crew can get it right to +/- 2 miles (which, by the way, are covered in 30 seconds flying at 200 mph). So it is good enough to get to an illuminated target, or perhaps to do area bombing.

But as to find a blacked-out island, and then find an airfield within the island, and then find the camouflaged aircrafts within the airfield, that I think requires some 1960s technology.

Well apparently the Japanese on December 12th, 1941 figured out how to do it without 1960's technology...granted the attack was ineffective but they were able to find the island at 5:00am after flying 600+miles...

And on December 7th they were able to fly to Singapore at night...

And in January 1942 the Japanese were able to find Mingladon Airfield (Rangoon) at night...repeatedly.

And on January 29, 1943 they torpedoed the USS Chicago at night...

And for four months following July of 1943 they conducted nighttime raids on Darwin...

This is a result of a night attack by 11 Bettys: 4 P-35A destroyed and 1 damaged. That is a result that many air forces would be proud to achieve in 2000.

At Dusk on December 27 , 1941 six Blenheims of 34 Squadron and 5 Hudsons of 8 RAAF attacked Sungei Patani airfield and destroyed eight or nine Ki-51's and damaged fifty others...

...never see those kind of results in the game though...

EDIT: I guess we could also consider Operation O-go launched August 11, 1941 ( a few months before our game begins) in which 20 A6M2's were escorted by 9 G4M1's. The G4M1's departed Hankow at 1:15am , flew over Ichang where the fighters joined them...in the dark... then the entire force flew on to Chengtu....and attacked the Chinese airfield in the pre-dawn hours...where they destroyed 2 bombers and 4 fighters on the ground and shot down an additional 5 in the air .... to put into context of Europe - Hankow to Chengtu is 47 miles farther than London to Berlin...

[NAVMAN]

Hi All: Regarding that "...accurate celestial navigation was accurate...", I would agree.
We were trained w/ a sextant and a chart and tables. If you could shoot a star(at night)
you could do pretty well as long as your calculations were accurate. I do not think
that has changed much. When I was home on leave once, I showed my father, who was a
bombardier and also trained in navigation, how we did dead reckoning and celestial.
He told me it was essentially the way he was taught in 1943.
Anyone remember the movie "Air Force", when the B17 is flying from PH to Wake?

Thx.

[Tracy White]

Hi everyone. Don't forget that Pearl Harbor was attacked a second time (unsuccessfully) in March of 1942 by two Japanese Navy flying boats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_K

[michaelm75au]

ORIGINAL: LoBaron

ORIGINAL: michaelm

Night bombing takes accuracy hits from plane damage, weather/clouds, pilot skill, group morale, flight disruption, non-city attack.
There is an increase in accuracy if target has a high Max DL.

The later is most likely the culprit for any excess in night bombing as we know that the max DL seems to be a runaway figure; the max DL check against the random 10 will always be true in these cases.

michaelm thank you! This is very informative.

So are you saying, since I remember the team is working on a solution for the mdl > 10 issue, that this solution could also lead to night bombing accuracy reduced and working fine then?

Don't know about working fine [:D], but it is definitely skewing the results because of the extra influence of HIGHER than expected DLs.

[crsutton]

We don't use it in my two games. No  house rules or anything my opponents and I have just not tried it out and I am fine with that.
 
That said I have yet to see a coordinated bombing attack from my airforce under any conditions and one game is at 11/42. (Yes, I have tried all the suggested solutions) I can't get more than one sqadron to sweep at a time. So I might consider night bombing if my losses from the total lack of coordination continue. So if you want to fix night bombing, you might as well take the time to fix the coordination issues. Heck, why don't you fix the high altitude sweep while you are at it......
 
Nah, aint going to happen is it?

[fbs]

ORIGINAL: treespider

Well apparently the Japanese on December 12th, 1941 figured out how to do it without 1960's technology...granted the attack was ineffective but they were able to find the island at 5:00am after flying 600+miles...

And on December 7th they were able to fly to Singapore at night...

And in January 1942 the Japanese were able to find Mingladon Airfield (Rangoon) at night...repeatedly.

Well, I don't want to argue, but dusk and dawn are not exactly deep of night. If a bomber is flying visually at dawn, a fighter can fly too, will find it and shoot it down. That is early (or very late) day combat rather than night fighting.

When someone is flying 1 mile every 18 seconds, I think one can eventually end up close to a 5-miles wide island at night. That is fair -- but bombing a 30-feet wide airplane, that is a lot of luck. Of course, one can make noise over the airfield and drop bombs blindly to keep the troops awaken (really no problem with that, several Soviet girls specialized in doing it), but other than the sporadic lucky hit, I find it very hard to believe that a bomber unit can precision bomb at night.

Once again, I mean a real night rather than dawn and dusk. If the game means dawn/dusk attacks when it refers to "night bombing", then it would be fair that my day fighters would fly to shoot them down.