ORIGINAL: PaxMondo
Yep, a good die roll on the surface engagement. Not necessarily 100%, but definitely in the 90's. So a possible result.
The Nettie attack is more like in the 80's. +40 Hellcats on CAP for 2CV is about right, so the CAP looks fine. Don't know what your ingress/egress altitude was, but looks like the CAP was up at 30,000. A low level attack would have a good chance to succeed, as it did, with the CAP like that. Likely the WASP had the low CAP and he forgot to reset his CAP altitudes. That's where your luck came into play ... if you had gotten the SARA and the WASP had their CAP at 10,000 then your Netties would have been decimated.
Since the raid was detected at 80 NM I don't believe that is true. And my Betty force didnt get decimated because I had slightly superior number (with a good deal of elite pilotes) on escort duty... I lost more then half of my escorting fighters and still 6 or 7 bombers to fighters...
There were 3 CV in the area (probably the Hornet, for sure the Lexington and Saratoga) but he had multiple strikes out vs my DD force and vs one of my bases in the vicinity. I think he had around 40-50% of his fighters set to CAP.
