Air Warfare Questions

[Relayer2112]

Hi all,

I'm looking for advice on a couple of different things, but rather than make several topics I've put it here:

1) Weaponeering in CMANO - I understand that units have a set amount of DPs, and that weapons inflict DPs, but how does unit armour etc factor into this? Are GP and penetrator warheads treated differently? I feel in some cases I'm taking a wild guess as to what munition and how many of them will be required to achieve a hard-kill of a unit. Is there any guidance for this? Or is it merely 'Target is 1000DP, weapon X inflicts 200DP, so I need 5x weapons'.

2) Modelling C2 assets in CMANO. Since the communications disruption in CoW was added, I've been thinking about C2 networks and how they work in Command. Currently, it seems all units share data with each other (unless I'm mistaken), so, in the context of an IADS, an EW radar site can share its data with an AD site automatically. How could I go about modelling the 'nodes' that make an IADS work? (and thus, make realistic 'day one' targets for a theatre). The idea being that destroying a central headquarters might mean sectors can't talk to each other, and destroying a sector hq would leave individual units unable to communicate. Can this be done easily, or will I need to get stuck into some hardcore lua-ing to make this happen?

[Cik]

1. yes they are treated differently. very differently. DPs are very nonlinear in that unless you can "exceed" the target's armor you may do trivial damage even with very "big" weapons. underground bunkers can soak 10,000+ lb of HEGP bombs, but will generally die in much less than that to penetrators of whatever type. without a lot of experience, you will have lots of problems trying to predict the DP you will need to destroy something, especially if it's armor greatly exceeds that of your weapon. you can assume that if the weapon is capable of destroying armor in one hit in real life, it can also do so in the game- but how many MK82s does it take to kill a bunker for instance would be hard to answer without just dumping a few dozen out of a B52 and directly testing it. damage not only varies by distance from center of blast, but is also probably at least a little random.

2. you'd have to have each C2 node on a side, and then write a middleware luascript that handles altering those sides to disallow intelligence sharing based on some condition (target destroyed, jammed, damage to a certain% etc) this is perhaps less problematic than it might seem at first. there are many here who could probably help you with it. the scripts probably won't end up being more than a line or two triggered with a unit destroyed/damaged event.

[thewood1]

You can do it without switching sides using comms disruption and isolation through Lua. Use lua to isolate specific parts of the network as nodes are destroyed or damaged. As the network's complexity increases, it becomes more complex in lua. So start simple and get comfortable with the lua command before jumping in with both feet.

[Gunner98]

I feel in some cases I'm taking a wild guess as to what munition and how many of them will be required

This is a bit of applied science, but takes a bit of skill to get used to. Key is what effect do you want to achieve:

-destroy a bunker, which was designed to withstand bomb hits - chose a monition that is designed to penetrate and you bypass its basic defense.
-destroy soft targets like aircraft on a tarmac parking area, soft skin vehicles or Air defence systems - cluster bombs with lots of dispersed shrapnel is your best option
-crater a runway - you need to penetrate again or use a specific anti-runway monition like Durandal
-Kill a mobile tank, you need something that can be guided (Laser or EO) and is probably designed to penetrate the armour - like an Maverick missile.

Figure out what you want to do. Understand the weapons the designer has provided you. Match weapon to target.

When in doubt, Google is your friend. Even watching a U-Tube vid on weapons effects will give you a good understanding of what it can do.

B

[Cik]

if you keep playing command you will develop an encyclopedic knowledge of at least whatever your favorite country's weapons do. in addition to what gunner said, you can often figure out roughly how a weapon works by looking at it's DB entry. various weapon properties like penetrator warheads, as well as it's homing type (revealed by sensors) etc. can often be determined.

if you have a rough understanding of how weapons work IRL a sentence or two from wikipedia can give you most of what you need to know about how to employ it.

[thewood1]

Two pieces of advice on building scenarios and using lua...

1) start small and slow. I see too many people coming and thinking they can build a 3000 unit scenario with hundreds of lines of lua code. They spend months asking questions and looking for lua code. There frustrations become part of the conversation and over shadow what they are trying to do. Just develop simple scenarios and get comfortable with some basic capabilities before developing WW3.

2) Work with what you have. Again, some people come across a very specific feature they feel they need for their scenario and then spend their next weeks bugging devs and others about adding that feature or finding lua work arounds. Try to stay simple and always think about the value of a specific capability, the work you'll need to make it work, and how much it actually contributes to the enjoyment of playing the scenario. In other words, keeping it simple is many times better for the player that hyper-realistic and complex.

The second one particularly true around integrated air defense. You can go crazy building a very detailed and all encompassing IADS. But will a player even notice or care about all those nodes vs just a few critical ones. It is always something you should be thinking about.

[Gunner98]

Those are sage words from thewood1. There are many ways to make a scenario 'fun' for the player and therefore more re-playable, one that I have found is complexity of the decisions the player needs to make.

Taking down a true IADS would probably take days, if not weeks or months - much beyond the scope and scale of a scenario. Best to chose a specific action and work through that.

Good luck.

B

[Cik]

well, IADS vary in size.

besides, anything can be done with enough planes. you could probably take an IADS down inside 3 hours if you had a sizeable enough force.. say a dozen CVNs, and then a few dozen squadrons :^)

in CMANO you'll see scenarios across the gamut of difficulty when attacking SAM networks. some are "strike while the iron is hot" and others give you so much force that you can "make the iron hot by striking" and just kick down the front door with massive walls of strikers.

it all depends on what you're facing and what you've been given. in particular i think i remember a scenario called black tiger or something like that where you're handed 3x CVN and piles of land-based attackers. i think i achieved a 4-digit harm expenditure in that one.

[SeaQueen]

I crater runways with JDAMs and TBMs all the time, not necessarily penetrating or anti-runway warheads. Sometimes you'll be surprised how well the "good enough" solution works. Don't feel like just because you don't have a specific munition optimized to achieve exactly the effect you want, that you can't achieve it efficiently. In the end, a big hole in the ground is often perfectly fine. You don't get extra points for style.

-crater a runway - you need to penetrate again or use a specific anti-runway monition like Durandal

[Cik]

well, durandaling a runway is a very optimistic strike. a single undetected shilka can mean the mission can go to hell in a handbasket very rapidly. a safer, less "efficient" delivery of one or more GBU-31 or -24 is often just as good and much safer.

then there's the time you will have to waste switching to a more specialized loadout. often you will be handed a carrier or airfield with a large number of generalists with guided GPs- switching to a durandal loadout both increases the danger of a mission and pushes back time on target by at least 3 hours, which is itself dangerous because it means redfor will have that additional 3 hours to launch strikes against you, or launch more CAPs to defend the base.

you "waste" a few thousand pounds of bombs to knock out the same target, but ultimately losing one plane and/or pilot is much worse than a little "munitions inefficiency" in my book.

personally i would only really use them if you are handed a package deliberately set up to ensure their use goes well and are against an inferior enemy, or if i knew absolutely that i had 100% suppressed the base defenses. otherwise, too risky.

but you know, just my two cents.

[Relayer2112]

Thanks for the many answers!

Coming from a background of flight sims for the last 20 years, I've got a reasonably good handle on what most NATO weapons (and indeed most WP) are/do - I guess the bit I didn't articulate very well was effects re armour. I was wondering if there was anything regarding the actual mathematics of how armour is applied in-game, and how 'much' armour a weapon can penetrate (eg, I know a BLU-109 will do a much better job of penetrating armour than a Mk.84, but that still feels a bit...nebulous. *How* much better?). I've ended up making a 'target range' of various common target types and simply testing various munitions out, 1 at a time, to see exactly what effect it will have on various targets.

Going back to my IADS / Lua question, I know I can use ScenEdit_SetUnit({Name=”x”, OutOfComms=”True”}) to make an individual unit 'blind', and I've got a small-scale scenario working where destroying a node makes each system attached to it go out-of-comms. I'm wondering, though, can this be applied to whole groups with one command? I.e instead of using SetUnit, is there a way of applying it to a group of units rather than setting each one individually? I know you can set EMCON on a group basis...

[Cik]

things will behave as you expect. will an AGM-65 defeat armor? yes. i couldn't tell you by how much, because i don't know myself. the game won't spit out exactly how much it's overpenning (if that is indeed a thing)

generally speaking: if it's designed to defeat armor, it will kill armor in one hit. if it's designed to defeat bunkers, it will defeat bunkers with one or two hits (maybe slightly more if the bunker is very deep underground or very big)

this assumes of course that the munition is hitting. mk82s won't defeat anything unless they hit it, and the scatter can be quite high depending on the attack profile.

tl;dr i'm not sure you're going to be able to get the precise information you're looking for, but you won't really experience any sort of shock about what munitions are capable of. CBU-97 will defeat armor- so will mavericks. mk82 is relatively effective against anything as long as you bring enough etc.