ORIGINAL: Q-Ball
A couple more really good posts here! It's intereesting ITAKLinus that you continue to produce the crappy planes. I have bombed Clark with garbage planes before, mostly as a way to use flak as you say, but it also trains the pilots anyway. And thanks for your comments on the Oscar and Lilly.
I'll look closely at A6M8 and the Peggy T; already had Judy on prioirty, because the Val is not a good plane
Well, there is a clear tradeoff.
Supposing you lose 5 crappy planes per-day for the whole 1942, you have a net loss of 1,095 planes per-year. Now, it's a lot in terms of VPs. And industrially speaking, it's not good either.
However, if you take into cosideration that:
A) the industrial cost is 19,710HI, which equals to 548 new 1E fighters or 365 2Es.
B) With a relatively easy to achieve +2,000HI per-day, you have 730,000HI banked during 1942. The 19,710HI expenditure amounts to only 2,70% of the net gain. Not much, then.
C) You have a fair amount of pilots getting trained
D) [decisive point for me] You don't have the industrial capacity of having 2E on ALL your bombers for many months. Using crappy 1Es you actually lessen the burden carried by 2Es, lowering their losses and/or enabling those groups to be redirected on more relevant targets.
Now, I can see that there are many many possible ojbections to my lavish use of crappy planes, but I am somewhat convinced I am doing well.
Probably, it just suits my operational and industrial setup.
I strongly advice on using Nates as Night Fighters, though. Putting planes in CAP increases their skills anyway and they do disrupt bomber runs. I generally don't produce many Oscar-Ic anyway, so I try to keep Nates on for many different duties.
Sometimes I even use them as cannon fodder in CAP. There is no real need to have extra losses in 1942 for Japan, but they do quite well if you have good numbers of much better planes.
In one of my two PBEMs,end of May 1942, of the roughly 250 1E defending Magwe, 80 are Nates. And they are doing surprisingly well.
In the other PBEM I had them defending Rabaul's skies until April/May 1943. Horrible losses, but they did their job. I mean, my whole reasoning is that a Nate for 18HI is actually better than an Oscar-Ic for 36HI, provided the Nate will be backed by more performing stuff (A6M2 or Tojo or whatver you can muster in 1942).
The same is applied to 1E bombers. In fights in which I aim to just put pressure on the enemy and make him consume ammunition, I prefer throwing away a 18HI 1E rather than a 54HI 2E bomber.
In the PBEM in May-42, I finally run out of most of my Sonias. I still have hundreds of Ann/Mary/Ida/Nate to have shot down, though. But I'm working on that.
I have 2 groups of Nates bombing Sydney at 10k and the rest is taking care of Manila/Clark/Bataan.
Another couple of groups are used for random runs on the Indo-Burmese border. Mainly port attacks to disrupt enemy's attempts to bring supplies forward. They even sunk a couple of xAKLs over the time.
And the big CAPs done by Nates.
JEAN. It's actually a decent TB and it's quite good to use it as trainer. I have sometimes equipped my CVLs with it. Since losses have been extremely low and they fly less than other planes (or, at least, it's what I think), I have decided to give the nice biplanes a purely training+coastaldefence role.
I like them.
As with the Claudes, the problem is that if you want to run out of them you need to invest pilots and you don't have too many IJNAF pilots. That's why I prefer warehouses full of useless planes but pilots alive. That's my general policy with IJNAF as a whole, even for models such as the A6M2, when it becomes obsolete.
Last but not least, I tend to produce very little amounts of the inital planes and I have adopted the production of "lots" for most of my a/c. So, I generally don't end up with massive stocks of obsolete planes and I can rather invest in those marginal crappy 1Es for half the price.
I strongly recommend switching to the mentality of "lots" rather than "flows" when producing most of the planes. It helps a lot the industrial planning and it puts every model (or most of them) into the right proportion, i.e. avoiding overproducing stuff just because you can afford it or just because you are having intense losses in a given period.
My industrial base is in systematic overcapacity, though: I might produce 20 A6M2 per-month but I keep the capacity of producing say 100 (80, actually).
; Julia Child
