Strategic Bombing of Japan

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

"overstuffing" a base yields less returns in AE....unless you place an Air HQ on the base. Even then, the raid sizes will be smaller vs. the mega raids your used to seeing in stock.

Once Japan is in range of the heavies though....your going to be in for problems....just as in real life. [;)]

Me....i have problems just managing the Japanese economy when it's intact!

Alright, so overstuffed airfields will be less of a 4E problem.

[Nikademus]

yup.

[Alfred]

Sure, a single big 4E raid can really dent the industrial infrastructure but I'm not certain that is really such a big problem.  Post #2 quoted Speer in support of the proposition that too much strategic damage is inflicted in WITP, but the poster, and just about everyone else who posts along similar lines, overlook one significant factor - the cutting of land transportation links.  It doesn't matter if industrial production is largely maintained, if you can't get it from A to B (whether we are talking about links in the production chain or from finished product to arny unit) because bridges have been destroyed, a shortage of rail engines/waggons, lack of coal/fuel to power your trains/trucks etc, then it is the same result as if the item had not actually been produced.  Since WITP does not allow for the destruction of the enemy's transport infrastructure, the high damage resulting from strategic bombing seems to me to be a reasonable way to simulate the destruction of the transport infrastructure.
 
Alfred

[TulliusDetritus]

ORIGINAL: SuluSea

ORIGINAL: Japan

The games biggest flawed in my opinion, is that you can fly bombers over many bases with 500 fighters without getting intercepted, as long as your target is another base or location.

Man you're like the Banzai Bunny.......





if the game is so broke why even play it?

Bombers didn't normally pass over well defended airfields [or any land bases if at all possible] unless it was the target plus in WITP the hexes are 60 miles, someone explained that to you just last week

This is by far the most hilarious WitP-related pic I have ever seen on these forums! Two thumbs up! [:D][:D][:D]

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: Alfred

Sure, a single big 4E raid can really dent the industrial infrastructure but I'm not certain that is really such a big problem.  Post #2 quoted Speer in support of the proposition that too much strategic damage is inflicted in WITP, but the poster, and just about everyone else who posts along similar lines, overlook one significant factor - the cutting of land transportation links.  It doesn't matter if industrial production is largely maintained, if you can't get it from A to B (whether we are talking about links in the production chain or from finished product to arny unit) because bridges have been destroyed, a shortage of rail engines/waggons, lack of coal/fuel to power your trains/trucks etc, then it is the same result as if the item had not actually been produced.  Since WITP does not allow for the destruction of the enemy's transport infrastructure, the high damage resulting from strategic bombing seems to me to be a reasonable way to simulate the destruction of the transport infrastructure.

Alfred

That would seem to be a rather diffiuclt angle to tackle. In BTR, for example, you had seperate railroads you could target, and until you damaged that infrastructure to a grand overall degree, there was no cut in production. I'm not too sure that the allies bombed rail and bridges on mainland Japan as they did in Germany and France. I'm thinking what IJ rail damage they had was more incidental to bombing something else, as as such probably wouldn't be too effective, but nobody can deny that IJ had very many factors which were considerably worse than the german situation (other than not having to face many fighters) and therefore would face more damage from a raid than the germans did. There is still a comparable medium nonetheless, and as we know from the Tokyo fire raids that even then the entire city wasn't incinerated in a single raid/day.

[anarchyintheuk]

ORIGINAL: Japan

But seriously, after Reading Albert Spears Book about the effects, or rather limited effects of the Bombing of Germany, then it is my impression that the Strategic Bombing in WITP is way to powerfully, of course it is B29's and not B17's... but Spear talks about a 3-6% Industrial Loss in a local region, if it was severely bombed over and over for a period of 8 weeks, so If you can do 80% [8|][8|] in WITP then its off the mark by a bit.. But to me that is no problem at all, because it is a lot of things who is off the mark, and I see it a bit as an Alternate Universe..

Speer's book is a good read. IIRC he looks only at the industrial loss in areas hit but doesn't address in any detail the loss of productivity due to the dispersion of industry (missing parts, late parts, transportation problems), the waste of resources involved in building what is in effect redundant production at other sites and the waste of manpower and resources involved in everything from camoflauging facilities to aaa to radar installations to repair of transportation facilities.

[herwin]

ORIGINAL: ny59giants

Does the AI treat targets differently when it computes the number of hits. It is a lot easier and cheaper to repair the damage done to an AF or port than if HI gets 50 centers damaged in one attack. IMO, there should be a two different series of codes used. One for AF/port/ground and another with economic assets targeted that have a lower percentage of hit achieved. Example - 150 4e bombers should not be able to almost completely wipe out the HI at a base in one day.  

In my younger years I worked in electronics (13 years) and took a few courses in programming to become "dangerous" on this issue. [:D] 

HISTORY and OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Bombardment is much more effective in the game than it was in history. On the other hand, installations on small islands are too hard to put down. Bombardment was an area attack mechanism, even with a small target, and the more developed the base, the larger the target and the greater the dispersal.

[Japan]

Well, you don't need to fly above the airfields, if im not incorrect in raids like the Schweinfurt raid Germany send aircraft based as much as 200 miles away from the Route of the Bombers, and 2 Groups who was longer away landed to refuel to be part of hitting them aigan on the return.

So, if you fly a huge formation within 180 miles from an Airbase... the Airbase should intercept you.

[EUBanana]

ORIGINAL: SuluSea
Bombers didn't normally pass over well defended airfields [or any land bases if at all possible] unless it was the target plus in WITP the hexes are 60 miles, someone explained that to you just last week

This was an issue in the Battle of Britain. The Dowding System meant that the entire RAF could be wielded as a single weapon by centralised command if need be. If the commanders wanted to, every airbase in range could vector fighters onto an incoming German raid.

However, it was the most sophisticated air defence system in the world at the time and it took years to get it ready and working. The Germans did not manage to duplicate it at any point during the war. When the Allies started bombing the Germans en masse the Luftwaffe met each incoming raid more or less locally.

...Far as I read in stuff like Shattered Sword, Japanese strategic air defence was so woeful as to practically be nonexistent. So I don't think they were likely to be able to copy the RAF's home defence network.

So really. The fact that raids are intercepted only by the targets local defences, and maybe some nearby bases or two, isn't so amiss really. Also due to the terrain of the map I guess you won't be flying over that many airbases anyway so it's kindof a moot point regardless.

[Erik Rutins]

A few things to note, there was some separate "sandbox" testing of late war bombing to make sure the results in all aspects were reasonable.

There are also changes in other areas of AE that will change the balance late war in many ways to become more realistic, mostly helpful to the Japanese in effect as you see more "diminishing returns" when it comes to overstacked bases and allied airpower in general.

Finally, I don't think you can directly compare B-17s/B-24s bombing Germany earlier in the war to B-29s bombing Japan later. Japan also had many highly flammable structures, but in addition strategic bombing was being "perfected" as the war went on. The results they were getting with conventional bombing before the atomic bombs were dropped were fairly devastating.

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: Japan

Well, you don't need to fly above the airfields, if im not incorrect in raids like the Schweinfurt raid Germany send aircraft based as much as 200 miles away from the Route of the Bombers, and 2 Groups who was longer away landed to refuel to be part of hitting them aigan on the return.

So, if you fly within 180 miles from an Airbase... the Airbase should intercept you.

Yes, but the flaw is in the game design, such that AE won't fix it. You can use LRCAP to a bunch of cities if you want, or at least that's what I'm hearing here.

[Japan]

ORIGINAL: Charles_22

ORIGINAL: Japan

Well, you don't need to fly above the airfields, if im not incorrect in raids like the Schweinfurt raid Germany send aircraft based as much as 200 miles away from the Route of the Bombers, and 2 Groups who was longer away landed to refuel to be part of hitting them aigan on the return.

So, if you fly within 180 miles from an Airbase... the Airbase should intercept you.

Yes, but the flaw is in the game design, such that AE won't fix it. You can use LRCAP to a bunch of cities if you want, or at least that's what I'm hearing here.

Yes, but the Flaw could been "fixed" with a work arround.

The Number of Fighters that Intercept at a base is also effected by the CAP's of Nerby bases...

I.e. If you have 200 in CAP over a base, and 100 in CAP over the base next to it, then some of the one from the base next to it will join the fight.

This Factor can be increased, so that maby 50% of them will join instead of I.e. 20%.


So, a Work Arround is possible IMHO.

[Sardaukar]

ORIGINAL: Charles_22

ORIGINAL: Japan

Well, you don't need to fly above the airfields, if im not incorrect in raids like the Schweinfurt raid Germany send aircraft based as much as 200 miles away from the Route of the Bombers, and 2 Groups who was longer away landed to refuel to be part of hitting them aigan on the return.

So, if you fly within 180 miles from an Airbase... the Airbase should intercept you.

Yes, but the flaw is in the game design, such that AE won't fix it. You can use LRCAP to a bunch of cities if you want, or at least that's what I'm hearing here.

Well, even that would be way better than what Japanese managed in homeland air defence...

[mdiehl]

So I wonder if AE fixed that problem of no interceptions enroute to the target (or on the bombers return)? It is silly when you think of it, as it's like the Schweinfurt raids with only the locals intercepting.

There must be a hundred reasons why that comparison is flawed.

German radar installations were technically very superior to Japanese radar. German radars were also much more frequent, concentrated, and operated by people who were better trained to operate the equipment and assess the information.

From there, German fighter defenses were very well coordinated and the Germans had outstanding command and control over their interceptor deployments, with a sophisticated system of ground controllers, radio repeaters to keep signals moving, etc. Japanese interceptors, in contrast, had a ground control system that was little better than the systems in use during the first world war, and their command and control was so primitive that it was at best spotty, unreliable, confused, and incommunicative.

Finally, the ETO air war theater is something that, IIRC, you could fit into the area of the Solomon Sea. In that area, Germany concentrated dozens of radars and thousands of interceptors, whose first advance warning of a raid would occur as allied bomber groups were forming up over the UK. In contrast, the Japanese might have three crude radars in the same area, whose first warning would be detection of a formed-up strike moving at high altitude and pretty good speed at a range of 50 miles. Given the absence of command and control (and frankly, the absence of any well thought out doctrine for coordinating defenses against strategic bombers), the likelihood of a Japanese outpost base providing advanced interception of a high altitude bomber strike, in passim, was pretty much nil.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Japan
Yes, but the Flaw could been "fixed" with a work arround.
The Number of Fighters that Intercept at a base is also effected by the CAP's of Nerby bases...
I.e. If you have 200 in CAP over a base, and 100 in CAP over the base next to it, then some of the one from the base next to it will join the fight.
This Factor can be increased, so that maby 50% of them will join instead of I.e. 20%.
So, a Work Arround is possible IMHO.

You realize this already works that way... there's been some overlap of CAP from nearby bases going back to the original WITP.

[AirGriff]

Some posts here have made the excellent point about the transport infrastructure. Yes, Germany and even Japan technically still had very good production numbers coming out of their factories. Read about what the soldiers in the field and the civilians on the home front in the Axis countries were experiencing in almost every book I've read on WWII and you see chronic shortages of everything. Those shortages weren't created by fighting at the front. They were created by not getting the materials from the factories to where they were needed, be it the soldiers in the frontline or the civilians at home. This had much more to do with transport capability than industry production. Roads and bridges constantly being damaged (yes, I know they got them back into working order in less than a day most of the time, but just how much back in working order? Consider how it would affect YOU right NOW if your way to work was damaged like it was then on an ongoing basis (it would make road construction in the US seem like a pleasant drive by comparison)). A chronic shortage of motor transport because those were being used at the front, and more importantly a chronic shortage of train engines and cars, which is the back bone of any transport system. It doesn't matter how many widgets the factories are making if they can't get them to where they're needed.

In a strategic game like WitP I think they do a good job of modeling the overall affects of strategic bombing. Not perfect, as many have pointed out, but unless you want to overlap BTR with WitP I think you're about as close as you can reasonably get.

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: Japan

ORIGINAL: Charles_22

ORIGINAL: Japan

Well, you don't need to fly above the airfields, if im not incorrect in raids like the Schweinfurt raid Germany send aircraft based as much as 200 miles away from the Route of the Bombers, and 2 Groups who was longer away landed to refuel to be part of hitting them aigan on the return.

So, if you fly within 180 miles from an Airbase... the Airbase should intercept you.

Yes, but the flaw is in the game design, such that AE won't fix it. You can use LRCAP to a bunch of cities if you want, or at least that's what I'm hearing here.

Yes, but the Flaw could been "fixed" with a work arround.

The Number of Fighters that Intercept at a base is also effected by the CAP's of Nerby bases...

I.e. If you have 200 in CAP over a base, and 100 in CAP over the base next to it, then some of the one from the base next to it will join the fight.

This Factor can be increased, so that maby 50% of them will join instead of I.e. 20%.


So, a Work Arround is possible IMHO.

May be, but how many bases do you know that are right beside another? I do see your point, however, that regular CAP can have it's next hex ratio increased, but I don't recall there being much cities in mainland Japan that are that way. I'm not sure I recall any hexes that have cities side-by-side for the whole map.

[Charles2222]

ORIGINAL: mdiehl

So I wonder if AE fixed that problem of no interceptions enroute to the target (or on the bombers return)? It is silly when you think of it, as it's like the Schweinfurt raids with only the locals intercepting.

There must be a hundred reasons why that comparison is flawed.

German radar installations were technically very superior to Japanese radar. German radars were also much more frequent, concentrated, and operated by people who were better trained to operate the equipment and assess the information.

From there, German fighter defenses were very well coordinated and the Germans had outstanding command and control over their interceptor deployments, with a sophisticated system of ground controllers, radio repeaters to keep signals moving, etc. Japanese interceptors, in contrast, had a ground control system that was little better than the systems in use during the first world war, and their command and control was so primitive that it was at best spotty, unreliable, confused, and incommunicative.

Finally, the ETO air war theater is something that, IIRC, you could fit into the area of the Solomon Sea. In that area, Germany concentrated dozens of radars and thousands of interceptors, whose first advance warning of a raid would occur as allied bomber groups were forming up over the UK. In contrast, the Japanese might have three crude radars in the same area, whose first warning would be detection of a formed-up strike moving at high altitude and pretty good speed at a range of 50 miles. Given the absence of command and control (and frankly, the absence of any well thought out doctrine for coordinating defenses against strategic bombers), the likelihood of a Japanese outpost base providing advanced interception of a high altitude bomber strike, in passim, was pretty much nil.

That's all very fine and good, but we're talking about the inability to intercept from other bases altogether, not just for IJ. And thank you for reminding us just how good the german network was, as an earlier poster seemed to think it wasn't comparable to the British one. I was always thinking the British one proved considerably inferior to the german one, but then the german one had a much vaster area to cover and theirs was brought to fruition later in the war, whereas the British one didn't need to become as large as the german one did.

[mdiehl]

I don't think the allies had a substantial record of intercepting raids from land bases in the PTO. Could they have done so effectively? To a degree, yes, if one takes the late war USN CAP defenses as an example. But nothing on the scale of the ETO I think. The basic limitation here is that the Pacific was just too big. Land bases in the PTO were for the most part too far apart from each other to provide the kind of mutual support that Germany used in the ETO.

I don't agree that UK interception was inferior but then we can't really know. It was superior in 1940 during the blitz to anything that Germany had going. By 1944, Germany had already seen four years of raids and a premium was placed on them to counter the massed bomber formations used by the USAAF. Since no other nation save Japan had to defend against those kinds of raids (and Japan defended against a well developed system with far less time overall to react to the raids than Germany had), we could simply note that the Germans reacted rather sensibly to a threat that most never had to face.

Japan *might have* if they'd been clever had lots of air attaches in Germany in 1942-e.1944 to study German air defenses but they didn't. It seems to have been a peculiar feature of the totalitarian states at the time that they all knew they had no lessons to learn from other nations.

[kaleun]

And all this brings us to the final and most epic strategic bombing question:
Has there been any tweaking done to the atom bomb attack?
I just carried out what was reported as a successful Atomic attack on Tokyo (In my game with Halsey) ... And nothing happened![:@]