Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: obvert

Not only do you lose good pilots flying Nates, but you also give kills to the Allied pilots in marginal aircraft like he Buffalo, the Mohawk, the Demon, or even an I-15. Why give away extra kills and make those pilots better?

+1

I try to keep some in the pools playing with PDU off, but I don't build them just to use the engines. Pilots - especially the good ones - shouldn't be wasted in Ki-27's. My advice would be to move the Ki-27 groups out of harms way, strip them of good pilots, fill them full of replacements and start training.

Use some of your Nates as NF. They may not be able to destroy too many bombers at night, but they can ruin their aim and lessen the damage the bombers inflict. They are better than nothing in '42.

Was the Nate so useless historically in WW2? Any assessment? Any book about Nate aces in WW2?

I would have said it would be useless as a kami as it does not carry bombs, just had another look at it and lo and behold it can carry 2 x 50kg.......enough to sink a transport perhaps......I still wouldn't bother building them just for the sake of using up the old engine stocks, after all you did not pay for the engines and it is a much less useful plane than the Oscar 1c.

Oscars and Nates become cannon fodder anyway once the Allies start getting stuff like Spitfire VC's and P47's. Even the early model P38's seem to do quite well against either

Nates have as much chance of getting through the late war CAP to expend themselves as kamakazies as they do of flying air superiority missions against those same CAP aircraft. And the lack of range at the start of the war isnt going to change.

Nate (and Claude) is a waste of production points. Dont bother.

Hmmmmmm..... opinion is certainly divided.

I think I shall sit down and consider all the comments here and evaluate!![X(]

I change Nate factories to Ki-43-1c and build them because you need as many Oscars as early as possible to get Ki-27b's off the front line. Crazy enough the Ki-27b's are one tick more durable than the Ki-43's but we need the extra legs and punch (hehe) the Oscar provides.

If you're dumping enough R&D into the airframe you'll have armor before you know it. [:)]

Nates good on early stage as strafe bomber in China. I build some Nates from engine pool and use later as training plane.

ORIGINAL: Dili

Was the Nate so useless historically in WW2? Any assessment? Any book about Nate aces in WW2?

no. Far from useless. Christopher Shores has a book devoted to IJAAF aces of the war.

historically japanese built plenty of nates, idas, petes, etc

Ki-27 nate materials cost: 1.1 tons

J7W shinden: 3.7 tons

in AE they all cost the same..


in my production mod pbem, it's only march 1942 and im running nates at 100/month

translates into legions of trained pilots

You are listing the net (empty) weights of these airframes, which is a very different property than material requirements in any form. That comparison is apples and pears, though I know what you are point at.

AE approximates that, right, but there is a pretty good reason for this: you don't want to play "logistics facility manager 2.0 -- extended rack edition", but keep some focus on the big picture. Well, at least I do.

Would it make much sense to "scale" the production costs (further)? They are already scaled a bit with the engine needs, so that's is a bit. But going beyond that, it doesn't make a huge different if there is only a "generic supply item"? Well, assuming you built something like 10-15,000 airframes during your GC, and have later models or bombers cost more, you may need some 50,000 supply extra. That sure sounds like a number, but if you think of how much you east thru in land-battles or facility expansion, it is probably in the noise range.

Besides, the true challenges for Axis resulted probably more often than not from the lack of certain materials, like rubber, nickel, or copper. Some of the equipment in later years were high tech products, and more complicated than a Nate or a Me-109B, and for e.g. Germans went to lengths to procure rubber for plenty of purposes, including the key tank parts (see e.g. Panther production issues). Airframe aluminum and wood were probably lesser issues, though that would be the gross weight of your air frames (ignoring engines).
Yet if you'd start splitting up supply for production purposes and wanted to make it meaningful (not just chrome in the noise), you'd probably have to include those materials that proved to be bottle-necks (and led to model changes or loss of quality/reliability). However, I don't know of any game that does treat that, especially no game at this scale. Nor would I be sure I wanted to have to deal with that level of extra detail...

ORIGINAL: Puhis

I've never build a single crap called Ki-27 Nate. I'll rather keep "half-built" crap than have completely build crap...

I'm w/Puhis. Also - as I replace my Nate units w/Oscars I get plenty of spare TRAINERS. Regarding building spares for the Kami attack: A single engine fighter is a single engine fighter... By 1945 I'll have better frames to put my kami-pilots in (not that it'll do much good). But you gotta believe that you'll get more bang out of your kami-pilots if you put them in a Tojo w/20mm gunz than if you put them in the sky in a Nate...

pretty easy house rule to implement, looks like this [:)]

as you can see im a big fan of emily,

but i managed to gut my economy trying to fast expand like that...

and maxing out my aluminum production

guess there was a good reason why they only built 167 of them [:D]

hope the allies don't make a submarine blockade .. or i will be stuck with biplane kamikazes for 1946 [:(]

but getting back to Ki-27 nate

yes, they build some thousands of them during the war

better to lose a 1.1 ton Nate in a training accident than a 2.7 ton Frank



also remember that nate had about 90kg/m2 wing loading, so you will not have 20% of them lost in take-off/landing like those Bf-109

or F4U / B-26 for that matter..

technically wing loading = landing speed, so for witp 2 i would make toff/landing ops losses affected by it