Strike Tutorials - testing

[Gunner98]

ORIGINAL: Drivingguy

I must be blind, but I can't find a #6

Post #54 above: fb.asp?m=4320217

[Gunner98]

I may have to change my mind about degree of difficulty.

Hmm, that may be required. Thanks I'll wait and see how you do. I think kbrown1950 was in about the same position when he last checked in.

[kbrown1950]

yes, that pretty much sums up my experience with #6. Gunner98, can you suggest any simple scenarios that might give me more experience at airfield destruction before coming back for another try at #6?

[Gunner98]

Will probably back this one off a bit. Thanks for your feedback.

You may want to try 'Uncle Marks Tutorials' Its been a while since I looked at them but there may be something there. There are probably several more but I cannot recall at the moment.

B

[schweggy]

Back in tutorial #3 Gunner went though a number of scenarios on attacking and rendering ineffective an airbase. It's all about the weapons selections. If you don't have an good selection to crater runways, go for aircraft shelters or hangers. Or wipe out ammo and/or fuel. Likewise with terrain hugging flights. Sometimes you have to "pop-up" at the last second and maybe manual control is the only way to achieve this.

I'm a longtime Harpoon/COMMANO user and I always learn something with a good tutorial.

Gunner, the degree of difficulty with tutorial #6 is not that bad. It's a little complex, but should be a "learning" type scenario. IMO.

BTW I did render the airbase "degraded" but with a few losses, mostly due to Bourbon. [8D]

[marksdoran]

OK, I think I finally did a decent run through on #6. The airfield is definitely closed. Punchline: yes, this one might be set up a tad too difficult. To explain and review...

First couple of times I paid a lot of attention to the parts of the mission brief where it talks about topology. Lots of trying to fly the ARM shooters and glide bomb shooters into the lee of the ridges to the south of the base and keep them out of site unless setting up an attack run.

Eventually, given the time it took to knock out the SA-10 some of those flights were low on fuel before going winchester. Not ideal. At this point I really gave up worrying about the terrain and went back into the mode of treating this as a blue water, no air-to-air threat scenario, I.O.W., using higher altitudes and ignoring LOS concealment concerns. [I suspect that if there were units placed to guard low level attack on that "road" up the left flank, my eventual approach rendered them a non-factor in the game...I never did detect anything placed in that area...more about detection to follow. I'm not sure if making the assumption of -- temporary -- air superiority is a "cheat" on my part...I wasn't flagrantly trying to ignore all the setup and reference points and briefing materials talking about the topology and so forth; it just seemed in the end like that was more of a distraction, that I didn't need to pay heed to it in order to prosecute the scenario]

For subsequent runs I changed the basic support flight strategy and put the AWACS and the ELINT birds to the flanks and then had the OECM jet fly a racetrack astride the up-the-gut route. It doesn't talk about this in the briefing but I ended up digging in the DB to find the S-300 to determine effective range and made sure that the OECM especially was set up running just south of the reach of that SA-10 -- to do this I set up the race track ref points well south and walked them up Northwards a bit once I'd lobbed a couple of glide bombs at the base to draw out the SA-10 and triangulate that better. I bought in the ARM shooters and glide bomb shooters up the middle and then spread them wider once north of the OECM track, making sure the latter was doing the JAM thing.

For the SA-10 I ended up using a volley of cruise missiles aimed at it and followed those with most of my ARMs close at the heels of the cruise missiles. After several run throughs I decided that firing the ARMs in particular from directions more than 60 degrees apart seemed to work better. [I've read that SA-10s have more trouble with multi-axis attacks and perhaps that's modeled here it might of course be placebo and I just got luckier with the dice with later iterations]. At any rate, in the last run-through I clobbered the SA-10 to the point it stopped firing seemingly because it fixated on the cruise missiles and left a fair number of the ARMs unscathed...I see both radar vehicles and 3 TEL's lost in the scoring log so I judge that group suppressed. I tagged both search radars with surplus ARMs (it took three to get both systems) after this -- there seemed to be no particular penalty for not going after those first (and in previous tries, attempting to go after the search radars just seemed to make the SA-10 guys mad and more effective ).

While all this was going on, I learned from previous attempts that time being of the essence on laundry day that I needed to get the follow on strikes in the air and moving north. Between launching the support flights and the SA-10 hunters though I sortied a recon jet. After seeing the heroics of the tomcats from the earlier tutorial I had an expectation that this would give me intelligence on what if anything might be lurking around the fixed elements on the airbase. I flew this over the airbase, directly overhead and over the SA-10 and radar sites...twice! The default mission profile for this is hi-hi-hi and I left that alone, assuming that it was set appropriately to be effective. I found NOTHING with the recon mission. OK, great, bring in the three strike flights of Fantans and let them rain their toys on the base.

Ahead of the Fantans, and being mindful of the time and the EF2000 threat I used their remaining glide bombs to make a start on the 4 runway access points. Moderate effect. Next in were the LGB shooters, one weapon on the runway access points and the other aimed at buildings and other hard(er) targets. These were nice and effective, moderate or heavy damage to all runway access points with 3 of 4 on fire...drive your EF2000 through that!

It was all going so well... until the second wave of Fantans comes in to hit the two runways, one flight of 4 to hit each runway. These guys attack profile takes them down very low to deliver the Durandal equivalents. I'm not worried though because the recon flight saw nothing and the LGB flight added only that it noted EF2000's parked on several of the pads.

The Fantans sweep in low...and get murdered. Up pop several AAA units (although none fired), and a Rapier and one other unidentified SAM and, count 'em 24 Igla MANPAD rounds fired. Only one Fantan got as far as weapons release. It's nearest miss distance was over 400 feet and it collected an SA-18 up the tail pipe for its trouble.

Round about this time the remainder of my cruise missiles arrived to come down on the various parking areas...not as effective as I'd hoped but then I guess if they'd have had area denial payloads instead of unitary warheads it might have been better for this purpose. Credited with only 3 EF2000 kills on the ground; still that's $300M assuming average pricing so not too bad.

So where does that leave me?? Well I left the scenario running well past the end of laundry hour and no Typhoons sortied (and they sure as heck did when I had less good success in earlier attempts! ). I think that means that the airbase is effectively closed. Mission accomplished?? Probably. There's no score to indicate that so it's possible I didn't trip the right event somehow(?).

I think on balance there are two main themes that I'd say could maybe use some extra help for this scenario. One is instruction oriented and one is scenario config.

Firstly: If you get fixated with the SA-10 hunt as I did initially, there is a very good chance that the Typhoons will lift off and wreck your entire day. I think in the blurb something else is needed to emphasize timing and coordinate of the waves of attacks needed to peel back defenses and then confine the air-to-air threat. One hour's grace period is clearly enough since I managed it in the end but the timing is pretty tight. Now the scenario taught me that quite effectively at the cost of a couple of run-through attempts that didn't go well. Perhaps that is in fact a good way to teach the lesson...I don't especially feel upset to come by the understanding this way. However, for time efficiency's sake it might be better to give a slightly stronger hint that having waves of attack with different purposes launched from your base such that take off times and transit times don't stretch into the time window after the Typhoon crews have hung their shirts out to dry might be in order.

Secondly, and perhaps of more significance, the business of recon and the implications thereof. The brief talks about defense in layers and more or less tells you that there are SHORAD units somewhere to find. As mentioned above, I flew the recon bird over the base twice and found nothing. The glide bomb shooters (up high) and LGB shooters (releases at medium altitude) didn't spot anything either. Leaving the Fantans to get pasted. If there's a more effective way to use recon so that you get a hint of the SHORAD units and can follow that "plink with glide bombs or cruise missiles" advice, I think that needs to be spelled out. Using the recon asset following it's default mission profile was a total non-event.

[at the time I was playing the scenario I did check the sensor descriptions for the recon jets and noted the 5nm range...that more or less why I flew them direct overhead the base... What I'm wondering now is whether that range is in fact slant range...in which case overflight at moderately high altitude might make stuff at the surface largely out of reach?? Dunno...just a thought.
And if that's right then perhaps flying them over at 20k feet (or less) might have yielded better results?? As you can tell, their complete ineffectiveness is still puzzling me so obviously I at least need more hints in the instructions to get value out of these assets.]

Overall, I liked it as a scenario. Knowing what I know now, I think using slightly less weapons on the SA-10 (in the end I had half a dozen or so missiles hit that group) and preserving some stand-off non-ARM weapons for the SHORAD units I'm pretty sure that I could get the runway denial sorties in and out without too much pain...except for the MANPADs. I'm not clear at all how you'd deal with that threat. Net effect the combination of those MANPADs and the ineffective recon efforts make this scenario just a little too hard as-is. I'm guessing I can be shoved in the right direction with the recon with a little more directive content in the brief. I still don't know what to do about those MANPADs though if the 200' AGL delivery height must hold for the runway denial munitions.

Again, I hope you can tell from the above that I took away more useful lessons from the scenario already as it stands right now. And had a lot of fun doing it!

[kch]

I also just wanted to voice my appreciation for the tutorial scenarios. I am on scenario 5 and having good fun.

Any tips on taking out the SA-8 & Shilka combinations? I tried with Skippers, Mavericks and SLAMs and I still have Shilkas functioning. Basically the 8 SLAMS, 4 Mavericks and 8 Skippers "only" took out 4 SA-8 TELs and 3 Shilkas. I dont dare to try to use CBUs on the AAA. Should a try a mid height Mk82 bomb run?

br

[marksdoran]

Any tips on taking out the SA-8 & Shilka combinations?

This may be cheating in the sense of gaming the system more than following realistic doctrine (or perhaps I just don't know enough to know that this is in fact realistic...) but what I discovered is that gravity bombs can't be shot down by the SA-8 and AAA while all the guided missiles you have available can be shot down. Using laser guided bombs was much, MUCH more effective for SAM/AAA suppression than the guided missiles were.

[kch]

Thanks for the tip. It seems a bit odd that it should be like that. I guess it could be a thing of the game. I was also getting a bit frustrated with all my ordinance getting shot down by relatively old as weapons.

[Gunner98]

I'm going to take the SA-8 out for the next version. Will put something a little less capable in its place.

B

[KungPao]

ORIGINAL: ultradave

That's a good point on OECM. I had it orbit just out of SA-2 range while the rest of the strike A/C did their thing. But I don't know if that's what is best, or even right.

If you are confident with all the high tech shrine stuff on your OECM A/C, you can just send them into the SAM's range, even a mighty S-300 could be jammed and lost the tracking of target.

11:32:55 - Contact SAM #290 has been lost.
11:32:54 - New contact! Designated SAM #290 - Detected by LCS 6 Jackson [Sensors: Generic Gun Director [IR]] at 21deg - 96.6nm

[T Rav]

Gunner,

I never heard that quote you used above. I'm going to use it at work!

Churchill once said 'If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.'

Classic! And thanks for the learning scenarios.

T Rav

[Gunner98]

OK Guys - I'm going to wrap this up after the 6 tutorials. Real life is getting in the way and these have sat on my back burner for too long.

Any final comments? I should be able to wrap this up on Monday.

Thanks for your help.

B

[Gunner98]

OK Guys here is the final. I'll put them on the main page as well.

There is a campaign file but I still haven't got to the bottom of the Error Reg discovered earlier. Will put that to the Dev's, they may have a quick solution.

Thanks for your help and advice testing these.

B

[cns180784]

Good effort with these tutorials. I should add that in the first tutorial your instructions at the start are to launch the Strike #1 aircraft manually and then manually assign it to strike Target 1 once its airborne. By doing this and without any more input from me, the aircraft proceeds to and drops its bombs on the target at 36,000 feet. In doing this the bombs miss by way too much and no damage is caused to the target but if you manually change its altitude to 800 feet then it will be obliterated...obviously this is due to the freefall bombs being more accurate at lower altitude.
What i did and what i always find to be better is to give it a strike mission. This ensures the aircraft(s) fly and attack their target(s) according to their loadout profile. I can imagine newbies doing as you said for that first strike in that first tutorial and playing that again and again scratching their head as to why the target never gets hit or at least gets damaged. would be helpful to newbies if this is explained in a message during this strike and to hint that creating a strike mission would be better. I find it much less micromanaging in doing so myself too.

[Gunner98]

Missions are covered in Tutorial 2

Altitude is talked about extensively throughout the tutorials, and bombing accuracy specifically at some point, cannot recall where.

Idea is to spread out the information over the six scenarios.

B

[cns180784]

Cool. Well i've played 1 and 2, i'll give 3 a go now.

[cns180784]

So i've played through 1-5 so far, 1-4 were simple and straight forward but i found 5 to be somewhat a challenge although i found some of the advice in the pop ups to be wrong- one key bit of advice was to have my recon plane circling the enemy AB at 20k feet so its' safe from mobile SAMs and AAA but it wasnt. This was because the ground altitude of at least one SAM (the one that shot my Tomcat recon plane down) was at 735 feet meaning the actual safe altitude for my plane was 20,736 feet. So it got shot down but as soon as it was engaged i ordered the F-14 to climb to max altitude and as it was climbing it should have got out of range of the SA-8's missiles but it didnt and was shot down. Hmmm. My F-14 got up to at least 25k feet at the time when the one lethal Sa-8 hit home so that was odd.

I dont want to write a long essay on this but as brief as possible, how i went about this was i first got both my recon planes airborne which was a mistake, should have been one. Never mind, i had these investigate the two Big Back radars to first check if mobile SAMs or AAA was present. There wasnt any so i ordered one plane to strafe the Northern radar with guns and the other plane strafe the Southern radar. With those destroyed they then proceeded to recce the SA-2's. As the Big Backs were providing radar coverage the SA-2's spoon rests were off but i knew they had TV cameras and it was daytime so i decided to have them probe them to see if they spotted my planes and engaged them. They did at about 11nm...all i had my planes do was hit the deck and the missiles lost track. My plan then was to get both my jammers airborne with their single HARMs, get their HARMs within range and bait the SA-2s into shooting my recon planes so their Fan Song FCR's are activated to guide their missiles, and then have my jammers fire HARMs so they would target the Fan Song. The northern SA-2 was successfully suppressed, the HARM actually destroyed its Spoon Rest, Fan Song, 1 Sa-7 section and 2 Sa-2 launchers. However the HARM that targeted the Southern SA-2 malfunctioned so no harm done to that (sorry for the pun). This pushed back the time i wanted my raid to go in because i wanted both SA-2's suppressed using only my jammers' HARMs so that i had all other a/c with their weapons concentrated on the AB targets and neutralizing its mobile SAM and AAA threat. So then i ordered all a/c to RTB and would have to wait 6 hours for my jammer a/c to be ready to go again. Preying at least one HARM wouldnt malfunction so it would destroy the Fan Song of the one remaining SA-2.

Once ready off they went again both jammers and this time just the single recon plane. The first HARM fired did the job on the Southern SA-2 so now i had the safety net of high altitude over the AB....but i didnt even end up using it. I then had both jammers turn on their jammers whilst one was positioned about 12nm East of the AB and the other 12nm North of it whilst i had my recon plane go in at 20k feet to find which parking space was taken up by Migs and to locate and ID any mobile SAMs/AAA. As i already mentioned almost straight away near the AB my recon plane descended to 20k feet, managed to evade/spoof 3 SA-8 missiles before getting splashed but before it did, it managed to ID the SA-8 that engaged it, as well as ID another SAM and a AAA battery along with two others classed only as "mobile". So at this point i know theres' at least one SA-8 possibly another and at least one AAA battery. Without thinking too much i presumed the AAA would be KS-19's or something like that, i never considered for a second they'd be Shilkas.

Enough details...the targets i wanted to hit were the Runways and access points with GBU-24 penetrators, the 5 hangars with SLAM and Skippers, the large tarmac spaces that had 3 Migs parked on each to be targeted with Snakeeyes and the two smaller tarmac spaces housing 2 Migs targeted with CBU-59. For the enemy AD i wanted SAMs targeted by Mavericks and AAA targeted by CBU-59 (little did i know they were Shilkas at the time).

Heres' my end losses and expenditures:

SIDE: Blue
===========================================================

LOSSES:
-------------------------------
2x A-6E Intruder
4x F/A-18C Hornet
1x F-14B Tomcat


EXPENDITURES:
------------------
9x 20mm/85 M61A1 Vulcan Burst [100 rnds]
3x AGM-123A Skipper II
4x AGM-65F Maverick IR
8x AGM-84E SLAM
4x AGM-88C HARM
6x CBU-59/B APAM [717 x BLU-77/B Dual-Purpose Bomblets]
12x GBU-24B/B Paveway III LGB [BLU-109A/B]
8x Generic Chaff Salvo [5x Cartridges]
112x Mk82 500lb Snakeeye



SIDE: Red
===========================================================

LOSSES:
-------------------------------
3x 23mm ZSU-23-4 Shilka
3x A/C Hangar (2x Medium Aircraft)
2x A/C Hangar (2x Small Aircraft)
1x AvGas (75k Liter Tank)
21x MiG-23MLD Flogger K
2x Radar (Big Back [5N69])
2x SA-2f Guideline Mod 1 Single Rail
1x SA-7a Grail [9K32 Strela-2] MANPADS
2x SA-8b Gecko Mod-0 [9A33BM2] TELAR
2x Vehicle (Fan Song F [RSNA-75M])
2x Vehicle (Spoon Rest C [P-12])


EXPENDITURES:
------------------
99x 23mm ZSU-23-4 Shilka Burst [50 rnds]
22x SA-2f Guideline Mod 1 [S-75M2 Volkhov, 5YA23 / V-759]
15x SA-8b Gecko Mod-0 [9M33M2]


So as you can see in total 7 a/c lost, 6 of those lost in the actual raid and this was down to one silly oversight in that i should have changed those a/c dropping ordinance at say 20,800 feet instead of 400 ft AGL. Those downed were two Intruders with Snakeeyes and four Hornets two of which had the HARMs and CBU's and two with just CBU's. All i had to do was alter their ingress and IP altitudes so they were above the SA-8's range. They would have been less accurate and might not have destroyed all the air defences but i'm sure with each Intruder packing 28 Snakeeyes even at over 20k feet they would have still hit the Migs in those parking spaces.

In terms of success with objectives hit it was almost a complete success except for one large tarmac space housing 3 Migs. The Intruder tasked with striking that was shot down before it could release its bombs. Other than that, 21 of 24 Migs all destroyed almost the entire regiment with both runways and access points having 99.9% damage with fires. Good result in terms of targets struck but losses too heavy especially when they could easily have been avoided.

Thoughts anyone? oh and it seemed like my jammers were useless but never mind.

[cns180784]

Just did #6. Lost one J-16 but destroyed all AD units (except for the ones positioned along the highway, didnt detect them but didnt attack through there anyway) as well as putting the runways out of action. Destroyed both terminal buildings, control tower, tarmac spaces with Typhoons parked on them (whole squadron wiped out) and the ammo pad. I lost a J-16 as i wanted it to drop some glide bombs on the Sa-10 and it needed to get upto 10,000 ft AGL- it didnt get to release the bombs due to going defensive and it didnt pop back down in time. Lesson learned but the whole sa-10 battalion was wiped out in the end at least. I enjoyed these, thanks for making them.

[Gunner98]

Glad you enjoyed them. Am thinking that your run through of scenario 5 was not with the latest version as I've swapped out the SA-8 for a less capable SA-6.

The trick about the jammers is you don't know when they are effective, never rely on them alone.

Am glad they are helpful.

B