WestPac 7 - Thanh Hoa Bridge
Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 12:41 am
It’s been a while since any new AARs have been posted here.
My past AARs have been chronological records, detailed down to the level of individual weapons. This one will be more conceptual and graphical. The report will be presented in segments.
Objectives
We have been instructed to destroy the Thanh Hoa Bridge within 12 (was 24) hours, while keeping casualties below a certain level. The first thing I am going to do is redefine the objectives. What the victory conditions consider to be acceptable casualties, I consider to be horrendous casualties. There is no justification for losing any planes to enemy fighters or SAMs in this scenario. The only losses I am prepared to accept are Intruders or Corsairs, and only because most of their available weapons are iron bombs, and someone has to take out the AAA. The B-52s won’t be bombing anything that can shoot back. I will be aiming for zero casualties. At the same time, I am not going to pay much attention to the 12 (was 24) hour deadline. The bridge isn’t going anywhere. The Kitty Hawk isn’t going anywhere. The enemy isn’t going to be doing anything different tomorrow that matters. Throwing troops to die against a target for political reasons is not something that happens on my watch.
The mission I have chosen to accept is to do as much damage to the bridge as possible in 24 hours, while keeping my casualties as close to zero as possible.
Period Considerations
The time period in question is well before what is normal for Harpoon. In order to simulate this, it is necessary to not use many of the weapons that could be used. For example, we could just arm every Corsair with Harpoons and lay waste to everything in sight. That might provide some amusement, but not much. However, the restriction has been implemented in large measure by providing only early model airplanes.
What exactly constitutes reasonable restrictions? I don’t know, but I will simply not rearm any unit with anything other than the initial loadout. What this means is that only 6 of our attack aircraft have “stand-off” weapons, and this won’t be enough to destroy the enemy air defences. Primary targets will be the SAM sites. After that, we will use rockets against the AAA, but mostly, we will have to use iron bombs. This is a recipe for losing airplanes.
Force Analysis
Our fighters completely outclass the opposition. Our Phantoms carry 8 missiles, all of which outrange anything the enemy fighters carry. Even some of our attack aircraft can do a job on the enemy fighters. The Vietnamese have MiG-17Fs, which only have guns, MiG-19s, and MiG-21MFs. Their maximum missile range is 4 nm. Each Phantom should be able to safely shoot down 2 (maybe 3) enemy fighters, and we have 24 of them. Unfortunately, the enemy has over 80 fighters, so we will need 2 fighter sweeps, using all available fighters.
The second phase of the battle will match our attack aircraft against ground defences. The Vietnamese AAA exists in 3 flavors: small, medium, and large (Ks-19, 100 mm). Only the KS-19 has a range that is equivalent to the rockets on the Corsairs, and it is likely only this weapon that will inflict any casualties. However, since all the AAA has a range less than 5 nm, we may be able to just stay away from the guns. The enemy SAMs are SA-2s, which have a range of 24 nm. These weapons will be priority targets for our Standard ARMs. Unfortunately, only 4 of our airplanes carry Standard missiles, for a total of only 8 in the entire force (per attack wave). Still, I think that this phase of the battle will also be very much in our favor.
The third phase of the battle will see a dozen Stratofortresses dropping 18 tons of bombs each on the bridge, possibly supported by the attack aircraft. Or maybe we will use 500 lb bombs; they seem to do more damage per pound.
As to ships, we have ships, they don’t. Nuff said. Nor do they have anything else that could possibly harm our ships.
As if that weren’t enough, all our aircraft have a much larger range than the Vietnamese ones, plus we have tankers, plus we have AEW aircraft and EW aircraft.
So overall, this scenario looks to be very much in our favor.
Difficulties
1) The Vietnamese have a lot of fighters (and we have quite a few as well). So when the shooting starts, there will be a lot of stuff flying around. Unfortunately, Harpoon has a deficiency common to many real-time games: the interface does not allow you to control all your units at once. Since the computer does not control your units properly in many crisis situations, you have to do it manually. Therefore you have to arrange the battle so that only one unit experiences a crisis at a time. And since you also have to search through your forces to even find the unit that’s in crisis, which is not an easy task in Harpoon, there needs to be a time interval of at least 10 seconds or so between crises. And since we are also trying to run a simulation, the solution we come up with cannot deviate too far from what could happen in real life.
In real life, our Phantoms would happily go hunting by themselves, because the real pilots can control their planes very well, and in particular, they are quite capable of locating and engaging enemy planes by themselves. However, in Harpoon, locating enemy planes can be problematic, and the fighters will generally not behave properly by themselves. Therefore we need to ensure that we locate ALL enemy planes well outside their weapons range, and manually send fighters to engage each one. The tactical formation described later will accomplish this, and while I consider it to be unrealistic, the overall result should be reasonable.
This begs the question of who is controlling the enemy fighters. However, due to their low weapons ranges and perhaps also their tactical doctrine, they probably can’t do much more than charge into the whirling blades of doom in real life, which is what they do in the game.
2) Many of the enemy fighters will be patrolling in their base formation. This means that they do not show up in the group window. Since attack and intercept orders need to be assigned in the group window, the problem is obvious. A partial solution is to attack or intercept the base associated with those aircraft and let the computer sort it out. There are still technical difficulties with this, which I won’t get into here.
3) The final big problem is that it is actually very hard to locate the enemy airplanes. In particular, the MiG-17s are VERY hard to locate. It’s almost as if they have cloaking devices. I think it has mainly to do with the fact that they don’t have missiles, so they never turn their radars on.
Next section: maps and plans.
My past AARs have been chronological records, detailed down to the level of individual weapons. This one will be more conceptual and graphical. The report will be presented in segments.
Objectives
We have been instructed to destroy the Thanh Hoa Bridge within 12 (was 24) hours, while keeping casualties below a certain level. The first thing I am going to do is redefine the objectives. What the victory conditions consider to be acceptable casualties, I consider to be horrendous casualties. There is no justification for losing any planes to enemy fighters or SAMs in this scenario. The only losses I am prepared to accept are Intruders or Corsairs, and only because most of their available weapons are iron bombs, and someone has to take out the AAA. The B-52s won’t be bombing anything that can shoot back. I will be aiming for zero casualties. At the same time, I am not going to pay much attention to the 12 (was 24) hour deadline. The bridge isn’t going anywhere. The Kitty Hawk isn’t going anywhere. The enemy isn’t going to be doing anything different tomorrow that matters. Throwing troops to die against a target for political reasons is not something that happens on my watch.
The mission I have chosen to accept is to do as much damage to the bridge as possible in 24 hours, while keeping my casualties as close to zero as possible.
Period Considerations
The time period in question is well before what is normal for Harpoon. In order to simulate this, it is necessary to not use many of the weapons that could be used. For example, we could just arm every Corsair with Harpoons and lay waste to everything in sight. That might provide some amusement, but not much. However, the restriction has been implemented in large measure by providing only early model airplanes.
What exactly constitutes reasonable restrictions? I don’t know, but I will simply not rearm any unit with anything other than the initial loadout. What this means is that only 6 of our attack aircraft have “stand-off” weapons, and this won’t be enough to destroy the enemy air defences. Primary targets will be the SAM sites. After that, we will use rockets against the AAA, but mostly, we will have to use iron bombs. This is a recipe for losing airplanes.
Force Analysis
Our fighters completely outclass the opposition. Our Phantoms carry 8 missiles, all of which outrange anything the enemy fighters carry. Even some of our attack aircraft can do a job on the enemy fighters. The Vietnamese have MiG-17Fs, which only have guns, MiG-19s, and MiG-21MFs. Their maximum missile range is 4 nm. Each Phantom should be able to safely shoot down 2 (maybe 3) enemy fighters, and we have 24 of them. Unfortunately, the enemy has over 80 fighters, so we will need 2 fighter sweeps, using all available fighters.
The second phase of the battle will match our attack aircraft against ground defences. The Vietnamese AAA exists in 3 flavors: small, medium, and large (Ks-19, 100 mm). Only the KS-19 has a range that is equivalent to the rockets on the Corsairs, and it is likely only this weapon that will inflict any casualties. However, since all the AAA has a range less than 5 nm, we may be able to just stay away from the guns. The enemy SAMs are SA-2s, which have a range of 24 nm. These weapons will be priority targets for our Standard ARMs. Unfortunately, only 4 of our airplanes carry Standard missiles, for a total of only 8 in the entire force (per attack wave). Still, I think that this phase of the battle will also be very much in our favor.
The third phase of the battle will see a dozen Stratofortresses dropping 18 tons of bombs each on the bridge, possibly supported by the attack aircraft. Or maybe we will use 500 lb bombs; they seem to do more damage per pound.
As to ships, we have ships, they don’t. Nuff said. Nor do they have anything else that could possibly harm our ships.
As if that weren’t enough, all our aircraft have a much larger range than the Vietnamese ones, plus we have tankers, plus we have AEW aircraft and EW aircraft.
So overall, this scenario looks to be very much in our favor.
Difficulties
1) The Vietnamese have a lot of fighters (and we have quite a few as well). So when the shooting starts, there will be a lot of stuff flying around. Unfortunately, Harpoon has a deficiency common to many real-time games: the interface does not allow you to control all your units at once. Since the computer does not control your units properly in many crisis situations, you have to do it manually. Therefore you have to arrange the battle so that only one unit experiences a crisis at a time. And since you also have to search through your forces to even find the unit that’s in crisis, which is not an easy task in Harpoon, there needs to be a time interval of at least 10 seconds or so between crises. And since we are also trying to run a simulation, the solution we come up with cannot deviate too far from what could happen in real life.
In real life, our Phantoms would happily go hunting by themselves, because the real pilots can control their planes very well, and in particular, they are quite capable of locating and engaging enemy planes by themselves. However, in Harpoon, locating enemy planes can be problematic, and the fighters will generally not behave properly by themselves. Therefore we need to ensure that we locate ALL enemy planes well outside their weapons range, and manually send fighters to engage each one. The tactical formation described later will accomplish this, and while I consider it to be unrealistic, the overall result should be reasonable.
This begs the question of who is controlling the enemy fighters. However, due to their low weapons ranges and perhaps also their tactical doctrine, they probably can’t do much more than charge into the whirling blades of doom in real life, which is what they do in the game.
2) Many of the enemy fighters will be patrolling in their base formation. This means that they do not show up in the group window. Since attack and intercept orders need to be assigned in the group window, the problem is obvious. A partial solution is to attack or intercept the base associated with those aircraft and let the computer sort it out. There are still technical difficulties with this, which I won’t get into here.
3) The final big problem is that it is actually very hard to locate the enemy airplanes. In particular, the MiG-17s are VERY hard to locate. It’s almost as if they have cloaking devices. I think it has mainly to do with the fact that they don’t have missiles, so they never turn their radars on.
Next section: maps and plans.
