Soviet aircraft upgrade mystery

[wga8888]

Rules say a group loses 2 experience when changing aircraft type. I have one I-16 Type 5 (trained as Fighter) group left with with a minimal number in the pool, so wish to obsolete this type from VVS (turn 13) as the type 5 only has two mgs.
Through trials the group has 64 experience;
-drops to 57 when changed to I-16 Type 29 (loss of 7 exp)
-drops to 56 when changed to Yak-1 (loss of 8 exp)
-drops to 53 when changed to LaGG-3 (loss of 11 exp)

So there must be other variables at play that are not defined. Any insight is appreciated.

[56ajax]

From what I have seen a manual or auto change of aircraft should drop the experience by 2 points. Did these units have a full complement of aircraft before the swap?

[wga8888]

I will check later how many aircraft the group had; perhaps 15 of 20 by memory. Perhaps and addition of new pilots dropped the experience way below 2. I note that new airgroups start with experience & morale in the 30s It was iterations of the same air group; experience loss was 7-11. Aircraft change was cancelled, takes too long to built up experience. I will put the group in reserve and let it build up to 20 planes over several turns, then experiment with aircraft change later.

[56ajax]

I have done manual changes of about 10 squadrons and every single one lost only 2 points of experience.

[topeverest]

Might want to check if the same penalty occurs if you upgrade when they are in the national reserve.

I find the experience loss is well offset by the airframe capability when the Ruskies are getting out of prewar models.

[wga8888]

The original experiment was with a group with 15 of 20 max planes; hence likely with the change of planes, one gets 25% new pilots with lower experience than the group.

I did some iterations using the number of planes in a 20 max group as the variable (having to pick different groups). I-153 to I-16 Type 29.
-20; loss of 2
-19; loss of 2
-18; loss of 2
-17; loss of 3
-16; loss of 3, another loss of 8
-15; loss of 2

So it seems a group with 20-18 planes loses 2 experience. as the plane shortage in a group increases, the experience loss varies more greatly.

[Stelteck]

I have the following jokes for the air war in WITE :

Two Soviet Marshall meet in berlin :

One Marshall say to the other :
"So, who won the air War ? " [:D]

[56ajax]

When I did mine I chose max/total of 20/20, 20/15, 20/3 etc from reserve, airbase close to the front and airbases some distance and everyone lost only 2 points

[wga8888]

I believe you, but I did not get that consistency. I am running 1.09