It has long been the case that flying in blizzard causes fewer operational losses than flying in snow (and ops losses in blizzard are so low that they are similar to flying in clear weather).
Logically, operational losses from flying in blizzard should be higher than when flying in snow. And certainly higher than from flying in clear weather.
I will ask Gary/Pavel about this. There are several things going on here:
1) Op losses have a lot to do with the airfield size and the weather at the airfield. Flying from a smaller airfield is very bad in any weather, and flying from a small airfield I think is worse in heavy mud than it is in snow (and maybe blizzard).
2) Weather impacts chances of cloud cover, but cloud cover and the actual weather in the air is determined at the time of the flight. It can totally shut down operations (or seriously reduce the number of a/c that arrive in the battle area), and since these are week long turns, you can have better days (which makes for easier missions), and worse days (more op losses, but likely more shut downs).
3) When a damaged aircraft tries to return from combat, if it is lost, even if due to crashing on the runway after return, the credit is given to the cause of the damage (with air combat taking priority over flak). This means in bad weather, you can have a lot of damaged aircraft being lost because they can't survive the trip home and the landing. These won't be op losses, but they are being impacted by the weather. Thus leading to more destroyed aircraft as opposed to aircraft that are damaged and return.
4) The ground attack system and the air execution phase systems are different. They share a lot of the same rules/code, but also have many parts that are very different. This means it's hard to compare flights in the air execution phase with ground support flights. Although there are big differences between ground support and many of the air phase missions, we realize it's not ideal that the two systems ended up as different as the did. However, that's what we have to work with, so each system has to be looked at independently.
5) Range is one of the biggest factors in op losses. Flying at or near max range, or at long distances is the surest way to increase op losses in any weather.
Other than Gary and Pavel looking at the code and confirming that the modifiers appear to be acting in the correct directions, the only way to get a real handle on this would be to have a test situation set up in the editor with the exact same attack, with different weather on the map, and then try to run the same attack at least 10 times in each weather condition. Probably would have to do it with intercepts and no intercepts. You could then start to interpret what the different impacts are, which are more important, and whether they seem to be enough (assuming there was agreement on what was "right"). We need a Wiedrock or someone like him that is willing and able to set up tests like this and analyze the results, and people like that are few and hard to find.
I get that you have a sense that blizzard is not worse than flying in other conditions, but we need to pin that down more (what phase, air or ground, what kind of mission, airfields, ranges, weather is involved).
Also, it also looks like German fighters may have been flying Air Superiority missions as it was listing losses of German a/c but none in the battle (I think this is a known quirk in how the battle reports show op losses from air superiority flights in a bombing battle report even though the AS aren't listed in that battle, these are a/c lost returning from the major Air Combat battle that also happened). You have to add up the losses from both the air combat and the bombing battle reports to get the full picture of A2A versus flak versus Op losses for both sides (and keep in mind that some of the A2A losses may not have been lost under better weather conditions.
All understanding comes after the fact.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
That would be a huge project, and in fact we'd just be publishing computer code that only some would understand. It's just not feasible. We've put out what we could, and usually it was because of Pavel's efforts externalizing some tables (like weather impacts on CV, and movement costs).
All understanding comes after the fact.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
So, as seen in the Chart. Compared to Vanilla weather (clear) we have an increase in OPS.
OPS-losses-factor.png (59.1 KiB) Viewed 432 times
So in Blizzard we'd have on average about 3.79 times the OPS losses of Clear Weather, so 2.79times more.
This number takes into account that less Sortie are performed during bad weather.
“Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.”
