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Post by dontmajorchem on Dec 19, 2020 23:18:54 GMT -6
Over the service life of a carrier, its aircraft capacity tends to drop as the next generation of planes are bigger than the previous ones. Also, a carriers aircraft capacity can change depending on what type of planes it has onboard. For example, torpedo bombers were usually much bigger than fighters and dive bombers so having more torpedo bombers on board could decrease a carriers theoretical capacity.
A more realistic way of modelling carriers ingame would be to add an aircraft size stat that would increase with newer plane models and change depending on the type of aircraft. When designing carriers instead of choosing how many planes it can carry, you would choose how big the hanger is. This would work well with the deck parking option which currently has no effect on the carrier. Deck parking could simply increase the "hanger area" at the cost of airplane damage and loss during bad weather.
This would be a pretty big change to a core game mechanic though so it might be too disruptive to implement. What do you think?
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Post by kotori87 on Dec 20, 2020 14:58:54 GMT -6
I like the idea, but shouldn't this be in the "suggestions" section of the forum?
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 20, 2020 16:29:36 GMT -6
I want to point out that a carrier class can be used for a long time, with the best and advantageous updates. The Midway's were commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1992. That is 47 years with angle deck and other changes.
The Essex class first entered the fleet in January 1943 and were not retired until around 1969 to 1971. Long hull versions were around from 1944 to 1976. Navy's do find uses for the older ships like ASW and supporting Marine landings with helicopters.
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Post by buttons on Dec 20, 2020 18:55:20 GMT -6
I want to point out that a carrier class can be used for a long time, with the best and advantageous updates. The Midway's were commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1992. That is 47 years with angle deck and other changes. The Essex class first entered the fleet in January 1943 and were not retired until around 1969 to 1971. Long hull versions were around from 1944 to 1976. Navy's do find uses for the older ships like ASW and supporting Marine landings with helicopters. Sure, but they couldn't as carry as many as they could later in their careers, Midways started with a capacity around 130 and by the 80s could only fit about half as many, the F-9 Cougar for example was about 20% longer and heavier than the F6F Hellcat.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 20, 2020 19:38:19 GMT -6
I want to point out that a carrier class can be used for a long time, with the best and advantageous updates. The Midway's were commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1992. That is 47 years with angle deck and other changes. The Essex class first entered the fleet in January 1943 and were not retired until around 1969 to 1971. Long hull versions were around from 1944 to 1976. Navy's do find uses for the older ships like ASW and supporting Marine landings with helicopters. Sure, but they couldn't as carry as many as they could later in their careers, Midways started with a capacity around 130 and by the 80s could only fit about half as many, the F-9 Cougar for example was about 20% longer and heavier than the F6F Hellcat. Yes, but that was almost a quarter of a century after she was commissioned. Aircraft size did increase dramatically in the late 1950's and after. You cannot expect a carrier that old to keep her air wings the same size. The air wings now had AEW aircraft like the S2f and then the E2 Hawkeye aircraft and they were far bigger. The older aircraft carriers were used for other missions especially during the Vietnam War. Performance is far more important than the size of the plane. If you haven't been next to, been in, an F4 Phantom, F-14 Tomcat or an F18 Hornet, then you might get a real lesson. An E2C Hawkeye is a very large aircraft. Over time, missions changed in the US navy and in the rest of the world's navies and the performance had to change. It was cost per performance. If you compare the F-111 Naval version to the F-14 which was chosen instead, there was a size difference but it was not critical. It was performance that matter. In the game, which is the subject of this thread, there is no information that I know of, about the size of the plane. We have to infer that if the plane has a longer range, faster, and can carry more ordnance, that it is bigger. How much is a good guess.
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Post by kotori87 on Dec 20, 2020 21:59:04 GMT -6
Guys... that's exactly what dontmajorchem is talking about. Rather than using a strict numerical value for air wing capacity, he's proposing something like a "hangar area" stat for carriers, and "hangar area requirement" stat for planes. Kinda like how there's a "AA positions used" stat representing available deck area for secondaries and AA guns. That way you can actually see the effects of better performance requiring bigger planes as it happens, rather than finding out during the next refit that your wonderful fleet carrier is mysteriously overweight.
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Post by aeson on Dec 20, 2020 22:11:42 GMT -6
My thoughts on an explicit size statistic for aircraft are that it sounds like an incredibly irritating amount of micromanagement.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 20, 2020 22:16:36 GMT -6
My thoughts on an explicit size statistic for aircraft are that it sounds like an incredibly irritating amount of micromanagement. Yup, my thoughts exactly, mate.
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Post by noshurviverse on Dec 20, 2020 23:38:43 GMT -6
My thoughts on an explicit size statistic for aircraft are that it sounds like an incredibly irritating amount of micromanagement. I know we've had it out over this subject before, but I'm still of the opinion that micromanagement could be alleviated by having many of the issues arising from shifting air-group sizes be simply auto managed, such as adjusting carrier wings to compensate for differing sizes.
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Post by seawolf on Dec 21, 2020 0:22:08 GMT -6
My thoughts on an explicit size statistic for aircraft are that it sounds like an incredibly irritating amount of micromanagement. I know we've had it out over this subject before, but I'm still of the opinion that micromanagement could be alleviated by having many of the issues arising from shifting air-group sizes be simply auto managed, such as adjusting carrier wings to compensate for differing sizes. Or just set the wings as a proportion of capacity
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Post by seawolf on Dec 21, 2020 0:23:02 GMT -6
This sort of thing would also be really great for airfields. Medium bombers and flying boats are much more difficult to maintain and operate than fighters
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Post by aeson on Dec 21, 2020 11:20:03 GMT -6
This sort of thing would also be really great for airfields. Medium bombers and flying boats are much more difficult to maintain and operate than fighters Squadrons of medium bombers and flying boats already cost 50% more to operate per aircraft than squadrons fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers that aren't carrier-trained, and - rather unlike aircraft carriers - airfields don't have a fixed-size hull onto which all the aircraft have to fit. If you need an extra 6' per aircraft at the airfield, you can get that by encroaching on an adjacent field or something like that; if you need an extra 6' per aircraft on the carrier, you're kind of out of luck. There are two main problems that I see with using percentages.
Firstly, using percentages ties the squadron to the carrier - if Independence is a 300-capacity carrier and Essex is a 1000-capacity carrier, a 20% Essex squadron isn't the same size as a 20% Independence squadron. As such, if you want to move squadrons between Essex and Independence, you need some way of resolving that sizing discrepancy; the same holds for moving squadrons between carriers and airfields, between airfields of dissimilar size, or between the reserve pool and anywhere.
Secondly, the desirable balance between fighters and strike aircraft is dependent upon the actual size of the air wing. The number of fighters required for CAP coverage of a given real level of effectiveness is independent of the number of aircraft that the carrier can hold and smaller air strikes require relatively heavier escorts, so as the number of aircraft on a given carrier declines the proportion of fighters you want it to carry increases. Now, this may not really matter for small changes in air wing size - there's probably not much difference between the number of fighters you want in 100 aircraft and the number of aircraft you want in 97 aircraft - but if the change in the number of aircraft carried resulting from a change in aircraft size is insignificant then I would argue that the size of those aircraft was not particularly worth modelling in the first place, while for large changes of air wing size (for example going from 100 aircraft to ~66 aircraft when aircraft "size" grows by about 50%) setting the desired percentage of the carrier's capacity fails to be less of a micromanagement issue than the current system. It is worth mentioning that, as much as WWII-era aircraft are generally larger and heavier than they were ten years prior, the adoption of innovations like folding wings mean that WWII-era monoplanes generally don't actually take up much more deck space than the biplanes of a decade earlier - insofar as the number of aircraft you can carry goes, a plane being 20% longer doesn't really matter that much when it's also effectively about 50% of the width because its wings fold. As far as practical limits on the number of aircraft which a carrier can operate goes, the length of deck an aircraft requires for take-off is generally far more important than its physical size, because, at least until you get to the point of all aircraft requiring a catapult-assisted launch or jet engines making the 'conventional' ranging of aircraft for a rolling take-off impractical, the number of aircraft you can range on the deck while still allowing all the aircraft enough runway to take off is the limit on the number of aircraft you can launch in a single launch cycle, and it is the time taken up by the launch and recovery cycle which tends to be the dominant limiting factor on the number of aircraft a carrier can practically operate.
The difference between carriers becoming overweight on refit and aircraft size changing every time a new model is introduced is that I only really need to refit carriers once a decade whereas new models of aircraft can get rolled out to squadrons almost every single turn. Even if I would have to make an adjustment to the carrier's air group to deal with weight issues, there is an enormous difference in the management overhead required by something that happens once every ~120 turns (air group adjustment after refit) and something that can happen essentially every single turn (air group adjustment when a squadron converts to a new model of aircraft).
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 21, 2020 12:36:09 GMT -6
I am trying to get my arms around what is being asked here for the aircraft specifications and carriers. I am not trying to confuse the issue, just put some actual specifications to discuss.
The idea is to get the specifications for the aircraft. This would be: A. Wing span with wings not folded B. Wing span with wings folded c. Length of the fuselage from the tip of the propeller or propellers to the tail. D. Height of the aircraft from the ground to the top of canopy or tail, if it isn't a tail dragger. E. Gross weight of each configuration such as Fighter, Fighter with one external tank or fighter with two external tanks. Empty weight possibly F. For some aircraft, loading condition could be 1 -1000 lbs. bomb and one external tank: One torpedo: Possibly 1 rocket with two external tanks and possibly another smaller rocket and two smaller fuel tanks. G. What size external fuel tanks: 150 or 100, possibly just 50 gallon tanks.
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Post by dontmajorchem on Dec 21, 2020 16:17:28 GMT -6
Yeah, it seems difficult to implement without making it frustrating for the player
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 21, 2020 18:27:14 GMT -6
Yeah, it seems difficult to implement without making it frustrating for the player Yes, but it doesn't mean that we and the team, can't find a way of implementing at least some of the variables. Let's keep researching this and see what we can come up with. Don't quit now.
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