Large Bomber Formations

[AKA_Big10]

Do we have the ability to make large bomber formation with up to 12 in a combat box? I know in DCS you can and they have a combat box formation option. 

[Jaegermeister]

Not exactly... but you can get close.

 

 

There is no box formation, but you can trick them into flying in a delta formation by targeting number 4 to number 3 instead of number 1 with a V formation command.

[Gambit21]

I’ve made test missions with up to 24,bombers, 12 bombers runs much better.

[IckyATLAS]

What Gambit mentions is the best way to go.

I tried to model real box formations, but it does not work. The problem is that to do it you have to consider each plane separately and so define the flight trajectories for each plane. As a result of a very tedious work with the various altitudes turning point positioning to keep formation geometry etc. you have a problem with speeds.

Once you have done that the problem is that the formation quickly will get disbanded because the speeds are not perfectly identical.

In the real world the pilot keeps speed and position on three axis in continuous adjustment relative to the other planes. The only way in IL2 is using formations and then combine multiple formations. It is far from perfect because formation stage the planes at different altitudes and so building real boxes is impossible.

The Devs should study this and create the box formation as a possible choice in the system. After all with BOBp and BON such an additions would be perfectly justified.

Nevertheless forget 100 bomber formation or so. The max I did sofar was around 65 planes in flight and it worked, but then time dilation cancer tumor started growing fast ?

[chanklaus]

I am playing single-player missions and tinkered around with mission building already since the 1946 Sturmovik versions.

 

I tried the bomber box formation in the old 1946, with 32 bombers, and I did it the way IckyATLAS described - without the speed corrections. It worked fine in the very first minutes, looking great with B-17s or B24s, some in olive, some in metal, with skins for a given bomber group and fitting aircraft signs. This works reasonably well, as long as there is no bent of more than a few degrees in the trajectory. And as IckyATLAS describes after short time the formation "smeers" because the higher aircraft are a bit faster than the lower ones.

 

Now in BoX I try more or less the same. I don't use single planes, though, but the in-game 4-aircraft-Vs. 8 of these units, in a moving column, each even "V" a few meters above the odd ones, this looks fine, although probably not accurate from a historical perspective. However, this is still better than randomly placed bombers, and attacking such a tight formation is a challenge ... which I loose mostly.

 

What I try is this: a bomber formation, in a marching column, splitting up for the attack on an airport, with a separate target for each of the 4-bomber-units. After the attack they are to assemble back into the tight formation of the marching column. Without any interference of enemy fighter planes this works reasonably well; I still have to tinker around to make it working the way it should. I am sure, however, that the assembly of the formation won't work good enough to produce an acceptable formation as soon as I make fighters attack the bombers.

 

To my point of view it would be very helpful for the mission builders to have a way to create larger defined formations. It would give us the possibility to create more accurate missions. In an ideal situation this could be a matrix in which aircraft positions relative to the unit leader can be defined by the mission builder themselves. In such an ideal implementation positions would be refilled. That means, for instance, that if the number "2" in the formation gets lost, the number "3" fills the position instead, the rest of the planes shifting as well, thus closing ranks. Which would be more accurate anyhow than leaving the holes in the formation where planes get shot out.

 

Whether this is possible from the point of view of a developer in the BoX team is another question, though. How much work it would be to implement such a complex behavior, and how much it would cost in terms of CPU load and FPS I can't even guess. Still I believe that this should be considered, because it would drastically improve the way missions containing larger numbers of planes in a single "swarm" look like.

 

Anyhow, wouldn't a "Battle above the Reichshauptstadt", with B-17s and B-24s in proper formation be a lot of fun?

 

By the way - another question: does anybody know internet resources in which to find spatial information about historical bomber formations?

 

We know the B-17 / B-24 used bomber box. Was it also used by B-25, B-26, A-20? What about German He-111 or Ju-88 formations? The Stuka? Russian or British middle or heavy bomber formations?

 

And were there standard fighter formations for larger flights?

Edited August 1, 2021 by chanklaus

[DN308]

A-20 used mostly Vics formations and loose formations between Vics.

 

B-25 and 26 used sometimes the same system but used also boxes formations 

[chanklaus]

There might be another way to achieve what we would like to see - large formations of aircraft.

 

Let's assume we had a command MCU "Follow", nudging a plane or a unit of planes to follow an object (plane) in approximately a specified position. Isn't the "Cover" command already more or less something like that? With it you can force eg. a fighter unit to "follow" a bomber unit.

 

Now assume you had such a "follow" command, in which you could define a matrix (XPos,YPos,ZPos), which would be the relative position to the object to be followed. Constructing for instance a bomber box formation would still be a tiring and time-consuming task, being based on single palnes or basic Vic units. However, once constructed, such a formation would be stabilized by the algorithm, and not just left alone after mission start.

 

Even modeling scenarios like I described in my post above - a bomber formation, splitting up for the attack, but reassembling after it - would be feasible.

[sevenless]

On 4/4/2021 at 10:45 PM, AKA_Big10 said:

Do we have the ability to make large bomber formation with up to 12 in a combat box? I know in DCS you can and they have a combat box formation option. 

 

Maybe these 2 Threads might help?