Ship convoy bombing

[IckyATLAS]

One of the most difficult things I found was scenarios where AI bombers must bomb large ship convoys that are moving at sea.

There are cargos, and tankers. And because the success is based on avoiding the loss of too many of either types , AI planes must target and sink if unopposed a certain number of these ships. In short, if you do not fight the bombers the mission will fail.

It is a ground attack type of mission except that ground is sea and the vehicles move continuously and are ships.

First you must have each plane have its flight plan designed separately. They fly together but are not linked together. You have to build the formation otherwise the behavior is unusable.

 

Initially I thought that by using the Attack MCU linking each planes to attack certain ships would work. It does not work. I used different bombers and dive bombers like Stuka. They are all AI. The behavior was completely abnormal like all the planes (these are completely independent planes) attacking only one ship and impossible to understand why.

Finally the only way to have this work is to use the AttackArea with only the "attack ground targets" parameter checked.

The problem here is that AttackArea is static and ships move. You have an AttackArea per plane. Now you have to estimate in your scenario when the bombers will arrive and at that moment where will be the ships. In this way you can design the size of your AttackArea and the position so that the ship to be attacked is inside. And that works perfectly, each plane will attack the assigned ship.

If the ship is fast say a destroyer at full speed bombers will never sink it, because I have tested and the bombers unload their bombs calculating the position (approx middle of the ship) as if the ship was fixed. Unfortunately it moves and so the bombs will always miss the mark. They do not integrate the motion of the ship. This is also true with fast moving trains.

 

The Stukas they dive from vertical but there are many seconds before the bomb hits the target and just for info a ship moving at 20 kph will move at 5 .5 meters per second. A 10 second bomb flight means the ship center has moved by 55 meters. So if your ship is 100 mt long you have 50 meters from the center of the ship to its extremities so it will be a near miss, with the largest bombs you may do some damage but barely. For Cargos and Tankers if you stay around 13 kph then you get hits. 

The other solution is to fly very low so that the bomb flight is very short. The JU88 are excellent at this low level bombing flights, better than the HE111.  Finally you can use submarines and torpedoes but this is another story.

 

Finally if you have a large radius encompassing multiple ships for your AttackArea MCU then you get a kind of random behavior because you do not know which ship will be targeted. It seems that it is the ship nearer to the AttackArea Icon coordinates. But with overlapping AttackAreas for many planes each encompassing many ships you get a kind nice global attack of the convoy with ships hit or missed.