How to make big Bomber formations in FMB?

[jdoe33]

Trying to create a 3x9 Bomber flight and make them bomb/attack together. But when i set the 2 flights up to follow the main flight they just deceide to loiter and do nothing. Anybody got experience? 

[9./JG52_J-HAT]

See here:

https://www.team-fusion-simulations.de/tfsresources/?&path=01_Manuals

 

Scroll down to the Mission Builder‘s manual. 
Here is the direct link:

https://artist.onlyoffice.eu/Products/Files/DocEditor.aspx?fileid=6542994&doc=MUdyTi9ZV2dnOVV1dXpYbllkZm1heDdFTHJGNEdCYmNaWDR0WWFXdVNPOD0_IjY1NDI5OTQi0

 

Also in case you don’t find it in the FMB manual, take a look at the ATAG forums. There have been lots of posts there over the year, maybe one specifically for what you seek. 

[56RAF_Stickz]

13 hours ago, jdoe33 said:

Trying to create a 3x9 Bomber flight and make them bomb/attack together. But when i set the 2 flights up to follow the main flight they just deceide to loiter and do nothing. Anybody got experience? 

I found the only way was to have them as independent flights/squadron of 9. With the leader of each 9 having a set of way points and ToT set for similar speeds. There are commands that would seem to enable them to be co-ordinated by hooking each leader together but I never got it to work that way. So did it all timing all flights manually including giving the drop bombs level command to each flight. The biggest problem I had with 20 or 30 bombers was inside flight or wingman falling out of sky during turns I guess from stalling out and collisions.

So I would guess if you have set up 3 squadrons/geschwaders, 2 are circling because they have no waypoints set.

[jdoe33]

3 hours ago, 56RAF_Stickz said:

I found the only way was to have them as independent flights/squadron of 9. With the leader of each 9 having a set of way points and ToT set for similar speeds. There are commands that would seem to enable them to be co-ordinated by hooking each leader together but I never got it to work that way. So did it all timing all flights manually including giving the drop bombs level command to each flight. The biggest problem I had with 20 or 30 bombers was inside flight or wingman falling out of sky during turns I guess from stalling out and collisions.

So I would guess if you have set up 3 squadrons/geschwaders, 2 are circling because they have no waypoints set.

I made it work, by making waypoints for all 3 geschwader and bascially making a "follow" chain for nr. 2 and 3. However now i have the problem that i setup a small target south of London (biggin hill) and as soon as the formation gets close to there (~20km) the game suddenly freezes and it advances like 1 frame every 1 minute. Got any ideas what could be causing it? My GPU is Rx 6700xt and CPU R5 2600 so i don't think it could be my hardware. I also tried experiementing with fly through radius triggers but they seem to crash my game. 
 

Edit: I found the error, using target AREA bombing apparently causes huge overload. Selecting the targets manually makes it work for me. 

Edited February 11, 2022 by jdoe33

[Buzzsaw]

Hello Stickz

 

You do know the huge bomber formations seen during the BoB or the Battle for Germany were all comprised of smaller formations?

 

Huge formations were simply not practical or safe.

 

That is why it took so long for these formations to be created in the air... each of the smaller formations had to maneuver into position. 

 

A typical bomber Squadron was 6 aircraft... two flights each of three aircraft.

 

Here is a page which explains how a B-17 formation worked:

 

http://www.303rdbg.com/formation.html

 

Be very careful when creating missions with mass formations.  (or any kind of mission)

 

Don't make the bombers gain altitude quicker than they could historically, don't make them climb at a higher speed than they could.

 

This will cause all kinds of formation issues which can lead to crashes.

 

Same with descents... remember all aircraft types have maximum dive speeds... and some bombers have quite low max speeds.   If you make a formation lose altitude too fast it will start to adopt all types of weird behaviour to avoid the aircraft exceeding the max. allowable dive speed and breaking up.  This can cause collisions, etc.

 

Remember the speeds shown in the Full Mission Builder are IAS... not TAS and therefore the higher you go, the faster the actual TAS speed is.

 

So the default 300 kmh, may be 300 kmh TAS at sea level, but it isn't 300 kmh TAS at 9000 meters... its 477 kmh... much faster than any bomber could achieve.

[Buzzsaw]

Another fact about high altitude bombing.

 

Contrails look nice and are exciting to fly through but...

 

Most of the German twin engined bombers did their bombing from between 4000-6000 meters... they did not go up to contrail height.

 

This was because their engines were not powerful enough to operate at contrail altitudes... the exception being the Ju-88A and occasionally the He-111.  (later models)

 

Aircraft such as the B-17 were built specifically for high altitude performance... their engines were turbo-supercharged., the most efficient method to maintain power up to very high altitudes... whereas the Germans were at best in 1940, two speed supercharged.  Aircraft such as the Dornier 17s were powered by single stage supercharged engines... with poor altitude performance.

 

If you you build a mission in the FMB and place a bomber at an altitude which it cannot achieve with a climb from sea level, then it will start to behave very strangely... it can stall out and fall out of formation, it can fly nose up, struggling to maintain the altitude and be unable to maneuver.

 

The Wellington I's too rarely went up to contrail height... their Pegasus engines with two speed superchargers didn't have the power to operate up there.  The Blenheims were even worse.

[56RAF_Stickz]

hi Buzzsaw

yes, certainly well aware of the typical bombing altitude the he111/ju88  and do17s came in at. But I was originally trying to recreate the aug 11th raid on Portland. It had about 56 ju88 and 20 he111 plus 60-70 110s and another 30 odd 109s. Of course Portland isnt on map so I had to substitute Bournemouth(guess they had recently beaten us at football and I always bear a grudge). I took a lot of missions I wrote from the BoB historical society timeline site to get ideas and suitable raids/targets then just focussed researching those.

Then again you did not always have to be over 20kft for contrails, lot reports about watching the contrails of the combat. My parents lived on southern England throughout war and would sometimes refer to it (especially my fathers stories of later chasing doodlebugs on army motor bike as a 16year old for arp and dispatch riding).

It was originally started in 2013 purely as a test bed to see if my machine could hack it, especially once adding historical defending fighters. Had the goal of making it a co-op for the squad to fly. In the end I had to reduce it to about 50%. The bombers came off from map anyway at 4000m and I had it all trying to form up around cherbourg which is where our radar picked them up. 

That is where the issue with stalling out became the problem. Getting them to track together in a straight path was fairly straightforward and I only ran them with 50-60% fuel (I would have to open it all up to find out). Only the 109s and 110s plus RAF took off as far as I could from their real field.

Sub dividing 2x groups of 9 bomber down to 3x groups of six does not really help when you have all the waypoints and times/speeds and path lines to follow to get it working, and as my eyesight get more limiting its easier to fix smaller numbers of formations.

The even bigger issue in those days was trying to get any of the fighters to engage one another, it became an exercise in futility. In the end, that was what made me shelve it for another 5 or 6 years until your guys had sorted some of those issues out.

TAS and IAS I had looked up at the time, plus no bomber lead would run much over 60-70% max throttle cos his flight would be running too hard to stay with it. So mine were never set over 190 - 220mph (I believe got them set for 280kph laden reading the mis file) but its difficult to get to turn like that so had to learn how to make it work.

The idea was only meant as a proof of concept, see what could be done with mission editor and how a machine imposed limitations and even possibly use as a template.

It still only runs AI only, would hardly be suitable to make for others, it takes 30-40 minutes just for them all to have formed up.

It would have been far easier to just have it all written formed up and ready to go but that would not have shown me much.

I could no doubt up the numbers a bit nowadays, amd5800 is a large upgrade on what I had then although I am only running a RX570 video card. Any upgrade to that got put behind a new bike as I figured it might well outlast me whereas the overpriced cards now are not good value for my time and money.

 

[messsucher]

8 minutes ago, 56RAF_Stickz said:

new bike

 

A bike better.

[56RAF_Stickz]

On 2/11/2022 at 6:02 AM, jdoe33 said:

I made it work, by making waypoints for all 3 geschwader and bascially making a "follow" chain for nr. 2 and 3. However now i have the problem that i setup a small target south of London (biggin hill) and as soon as the formation gets close to there (~20km) the game suddenly freezes and it advances like 1 frame every 1 minute. Got any ideas what could be causing it? My GPU is Rx 6700xt and CPU R5 2600 so i don't think it could be my hardware. I also tried experiementing with fly through radius triggers but they seem to crash my game. 
 

Edit: I found the error, using target AREA bombing apparently causes huge overload. Selecting the targets manually makes it work for me. 

hi jdoe - Looks like your base setup is similar to mine then for paths.

I am only running a rx570 (although a amd5800 cpu). So do not believe your system is a problem unless you only have small quantity of RAM (although I do noyt actually recognise your cpu). I have never had my game slow down to that level though even with the previous cpu (an amd960). The only time mine hiccups is when it starts loading in part of London ie to land around Gravesend area or the like and its not a serious problem.

I do not notice any difference using the area bombing command though and fly through radius (assume you mean the enter area) never causes me a problem (once I learnt to turn it off after single occurence) so I think there must be something else going on. There is a lot of info on the atag site and plenty of youtubes for mission writing and even some pretty old ones are still relevant philstyle  and a guy from acg did some that go through the triggers.

2 minutes ago, messsucher said:

 

A bike better.

oh yes however still having to put it together, I buggered my back the day it arrived (late October) - especially annoying as I have never really had issue with back trouble nor was aware of doing anything untoward. A lovely dolan rebus - not sure that at my age a new aero bike was sensible, although as my hack bike (a 2004 lemond with 20000 mile on it) broke - probably terminally (the rear derailleur hanger snapped going uphill 2 weeks back, derailleur rotated round on chain and jammed back wheel so after I had picked myelf up I had 15mile walk back home on look cleats. After 3 mile I had to tip bike over a wall out of sight cos I could no longer carry it).

Such is life, still have my (euphemistically named) race bike although my days of sub hour 25miles time trial on it after a 2 mile swim are a long gone memory (last was a little after my 50th birthday) to fall back on til I can take the new one out without being annoyed by roads cover in salt and gravel shit for the car drivers to do 100mph in the snow

[messsucher]

2 hours ago, 56RAF_Stickz said:

hi jdoe - Looks like your base setup is similar to mine then for paths.

I am only running a rx570 (although a amd5800 cpu). So do not believe your system is a problem unless you only have small quantity of RAM (although I do noyt actually recognise your cpu). I have never had my game slow down to that level though even with the previous cpu (an amd960). The only time mine hiccups is when it starts loading in part of London ie to land around Gravesend area or the like and its not a serious problem.

I do not notice any difference using the area bombing command though and fly through radius (assume you mean the enter area) never causes me a problem (once I learnt to turn it off after single occurence) so I think there must be something else going on. There is a lot of info on the atag site and plenty of youtubes for mission writing and even some pretty old ones are still relevant philstyle  and a guy from acg did some that go through the triggers.

oh yes however still having to put it together, I buggered my back the day it arrived (late October) - especially annoying as I have never really had issue with back trouble nor was aware of doing anything untoward. A lovely dolan rebus - not sure that at my age a new aero bike was sensible, although as my hack bike (a 2004 lemond with 20000 mile on it) broke - probably terminally (the rear derailleur hanger snapped going uphill 2 weeks back, derailleur rotated round on chain and jammed back wheel so after I had picked myelf up I had 15mile walk back home on look cleats. After 3 mile I had to tip bike over a wall out of sight cos I could no longer carry it).

Such is life, still have my (euphemistically named) race bike although my days of sub hour 25miles time trial on it after a 2 mile swim are a long gone memory (last was a little after my 50th birthday) to fall back on til I can take the new one out without being annoyed by roads cover in salt and gravel shit for the car drivers to do 100mph in the snow

 

Haha, good writing. And good exercising, it will keep you in better spirits after all and eventually, but you must know this already of course.

[IckyATLAS]

I did flights with over 50 bombers A20 or so and tested up to 9 bombers per flight. This was a few years ago and it did run fine on the Kuban map. The time dilation was an issue but framerate was in the 70/80. I have not tested yet this mission again with my more recent hardware.

You need to have an Attack area MCU per flight set to Attack Ground. To have it work well you must have a bomb run with a straight flight trajectory same altitude for say the last three four kilometers.

To do this set two waypoints, the first is at the entry of the bombing run with Medium setting the second waypoint same altitude with setting High. This will oblige all planes to fly straight and make no evasive action to avoid flak or anything else. After that last waypoint again in straight line you set the Attack Area in mode High and Attack Ground at the same altitude as the previous waypoints. The bombs will be spread according to the flight planes position and so the bombs will have a ground pattern according to the formation patterns.

 

One problem is related to the special effects. If you do large carpet bombing and have at the same time dozens and dozens of bombs that explode at the same time it is the effects of those explosions that can slow down and completely destroy your FPS. If you put a camera on the ground near the explosions and those are spread large on your screen then you have the perfect FPS killer situation. At least so it was. Maybe things have improved with the new effects.

[56RAF_Stickz]

19 hours ago, IckyATLAS said:

I did flights with over 50 bombers A20 or so and tested up to 9 bombers per flight. This was a few years ago and it did run fine on the Kuban map. The time dilation was an issue but framerate was in the 70/80. I have not tested yet this mission again with my more recent hardware.

You need to have an Attack area MCU per flight set to Attack Ground. To have it work well you must have a bomb run with a straight flight trajectory same altitude for say the last three four kilometers.

To do this set two waypoints, the first is at the entry of the bombing run with Medium setting the second waypoint same altitude with setting High. This will oblige all planes to fly straight and make no evasive action to avoid flak or anything else. After that last waypoint again in straight line you set the Attack Area in mode High and Attack Ground at the same altitude as the previous waypoints. The bombs will be spread according to the flight planes position and so the bombs will have a ground pattern according to the formation patterns.

 

One problem is related to the special effects. If you do large carpet bombing and have at the same time dozens and dozens of bombs that explode at the same time it is the effects of those explosions that can slow down and completely destroy your FPS. If you put a camera on the ground near the explosions and those are spread large on your screen then you have the perfect FPS killer situation. At least so it was. Maybe things have improved with the new effects.

hi IckyATLAS - this is comments related to the cliffs of dover mission editor, not the great battles series. Different sets of problems.

[IckyATLAS]

11 minutes ago, 56RAF_Stickz said:

hi IckyATLAS - this is comments related to the cliffs of dover mission editor, not the great battles series. Different sets of problems.

Sorry missed the title ?