Had an odd co-incidence the other day.
I guess everyone that's flown bombers for any length of time in this game is familiar with the idea of dropping bombs in the path of a pursuing fighter as a last ditch attempt to avoid getting wasted.
I always thought that this was just a 'gamey' thing to do; that it wasn't something that was recognised as a valid RL tactic.
However, I was idly flipping through a bound magazine collection that the Father-in-law had bought me from a car boot sale; I think it's 'Warplane' by Orbis, from about '87. It's all about late cold war military aviation, not something I'd read avidly about; in fact, I've barely touched the collection since it arrived.
Came across a piece on the Buccaneer and the mission profile for Anti-ship work. Reading through I was surprised to see the 'dropping your knickers' was the expression used for the idea of dropping spare 1000lbrs in the path of pursuing fighters, when it wasn't carrying self-defence Sidewinders.
So the co-incidence was, only the night before I'd done this really effectively to a FW190 that wanted a piece of my B-25 on Warclouds. Looked f***ing cool from the rear turret of the B-25 as the FW dissolved into little tiny bits of plane when he flew over a pair of 1000lbrs I'd just dropped on target.
So, if you're on TS and you hear me shout, "I'm going to drop my knickers' don't worry...too much.
Late in the war, the Germans resorted to taking bombed up fighters above bomber formations and dropping the bombs through them, in an attempt to hit a bomber with a bomb. Don't know that it worked well, and I'll bet more than a few farmers got a nasty surprise when bombs failed to detonate in the bomber streams.
I've almost been hit by bombs dropped from enemy aircraft. It was pretty neat.
Only a few times have I been successful in dropping knickers myself.
In WWII, the Germans would also fly captured Allied bombers into formations to drop their loads through them. Bombs need to be going fast enough to detonate, dropping them on other planes would punch a very large hole, but not explode. Sometimes they hit, but most of the time they failed.
Delays and their amounts depended on the type of mission. Extreme low level missions obviously had delays. IIRC, terror bombing missions would sometimes have a mix of delayed and un-delayed bombs, to kill anyone who gathered around the blast site of the un-delayed ones.
And that's what bothers me about "dropping your knickers" in the game. It's the kind of thing that becomes far too common since virtually everybody is flying around with delayed bombs, regardless of the mission. That's what makes it "gamey." </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Originally posted by idonno:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Delays and their amounts depended on the type of mission
Well it's gamey anyway because almost no one does the kind of high altitude level bombing that was done without a delay, most have a delay on their bombs because they know they may end up on a low alt bomb run and don't want to blow their own tail off, lol.
And that's what bothers me about "dropping your knickers" in the game. It's the kind of thing that becomes far too common since virtually everybody is flying around with delayed bombs, regardless of the mission. That's what makes it "gamey." </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Originally posted by Urufu_Shinjiro:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by idonno:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Delays and their amounts depended on the type of mission
Well it's gamey anyway because almost no one does the kind of high altitude level bombing that was done without a delay, most have a delay on their bombs because they know they may end up on a low alt bomb run and don't want to blow their own tail off, lol. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
I tend to do as many, if not more High Alt (>20,000') bomb runs as low; but I don't reset the delay to 0 for the high runs because I know only too well, from bitter experience, that the next time I go low or go skip bombing I'd forget to set it back.