Quote:
Originally Posted by noguaranteeofsanity
This is an interesting analysis and I think the one of the reports used to support the 6 hour ready time as in table V.3 it has an average of 1 to 1.6 sorties a day per aircraft, which if you round up to 2 becomes 12 hours on the ground and 12 in the air for each aircraft, so each flight or the time to ready the aircraft takes place in a 6 hour window.
http://fas.org/man/gao/nsiad98001/a5.htm |
Actually it's a bit more complex than this.
During surge ops, 4th gen fighters can produce 2.0 to 2.1 sorties per aircraft per day. But not all aircraft would fly at the same time. Typically, 1/4 to 1/3 of them would be stuck on the ground. Also, a day/night capable strike squadron should be able to produce 3 packages per day.
So lets take a quick look at how a 12-aircraft squadron would be implemented in Command:
First make 4 aircraft permanenty unavailable for ops. That prevents the player from putting more than 2/3 of the fighters in the air as per RL observations.
Then ready the remaining eight aircraft with strike loadouts. These have 6 hr ready time. With a 500nm strike radius you need 2 hrs (++) to fly the mission. So that's 8 hrs to ready and fly. Then repeat three times (again as per RL ops), and you end up on 2.0 surge sorties per plane per day.
If you make 10 out of 12 planes available to the player you get 2.5 sorties per aircraft per day and you've probably moved beyond what's realistic. There are real-life examples where much higher sortie rates have been achieved (typically for simpler CAS missions that do not require any briefing - all you do is haul bombs a short distance) and we will look into adding a 'quick turnaround' option for these cases. Ref earlier discussion.
I'd also like to have a 'sustained ops' ready time option, where the player is limited to 0.6-0.9 sorties per plane per day as a alternative to the 2.0-2.1 surge rates we have today. Will have to discuss it in more detail with the other programmers when back from the summer break.
Thanks!