[gap]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

Seems to me there were clues in Rubini's SH3 thread...

Weren't air torpedoes a feature introduced with SHIV?

Indeed, there is an Air Torpedo mod for SHIII by Rubini, but I think it exploited the same workaround as the ship torpedo mod (where torpedoes are spawned in game as the muzzle flash effect of an invisible dummy gun); I doubt anything related with their working and with their setup to apply to later SH games

Originally Posted by propbeanie

planes will spawn from the same group, until it runs out of planes apparently. [...] All of the planes seem to come in to "play" from the same generally direction. I would say only one AirBase responds, seemingly the closest.

Resuming:

• Once an unit is detected, there is a chance that response aircraft will spawn from the nearest enemy base within detected unit's range. If, considering max radii of the assigned aircraft, no air base is within range, no response aircraft will spawn.
  
• The chance that the selected airbase will actually spawn response aircraft depends on a number of factors like airbase veterancy level and day/night time as well as a number of related parameters in AirStrike.cfg (i.e: Default Air Strike Probability, Probability Increase factors, Atenuation Factor, Airbase Modifiers and Night Modifier). If someone could provide the formula actually used by the game for calculating this chance, that would be cool.
  
• The chance of a response "session" is calculated at fixed time intervals equal to Logic Steps Between Air Sessions (AirStrike.cfg) x 90 seconds.
  
• The maximum number of response aircraft spawned per session is variable, depending on the type of unit (ship, submarine, port, coastal defense, etc, Axis/Allied threat zones count as if they were a refular unit) whose detection has "triggered" the response. In SHIV, the typical response against a submarine is composed of a maximum of seven aircraft.
• The minimum number number of response aircraft spawned per session, depends on the number of aircraft with the appropriate range assigned to the selected airbase and "available" for the mission.
• Resuming, if we are detected and the nearest airbase has more than 7 aircraft assigned with enough range to perform a response raid, only 7 aircraft will spawn (i.e. the maximum hardcoded limit for ASW attacks), but if that base has only 4 aircracft available, then only those 4 will spawn.
  
• All the aircraft composing a response group will come from the general direction of the airbase they spawned from. If that airbase has more than one aircraft type assigned and available, the composition of the response group will be random. Aircraft won't get to the operation area all at once, but at short intervals and in small groups of 1, 2 or 3 aircraft.
  
• No matter if the aircraft composing a response raid are killed in action or they return to base after accomplishing their mission, they become "unavailable" for the next raids, yet, on they way back to base they are still "active"; they will report any enemy unit if they detect one (thus triggering a potential cascade of "resposne raids"), and they will attack it if they still have any weapon available.
  
• If the unit which had triggered the air response was not destroyed during the first raid, more raids will be considered by the game if the selected airbase has still some aircraft available. Indeed, that will involve waiting for the next dice roll.

Originally Posted by propbeanie

When we attempted to build "appropriate" bases for a given RL air group, we would usually end up with skies polluted with airplanes. We put the 38th BG B-25 AirGroup at Port Moresby, New Guinea, but 72 planes seemed a bit excessive, so we made it 16 planes. Yet, a person could not operate their submarine between New Guinea and the Admiralities north of the Bismarck Sea, and Guadalcanal south of the Solomon Sea, for all of the airplanes. The B-25s were constantly in the air, and the Japanese of course, had to have an air response to the B-25s... lol - mass hysteria! Plus, they sank everything in sight! Nothing left for the subs. So we cut the B-25 group back to 6 airplanes and shortened their operating radius quite a bit. It is much better now.

LOL

Did you try playing with AirStrike.cfg settings in order to reduce aircraft activity?