[stugumby]

Hi, just curious as I understand the planes usage in real life was as a lead ship equipped with a bombardier, the others would maintain tight formation and drop when it did. So i guess my question is when building a mission is it better to assign each flight a linked target or just an icon over the target. if linked wont the p-38s dive on it etc??

Am in the tinkering mode with a mission but the nemy fighters make the other p-38's jettison bombs and go after them, im on level stabilizer doing the drop and end up dropping by myself. May have to change the intercept time etc. Any ideas??

[BBury]

Depends on altitude. If they are lower than, I think about 5500meters, they will dive bomb. Above that and they will level bomb.

[stugumby]

Im currently trying 2500m 375 kph unlinked to target and the droop snoot is "A" flight and "E/I" flights are 4 each p-38L05. At target the droop starts a very shallow dive to about 1800m and the others are klinked to it and do likewise, they go into line astern and drop just fine but after that i loose control of them, maybe due to enemy fighter intercept etc.

Puzzling but im keeping in mind p-38 is a fighter not a level bomber, so far so good, just a bit tricky to control as flight leader when half stays with you and half goes after enemy fighters. More tinkering is in order. I will try the higher altitude. Thanks for your quick reply and good advice.

[Guest]

That's the beautiful thing about it... It had the speed, range, and size of a fighter so it became a perfect conversion option for a hit-and-run type tatical bomber.

[Checkyersix]

Im currently trying 2500m 375 kph unlinked to target and the droop snoot is "A" flight and "E/I" flights are 4 each p-38L05. At target the droop starts a very shallow dive to about 1800m and the others are klinked to it and do likewise, they go into line astern and drop just fine but after that i loose control of them, maybe due to enemy fighter intercept etc.

Puzzling but im keeping in mind p-38 is a fighter not a level bomber, so far so good, just a bit tricky to control as flight leader when half stays with you and half goes after enemy fighters. More tinkering is in order. I will try the higher altitude. Thanks for your quick reply and good advice.

One trick to control fighter bombers in ground attack missions is to give them a ground attack waypoint right after their target, some distance away with no enemy targets below (like on the way back to base). This will keep them in "attack" formation all the way to the next waypoint, and they won't stray off to find new targets. Another thing to remember is that a ground attack waypoint, even one linked to a specific target, orders the group to destroy all enemy objects within a radius around that point (or the specific target), so they'll keep attacking until everything is destroyed. If you don't want them to go in for a second run, there should be just enough targets to kill on the first attack, and at least a few hundred meters around them with no other enemy targets.

Cheers,

CY6.

[Pooch]

Droop Snoot Lightnings were not used as dive bombers. That would be missing the whole point of the airplane. They carried a bomberdier. You don't use one in a dive bomber...the pilot drops the bomb.
Droop snoots would fly as lead airplane in a fighter formation that was bombing a target. The bomb aimer in the P-38 would use his Norden and release his bombs, in level flight, as on any other type of bombers.
The fighter pilots would wait for the release, and when they saw the bombs fall, they'd release theirs. That's it. Then turn around and go home, or the Lightning would would head back and the fighters would go looking for targets to shoot up. As you can imagine, fighter pilots didn't like it very much. You can just imagine,"I'm a fighter pilot, not a damned bomber pilot!" being repeated several dozen times from various units!

[stugumby]

problem is the ai behavior on bomb run with an unlinked target below makes it go from 2500m to 2100m then level out and drop. made 3 different version with different altitudes etc. get same basic result, target gets plastered but ai wingies always go into line astern etc, tried change formation comand and wasnt much better. just a minor fmb issue to get desired result.