Quote Originally Posted by Stumptonian View Post
I guess it’s the “let’s fix it and make it better” side of me, Dave.

A simple fix would be to place the bomb behind the plane in the Declare Bombing phase.
First turn use the actual movement (straight or stall) and subsequent use stalls.
Pete, I've thought it over and realized that the bombing rule compromises on both speed and time to fall. Yes, we could come up with a more realistic speed but we would also need a more realistic time to fall, which as calculated for 3,000m would be > 0.5 minutes taking air resistance (terminal velocity) into account. Given the 1-2 seconds per phase that means at least a dozen phases - perhaps 2-3 X that - before the bombs hit. Is that worth doing?

I took the SPAD XIII maximum speed and using the 1-2 second per phase to calculate that the ground scale is between 1-to-500 and 1-to-1000 in order to be consistent with the speed and time per phase. Okay...with that I calculated that a SPAD XIII dropping a bomb while travelling at top speed (crazy - but just to use the maximum case) from altitude 8 (3000m) takes 4 phases and travels (using the ground scale) of 250-500m horizontally. Yes, that's unrealistic for 4-8 seconds but it's equally unrealistic that it reaches the ground in 4-8 seconds. As we both calculated it would 24 seconds (in a vacuum), so longer with air resistance. Let's say it really takes 4 X the 4 phases (i.e., 32 seconds using 2 seconds / phase) that equates to less than 50 kph even though in terms of game mechanics it looks like the bomb is going 200 kph - all so that the bomb reaches the ground in a reasonable number of turns for game play.

With respect to placing the bomb in front of the plane, don't forget that at altitude 2 the bomb hits immediately but using physics it should be > 10 seconds (5 phases).

If we're going to 'fix' the speed of the bombs we also have to 'fix' the time to fall. To me it seems the game exaggerations cancel each other out (i.e., if your travelling in an aircraft and your dropping your bombs it will hit a target ahead of where you release and given the altitude quite a ways ahead of where the aircraft is at that instant. That's the important part of a game....is the game modelling the decisions the player has to make.

Does that make sense?

Apologies for beating a dead horse - you can blame my military operational research career where I spent a lot of time thinking about such things has how to model this or that.