bombing ammo bunkers
 

when bombing ammo bunkers with ur air strikes how often the plane itself is destroyed from the ammo explosion ?

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

Never got such a result, i dont know if this is possible, (plane in the air, explosion on the ground)

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

Umm, that has happened to me pretty much every time an ammo bunker/depot has been destroyed by bombing while the plane is directly abvove the ammo depot. I'm not completely sure, but I think that all units in the hex of the ammo bunker/depot will be destroyed when it is blown up, or at least a really high percentage of them.

I guess the game doesn't check if the unit is flying or not. Or alternatively it is intended behavoiur. I wouldn't consider it too far fetched, given the size of explosion an ammo depot with as much ammo as those depicted in the game would create.

- Koh

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

It is the secondary explosion size (1000lb bomb) - planes drop these in the hex behind the line of flight, not the same hex. So they are protected from the blast.

I had a Nazi Stuka take out an ammo dump of mine, and it was in an adjacent hex to the dump, since bombs are dropped 1 hex behind. But a secondary explosion went off in that particular hex. It died :).

No idea whether to call that a feature or a bug, really. The secondary explosion could always miss the plane after all, or go off in another of the surrounding hexes and not the one the plane was in. Plus they are not nice things to be near are exploding ammo dumps - warheads and stuff get thrown every which way including upwards. I think I'll side with "feature" even if it was not specifically coded that way intentionally.

Best to target an ammo dump with a stand-off weapon?.

Andy

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

IIRC railway engines were pretty tricky targets from low level flight because if the boiler was hit, it tended to explode and send pieces of debris flying quite high and far - endangering the attacking aircraft. So I guess ammo dump would produce even more dangerous results.

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

Hmmmm...does it work that way with smaller, i.e. cheaper, ammo supplies? Might make a nice booby trap :idea:

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

I destroyed a few bridges in a game using that strategy. I parked my own ammo dumps on a concrete bridge and emptied a few rounds at it, making a nice gap in the bridge. So yeah, they can be used pretty nice for other purposes than resupplying ammo.

- Koh

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

Agree with you Mobhack, i just remembered that in WW2 german stukas had minimun altitude to drop the bigger bombs(1000lb i think), dropping lower would get the plane in troubles as the blast make sthings fly, and also the british pilots that had to destroy V1 flying bombs that were too close would end blowing up with the bomb.

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

That's also why low-level attacks used 5 second delay fuze. Like, say, Mosquitoes in op. Jericho, or those B-25's massacring Japanese transports in Bismarck Sea. Also the planes had to fly in loose enough formation so that bombs from first aircrafts won't destroy the later ones (faintly recall such situation, with Typhoons attacking a French port, is described in "Le Grand Cirque" by Clostermann).

Re: bombing ammo bunkers
 

That's only because units are immune to their own weapons - the blast from an ammo explosion is perfectly able to damage an aircraft in an adjacent hex.

For the record, I just tried it with four Stukas against a bunch of ammo dumps:
Most of the time, they got away unscathed, but eventually,
-two were destroyed by secondary explosins (both times in a hex adjacent to the plane, not the same one)
-one was damaged by the explosion of the dump
-one disappeared from the bombardment menu, although I had not seen any particular reason why (probably damaged, but I missed the message - was more focused on where the explosions were happening)