All has been said.
The problem is that we need a bigger daidalos dev team.

For the Ju-52, you really have two options:

1, fly without enemies, just for "fun". However, this kind of flight belongs to MS Flight sim, not to IL-2

2, fly with enemies around, and pray not to be shot down. (= being a sitting duck) Its not fun at all.

This is why it would be a waste of time and effort, both are very limited now. It should be spent on planes that are sorely missing, like the Helldiver.

Under HSFX mods, Transporters are flyable and used in SEOW online campaigns to run supplies to airfields and combat areas.

Flying these missions with a few squad mates is a lot of fun and tests your nerve navigation skills and team work ability.

The same can be said for recon missions in Fw189's

Necessary for stock game probably not but very welcome,
as a modded addon for online campaigns, certainly.

:mrgreen:

Not everything it s shoot kill and destroy. If you take an online game as a shooter, of course could be boring fly a transport or a recce. But, if you take it as a role playing game, the online interaction it s not only shoot, kill and destroy. In mature MORPG, like wwiiol, or coops online wars in Il.2 as Condor war, ADW, SEOW; transport, recon, rescue, has/had a very important role. And, lot of people enjoy these roles.

yep ... i really love that transport/support missions on ADW .... just fly little above grass and try to identify where are you and where that Field to which you must deliver ammo or fuel or repair kits)...

Isn't this similar to the same situation you'd encounter with a slow and undergunned bomber?

Mostly, transports will be useful in multi-player where there are "capture the airfield" options. In that situation, they'll need support or local air superiority.

For single player, if you're dropping paratroops or cargo, you have to fly lower and slower than you would with a bomber and hold your "bombing run" for longer. That means, unless it's a suicide mission, you have to scale your challenges accordingly. You provide darkness, clouds and good intel to protect you from fighters and flak.

[My impression is that TD is mostly "filling in the gaps" by making existing planes flyable. New planes are done by outside developers. It would be great to have new flyable planes - especially highly desired planes like the SB2C or Spitfire MkXIV, but fans are limited by who's building planes up to TD's standards.

About the summer:
high lattitudes - similar to IL2 default, very high latitude summer - brighter then the default, tropical/equatorial zone - pitch dark in the summer and in any other season.

Agree with other points.

You're right on both points.

I knew about pitch dark equatorial nights, but I didn't bother to mention it.

Another issue that IL2 might not model correctly is sunrise and sunset length. Both are longer the closer you get to the poles. Near the equator, however, sunset and sunrise occur fairly quickly.

While it's probably beyond IL2's limitations, it would be fun if the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars actually match your latitude, longitude, date and time.

Hypothetically, that would allow you to do accurate celestial navigation. More practically, it means that, once you've got the sun's position worked out, you can figure out how much light there should be from the moon, and from light scatter over the horizon.

At the very least, the night sky maps should have the actual constellations, with Ursa Major/Polaris in the correct location if you're in the northern hemisphere, and the Southern Cross and the "Coal Scuttle" nebula if you're in the Southern Hemisphere.

The stars don't need to move, they just need to be bright enough in pitch darkness that you might be able to see the silhouettes of aircraft above you, and that you can do basic direction finding by the starts.

P_38 said "All the cities at night seems abandoned".

During WW2, all cities were blacked out, so that would be what pilots would see unless some one was violating the lights out policy. Or the city was already burning from a prior attack.

Cheers!

Additionally, if there are enemy planes nearby, traffic will have (mostly) stopped and anyone not manning an AAA gun will be in an air raid shelter - or at least off the streets.

And that's not counting towns which are near the actual battlefield, where the civilians and livestock are long gone - dead or fled.