To let the user increase this in a scripted campaign, they would have to make each mission at least 3 times to account for a bare minimum of low/medium/high aircraft density settings.

There's nothing stopping me from creating my own scenarios with 100 bombers in the air, or flying online in a server with a few dozen people if my PC can handle it.

Nevertheless, when the dynamic campaign is ready it would be a cool feature to be able to select the desired aircraft density.

Well as with most things to do with this sim, given time this will be something to be increased/included down the road. I can't even imagine how powerful hardware will be in a couple years. Just gotta stay optimistic for now.

Oh yeah,

I can't wait to see 100 bombers in action.

Although we probably won't see hundreds of planes in the air at the same time on a mid-range machine we can still create missions with triggers. Let's say a formation of 30-40 bombers approaches, your squadron shoots down about 50% of them -such kill rates were rather uncommon though- the loss of a certain amount of planes then triggers a second wave of bombers which you are vectored to by ground control. Now, I don't know if this will be possible but if that's the case then we might no be able to have huge single formations but several "smaller" ones in portions. That happened quite often, the luftwaffe sent out several "smaller" bomber formations against different targets to screw up the RAF fighter command as much as possible. Also they sent formations in delay so one came in first and maybe 20-30 mins after that a new one would come in so that the RAF fighters wouldn't have enough time to land and refuel/arm. Super large formations weren't as common as many would like to believe. Personally I don't care so much for hundreds of planes in the air at the same time, sure it looks fantastic but I wouldn't be able to shoot down more than a couple anyway:)

Surely the skinners will still be able to weather their skins in the same way as before. All that we'll have to do is to turn the COD weathering off (ie set the slider to zero). Skinners could even release a 'clean' skin for use with the COD weathering and a pre-weathered skin.

Similar to producing il-2 skins with national markings or without - you had to make the apprpriate setting in il-2 to turn off or keep the built-in markings.

The weathering will also have a specular map (where the underlying metal is exposed), which may not be available to "normal" skinning. So this approach wouldn't provide the same options and quality as the built-in weathering system.

Yes Kendo I agree

that sounds like a good idea to put weathering to zero. This would work best for user created missions and campaigns as the official missions/campaigns will already have the weathering levels set for all a.i. planes...but it wouldn't be too big a job to re-set all the official mission weathering to zero if the player wanted to use custom skins.

This will also help with unit emblems and nose art - in the screenshots i've seen so far these do not have any weathering/rivets/panel lines and look false against the otherwise great skins, with the greater detail/quality custome skins in COD we'll have better quality emblems/nose art as well for custom skins.

Templates for panels/rivets is another story !....we'll have to wait and see.

But, if the plans for an SDK hold up, we should see entire new aircraft created (which requires this level of access).

You can use triggers to spawn planes on random paths in case the player gets close, which reduces the overall amount of planes that show up in the mission at the same time. Not the best approach though if radar and ground vectoring are implemented. But triggering waves of new enemies when the first wave is shot down? Sounds closer to Space Invaders than a realistic mission setup...

Anyway it's all speculation until we know how many planes a high-end CPU can cope with. For sure not all BoB missions were multi-wave attacks with several hundred bombers. But being tasked with attacking a lone recon flight on September 15 would be a bit strange :(

Sure but the SDK won't come with the release, and no details are known so far about who will get access to it at all. But yes this would certainly require full access to all modeling features of the engine. Even more reason to open up the skinning process already before so people could get some practice in that field ;)