A weakness of Il-2 has always been the visibility model of ships. I understand that this was borne out of performance considerations, still the implementation was pretty a big compromise. With more processing more available today I think it would be worth it to redesign this aspect, to increase ship visibility to a more realistic level and make a more refined scaling of LODs.
Please see here how it is currently seen in Il-2. The ships are from left to right: CV Essex, CV Shokaku, BB King Georg V, DD Fletcher.
The switch from ships, to shadow, to dots within 9 to 11 km is very abrupt and very close to the ships.
I suggest to following adjustments:
1. Increase draw distance of wakes. This should actually be one of the first features visible of a ship.
2. Increase view distance of the lowest LOD ship model.
3. Implement an additional, very low detail, generic LOD for large, medium and small ships. I think visibility out to 20-30 Km would be appropriate for the big hulls.
4. Draw distance of shadows can be cut significantly. The shadow LOD currently seems to act as a substitute to a low geometry LOD (although not very convincingly). In view of the adjustments above, this could be dropped.
Thanks for your considerations.