Ideas for Night ops in the future ....

[bolox]

some good thoughts Ian,
the possibilities for night flying have been given a boost with 4.10 and 4.11 will hopefully maintain the momentum

couple of other things spring to mind:-

Flares as an object that can appear at specific times- target marking/illumination of bomber stream. 15km visibility (of object) would be good here

Burning cities- the ability to simulate this would be great- possibly as an additional destruction 'brush' in fmb???. whether it's possible to achieve a suitable viewing distance with game engine could be a problem

Bombsight illumination- if we ever get flyable bombers whose main role is night bombing (we can dream of Lancs but Do217 is possible???) the ability to read the bombsight against 'black' ground becomes rather important

[Ian Boys]

Another idea - night fighters often dropped air flares to highlight the enemy. This would be GREAT. However they'd have to be proper light emitters, not just providers of a ground texture.

Speaking of which, the Swordfish flare looks bad over the sea. Isn't there a way to make it an actual light soiurce?

[Azimech]

On the searchlights, I experimented with them and it seems they're activated on altitude above ground level, I believe 250 meters. At first I thought they were activated on sound, which would be quite realistic, because when I instructed the automatic pilot to land while a few enemy searchlights placed in the vicinity of the airfield stopped searching and switched off, when my engines where idling while on decent. Imagine trying to evade searchlights by switching off your engines. I know there were german AA guns that used sound to aim, right now they all seem to use some kind of inaccurate "radar", while I can't imagine all stations having them in those days. But switching off engines in flight is probably not realistic, I haven't read or heard of any occasion, except of course gliders. And I can imagine some aircraft having great difficulties restarting them in flight, not to mention shock cooling being a problem.

This is nice if it could be incorporated in SOW and IL2.
Sandra:
Three search lights positioned around an airfield and directed skyward to form a cone, the glow of which could be seen by planes trying to find the airfield

from this page: http://www.lancasterdiary.net/terms_and_slang.php

[Ian Boys]

Sometimes the light night bombers such as the Po-2 would switch off and glide into the attack and drop their bombs without warning.