I just came up with all this so let me know if you can see some major flaws with my suggestion that I don’t see.
Forward airfields should be destructible objectives. This would, in my opinion, not only make strike aircraft like the Tornado much more viable in ARB, but would also add purpose to fighter gameplay in the sense of escorting strike aircraft to their objective/defending the objective instead of just playing TDM in the sky.
The destruction of the airfield would mean that aircraft would have to travel much further back to rearm and refuel, as well as taking a substantial hit to a team’s tickets, making its defence indispensable.
Forward airfields would be structured in separate modules, each with a specific role. For instance, bombing the hangars would extend the time it takes to rearm and repair an aircraft, destroying the ATC tower would make it disappear off the map, forcing pilots to visually locate the base and bombing the runway with enough ordnance disables the airfield entirely.
Now I know this sounds a bit crazy, but this is where the airfield’s modular structure come to work. If, for example, the runway is bombed without the other modules of the base being put out of action the runway will be unavailable only for a limited amount time, until the runway is repaired and available again.
Currently bomb loadouts reduce the sp/rp you get the more bombs you bring, in some serious convoluted scheme to kneecap rewards to be the same for all loadouts. IE you get virtually the same RP/SL for bombing 1 base with a 2 500kg napalm loadout, as you do bombing 3 bases with 6 500kg napalm loadout, except the latter example is exponetially harder to pull off.
Having a high HP target like an airfield in ARB throws this out of whack completely and neccesitates bringing more bombs, but then you nerf your base rewards and have to hit the airfield and not bases?
To clarify if its hard to understand. If you load into an ARB match with a loadout that is just enough for 1 base (2 500kg napalm) you get 100% rewards for a base. If you spawn in with a loadout that has 4 500kg bombs you get around 50% rewards per base, 6 500kg napalm 33% rewards per base, and so on. The % probably aren’t exactly correct, but pretty close. This is also why they basically removed the ability for rockets to deal meaningful damage to bases, you could get multiple bases at near 100% rewards for each, if you brought say 2 500kg napalm and the rest rockets.
The amount of players flying stuff like the f111 or tornado with full bomb loadouts and dont notice the pitiful score they get per base is kinda saddening.
Fully support any idea which would increase the immersion factor.
I mean opening an alternative for bomb drops outside bases seems rather like a no-go for gaijin because it would most likely increase the overall earnings of pilots in Air RB.
But in the long term it would also give gaijin the opportunity to increase the immersion factor for interdictor pilots and create the opportunity to introduce new weapon types.
If you realize that weapon types like JP 233s or MW-1s were designed to “deactivate” enemy airfields by destroying their runways you might get a lot of support from passionate Tornado pilots - so instead of having incredibly high HP for forward airfields (which might not be approved by gaijin) it might make sense to think about disabling the runway. I mean technically all you have to do is to destroy the last 10-20% of the runway so that repaired enemies can’t take off…
For props: Not so sure - as from my pov most forward airfields have no concrete runway and even a single 1.000 kg bomb ( PE-8: 4 x FAB-1000 kg
In medium-hard soil, the bomb leaves a crater which is 4–5 metres deep and 15–20 metres wide Source) would render such an airfield useless…