[WarInEur] Thoughts on WIE weather and a vote.

[sgm]

If one thinks about it, reporting on weather was critical to the war 
effort, but cwie does not go this far.
One key advantage the Wallies had, was an excellent presence in the 
North Atlantic, and thus that key ability to form met judgements in the 
prevailing westerlies, for example, enabling the window for Normandy to 
be spotted, and leaving the Germans oblivious to the fact that this safe 
couple of says...wasn't. With all the consequences that followed. 
Similarly on the eastern front the lack of reporting stations east of 
the front line, left huge potential gaps in the German reporting 
network. In the North Atlantic u-boats were risked outside the convoy 
routes away from the key battle zones to try to fill in these blank 
areas. Because of the relative area of surface that the allies 
controlled, much of the time they were able to gain the upper hand in 
better weather forecasting, especially as the North Atlantic was lost , 
and the fronts shrank towards Berlin.

The concept of "rain" as a weather factor is an interesting idea.
With the air war, this can be simplified using a dodge.
Bad weather can have a simple overall effect.
It affects one
It affects the other
It affects both
This can be actioned by a variable random percentage of your aircraft 
that may not fly. Day fighters were all "VFR", the instrumentarion was 
still in its infancy, so you proceeded under visual flight rules. If you 
could not see properly, It was a no go situation. Not for reasons of 
taking off, but for reasons that you could never find your way home 
easily, and letting down through cloud was a 1st class one way ticket to 
meeting large hard bits (hillsides or mountains) where you were not 
expecting them. A  fighter pilot had too much on his plate to handle 
radio navigation, he wasn't trained for it, and to do so took an 
enormous amount of all-to-valuable time.
 So...you stayed out of bad weather, and you stayed out of cloud. An 
untrained pilot entering cloud is generally expected to lose control 
with fatal consequences within a mere 90seconds of that entry, it is 
that bad. Multicrewed bomber (and some fighter) aircraft have the 
resources and the attention spans available for a separate navigator to 
deal with the huge workload in this environment.

S.E. Nightfighters were the cream of resources, one of the reasons that 
the Wild boar programme was so difficult to mount for the Germans. It 
required a tranche of exceptional pilots, with extensive and very costly 
training, and additional equipment in the cockpit that was difficult to 
fit, and even harder to use well.

 So if you were to simulate this enviroment, some random proportion of 
your formations would not fly, on both sides.

Look at a satellite picture of any day in Europe, where you see cloud, 
think, no fighters, and you get the picture.

The effect of this:-
 one or other, or none flying, simply reduces the lethality of the air 
war. Less aircraft bumping into each other.

Now  we come to the rub....
Drawing on the official figures for ops, which SPI may have drawn on, 
would result in these weather effects being incorporated umwittingly, OR 
NOT.
I have tended towards the contention that the air war has always been 
too lethal. One of the reasons for this could come from the figures 
concealing this very fact.

i.e. out of every 100 sorties x aircraft were shot down. Giving a 
lethality of A%. BUT, midwinter, only 25% of the aircraft were able to 
fly, the other 75% could not and could neither inflict loss or suffer 
loss. Nut the recording was that 25 missions were flown and the 
lethality was the same for those that flew.

We don't know what the assumptions are, and we don't know how such 
effects were incorporated in the figures. It may be that in fact the 
1/6th chance reflects the average lethality included with _all weather 
effects_ (which personally I doubt), but the truth is, we do not really 
know.

Indeed if SPI played the large scale numbers game over each years air 
combat results itrw, then we may not need to do anything at all, it may 
already be factored on at the basic equation level as an assumption to 
which we are simply not party.

 Personally speaking, if I were flying on the basis of a 1/6 chance of 
"buying it" if the sides were evenly matched, i don't think I would ever 
have been that keen, would you?

It may be therefore, that nothing needs to be done, because the basic 
numbers may conceal the fact that , as we don't realise, it has already 
been incorporated at a low level, implicitly.

-|steve|-(admittedly arguing against myself and my call for lower 
lethality in the airwar)


baseballnut570 at hotmail.com wrote:
> Thoughts on WIE weather and a vote:
> 1) No one should know months in advance when the transitions will 
> come, only when they normally come.  A prematurely shortened campaign 
> season is part of the Fog of War.  When playing War in the East it is 
> probably better to have a fixed date so that the Russian player can't 
> luck out in 1941 and the German can't luck out in 1941, 1942 or the 
> winter of 42-43.  In WIE the German gets to pick his starting point 
> and one of the consideration is when can he be assured of sufficient 
> good weather.  Otherwise he could have a lot of units twiddling their 
> thumbs rather than beating up the Brits and Greeks.
>    I happen to think that it is Very Very Probable that unexpected or 
> unhoped for lousy weather might (a) postpone by a week or even two the 
> start of an offensive for which most of the units are in place, or (b) 
> turn an operation that started well into a temporary disaster that 
> must be salvaged once the weather returns to CLEAR.
> 2) Given the nature of MUD (i.e the results of either continuous rain 
> or a snow melt)  It seems to me that after two CLEAR spring turns it 
> should be impossible to revert without warning to MUD status and after 
> two fall MUD turns it should be impossible to revert immediately to  
> CLEAR status (since drying out  would take about a week. This leaves 
> open the possibility of alternation between mud and snow for a three 
> or even four week period.
> 3) SNOW doesn't mean snowfall it means a persistent hard freeze that 
> partially nullifies the mud, but presents equipment maintanence 
> problems not encountered in warmer weather.   Hence it follows that 
> after two weeks of SNOW it would be improbable to have a reversion to 
> mud conditions (at least in the Severe Weather zone.)
>
> Therefore I would vote for variable weather with 2 limitations: The 
> players should always have two weeks notice about a potential change. 
> By this I mean
> that they should be able to prognosticate some N percent chance of 
> next week's weather once this week's is certain., Anything further 
> should be uncertain.
> The second limitation is that the percentages involved conform to the 
> two limitations above.
>     If the weather zones are subdivided (and I always assumed that the 
> three Air Fronts represented separate weather fronts anyway.) Then the 
> computer could announce a weather condition called RAIN.  RAIN could 
> either have no effect on ground or Air operations, or effect Air 
> operations only, but without RAIN there could be no MUD the following 
> FALL week and without RAIN there can be no MUD the following spring 
> week.  With RAIN, there could no transition from MUD to Clear.  This 
> would give the commanders one  and only one turn's true notice the 
> campaign seasons will end or start early.
>
> Bob Sawyer
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:37:01 +1000
> > From: Jim Martin <sanjac at mac.com>
>
> > Bruce,
> >
> > So are you saying have an alternate less random weather option? Like 
> have
> > the mud and clear weather in spring randomly start within a couple 
> of weeks
> > of historical and once it changes, it doesn't randomly revert back? Same
> > with Winter - it starts a within a couple of weeks of historical and 
> once it
> > is winter - or mud - it doesn't go back to clear?
> >
> > I like that. No one knows exactly when mud, clear, or winter weather 
> will
> > start, but it isn't so random as to destroy the game with unusual 
> results.
> > Just enough variation to prevent planning with perfect foreknowledge.
> >
> > Jim
> >
> >
> > > From: Bruce Denney <jbdenney at swbell.net>
> > > I do like the players to not know for sure when the weather is 
> going to
> > > clear or turn bad. But the player trying to plan a long offensive 
> (i.e.
> > > Germans attacking the USSR ) has a problem. With the standard 
> weather he
> > > knows he will have 22 weeks of clear weather before mud hits. But with
> > > variable weather it is "possible" for him to have 32 weeks of 
> clear weather
> > > (if he gets REAL lucky on die rolls but on the other hand he is 
> assured of
> > > only 12 weeks if all of the rolls go bad.
> > >
> > > On average it should be 22 weeks of clear but there is a very 
> strong chance
> > > if an offensive is launched when the weather clears, as late as 
> all the way
> > > through the 6th cycle for mud to hit again stopping the offensive 
> in its
> > > tracks.
> > >
> > > As I said I like not knowing when the weather will clear and turn 
> to mud
> > > again (I hate people who can count exactly how far the Axis supply 
> lines
> > > will be when mud hits as soon as the first German units cross the 
> border) I
> > > get the gut feeling that the weather system has too much of a 
> chance of
> > > killing an offensive.
> > >
> > > If you launch the invasion of France on the historical 3/5/40 with 
> a clear
> > > weather turn you could very well then have 5 straight turns of 
> mud. (50%
> > > chance on 4/5/40 and 20% chance on each turn of cycle 6) If you 
> attack USSR
> > > historically (1/7/40 - Also the first possible turn that assures 
> that mud
> > > will not hit again) it is clearly possible to lose up to 4 turns 
> of good
> > > weather. (just as a historical reference, in 1941 on the Front 
> apporching
> > > Moscow mud hit on 2/11/1940 and hard freeze really hit on 1/12/41).
> > >
> > > IMOHO the weather can stay bad too long and can hit too early. 
> Also the
> > > chance of having the weather clear and then snap back into mud can
> > > completely kill an offensive.
> > >
>
> > From: sgm <sgminfo at aol.com>
> > Precisely,
> > it has to have some predictability,
> > or it becomes too much of a lottery...
> >
> > On that basis Ike would never have gambled on May for the Invasion...
> >
> > The size and depth of the season in the game, does not easily admit to
> > too much seasonal variation, or the campaign could break down , as the
> > uncertainty eats away at the (limited) campaigning season. Too much
> > hangs on the logistics advancing at a critically moderate pace, leaving
> > no room for lattitude.
> >
> >
> > -|steve|-
>
>
>
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