[gap]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

In SH4, the ranges come from the airplanes' cfg files

In addition to the max radius setting in aircraft cfg file, in SH5's AirStrike.cfg there is a global 'Maximum Aircraft Range'. It should be there also for SHIV.
I am not 100% about its usage by the game, but it is likely to override individual ranges of each plane, if they exceed that limit.

Originally Posted by propbeanie

and the "order of appearance" is all chance. Other than the "patrol" platforms, which go out every so often no matter what, the "response" airplanes are always a roll of the dice. If you have six planes, each plane has a die dot. If the game rolls a "one", the "one" plane goes out. If the game rolls a "two", the "two" plane goes out, etc.

I understand that, but since all the dices are rolled at the same time, the first aircraft arriving from a given airbase to the point of detection, will be the top speed ones. Unless their number/range is limited compared to other types of aircraft, we will always see them. Indeed, soon or later slower aircraft will join the party too, but by that time we will be dead or we will have submerged and cleared the area for good.

As noted by kapuhy in this thread, in SH5 the most common aircraft encounters are with aircraft types which, historically, did not sink any U-boat and which - due to their operational usage, would have seldomly attacked any naval target. In a submarine simulation this is not good.

Originally Posted by propbeanie

The only way in SH4 to control what goes out is to restrict the AirGroups and specific planes available. Such as, we might want Corsairs going out instead of Wildcats, if there is a US Marines' AirBase nearby, or maybe drop the number of planes available of each type, or just drop all but one or two plane types from an AirBase. It does involve cloning though. You might want to clone a Corsair one way for later CV use, while the land-based version might have a shorter range. You might also want to clone specific AirBase assets, such as an LAB_FP40_AirBase or LAB_LBWhitley_AirBase, or whatever... The only problems with more airbases is of course, complexity, plus more airplanes responding if they are all within range of the detected U-Boat...

You are making some good points. creating as many 'proxy clones' of each aircraft featured in game as the squadrons using it, is an idea I had myself. In practice, I think that creating specific clones for the main variants of those aircraft and for the various types of armament (i.e. AHurricaneMkIIC_bombs, AHurricaneMkIV_rockets, BBlenheimMkIV_dcs or TBMarauderMkI_torps), would be more rationale. Since in WWII warfare squadrons with similar duties tended to use the same aircraft with the same armament and they had comparable patrol ranges, it is likely that each aircraft cloned in game could be assigned to multiple airbases / air groups