In the past few months the developers have been providing us with lots of great content and new features, most of which were great and accepted well by the community. However, it is quite sad that we have not have an event with vehicles as the main reward for quite some time (the last one I can remember being the anti-air tanks), though such events are quite nice in my opinion. Therefore, I suggest a new event – with the main rewards being a pair of unique planes with special defense systems.
With the addition of controllable tail gunners, the options for air combat have been greatly expanded. So, what could fit better with this new theme than unique squads with rare, but historically accurate aircraft defense measures used in WW2? I propose 2 squads for the USSR and Germany.
Germany -
Keeping in mind the already existing flame bomb planes for the USA and Japan, the addition of a flammenwerfer plane seems quite justified. While the history of plane-mounted flamethrowers begins in WW1 [1], this time the ones suggested will be WW2 prototypes, the defensive flamethrowers mounted on a variety of planes, including the Ju-88 and He-111.
He-11
Ju-88
Close-up image of flamethrowers
Flamethrower plane brought down by the RAF
“Gero” type flamethrower mounted on a Fw-190
Another type of plane-mounted plamethrowers wete the Gero type foward-facing offensive flamethrowers, however their actual use in combat is not as well documented as that of the defensive ones [2]. These flamethrowers could work in the following fashion – upon turning on the flamethrower, a 100-yard-long spray of flame is thrown out (hope you have a good graphics card) that ignites everything within 50-70m and blinds any attacking airplanes by temporarily blacking out their windshield and making them lose all plane markers. For balancing purposes, these flamethrowers should not be able to affect tanks and infantry as well as bombs, however I’m sure that some people will find a way to use them against ground targets in one way or another, despite the overall lacking effectiveness of the flame bombs. As previously mentioned, these flamethrowers (including the Gero) could be installed on a variety of planes, including the Fw 190, Me 109, Fw 190, Ju 87 and Hs 129, meaning the developers could easily implement them on an already existing plane.
USSR -
While it may seem at first glance that the weapon creators of the Soviet Union were not so original in their designs, such a reputation is by no means deserved. Proof of this is the AG-2 Aerial Grenade, a defensive measure against attacking planes to be installed on planes, created by Aleksei Fedorovich Truhanin (not to be confused with the 1931 Taubina AG-2 automatic grenade launcher created by Yakov Taubin). It was used quite widely on planes such as the Il-2, Il-4, Li-2, B-25, Pe-2, Pe-8 and Douglas A-20 with stunning results, as the grenades showed to be quite effective, with at least one confirmed Bf-109 being brought down by such a grenade [3].
The grenade itself
Internal parts of grenade
Mechanism
In-game, the grenades could work like a cloud, flying out behind the plane. They then explode 50–100 meters from the aircraft, similar to the way shotgun rounds spread, and scatter shrapnel in an area of about 50 meters. If the plane is directly hit, the blast wave may also have some effect on its parts, like a normal grenade would. For the sake of balance, the characteristics of this grenade are similar to the shells of the Dyakonov grenade launcher, they cannot penetrate closed tanks, are used only once and are equal in effectiveness against infantry to about 4 conventional 50kg aerial bombs, which is much less than even one 250kg bomb that even many BR2 Axis planes carry. Furthermore, unlike the flamethrowers, they can only be dropped all at the same time from a holder, with a maximum of 2 holders per plane. In the game, I suggest placing the holders ( DAG-5 or DAG-10 holders, depending on the capacity of 5 or 10 grenades) on Il-2 (1941) or Pe- 3-21 attacker planes, since they are in great need of adequate defense against other aircraft on their BR and are relatively unused due to their poor performance compared to other soviet aircraft.
In summary, these aircraft would bring some much-needed historically accurate diversity to the skies because they have unique and rare examples of rear defense systems were actually used. Since there hasn’t been a engaging, interesting event for vehicles for a very long time, these are perfect, since their in-game use will not be as very common and will bring variety and uniqueness without breaking the overall balance.
A comment with a suggestion/addition/noticed mistake will be greatly appreciated, I hope my first post on this forum will be a good one!