[2023] Interwar plane design help.

Synicus said: 1) Is air defense important for fighters? or would it be catastrophic to use drop tanks instead of self-sealing fuel tanks resulting 1.0 air defense 800 range?

I did a run on a live stream a few weeks ago where I had a ton of planes with non-standard materials usage. I wasn't running IW planes, but I had plenty of CAS with air defense of 1. It was part of a larger experiment with trying to save aluminum by having fighters with top tier stats and CAS with poor air to air stats to lower their cost (since I wanted to see if I could lower costs of planes lost to AA).

The end result was that CAS losses to enemy fighters skyrocketed even though I had plenty of fighters in the air regions covering the CAS.

The lesson was simple: air defense is a vital stat for any plane that gets into combat with other planes, fighter or bomber. As you discovered.

Synicus said: Good to know. I guess that's why the 36' design did so well, having a higher defense than the interwar fighters attack despite the still limited range.

The problem you are facing though is that air defense is a vital stat, but mission efficiency is also a big nerf to aircraft capabilities. Because better airframes have better default range, I think the correct answer is this: build IW planes with range in mind, but later air frames shouldn't trade range for horrendously low air defense.

But get those better airframes into use ASAP.  

The Colonel said: I think the bigger effect, unless the live patch is significantly different from the beta, will be the huge range nerfs. It's going to be very hard to make offensive fighters to take air superiority over a zone you're just pushing into because you have to sacrifice defense and weight => attack (with thrusts now reduced) to get the extra fuel tanks to have enough range to project superiority into other zones. Unless there are more changes, it seems like defensive interceptors will be able to mop multiple times their IC in bombers/air superiority fighters, which I can't really comment on the historicity of but certainly seems like it'll make air less useful or fun.

We'll see how it shakes out, but I know what you mean by the impact of the range changes we saw this summer.

It might lead to several different outcomes depending on how the costs shake out:

1) medium air frames become much more common due to range.
2) we build a lot more airfields in places we normally wouldn't bother/need to
3) light airframes are going to become loaded up with tons of range upgrades.
4) The Pacific is going to change substantially. We might see far more practical use of Pearl Harbor bombers
5) we might see more dedicated interceptor designs for use at home to deter bombing. I don't mean heavy fighters, but just literally light airframes with no range upgrades and tons of armor/survivability upgrades.