Only scramble from islands?

[almashir]

Hi, all,

I was just wondering if the designers have ever said why aircraft can only scramble to defend a sea zone from an island.  I imagine if German ships were operating off the coast of Norway they would be using ground based aircraft to provide a CAP.  And said aircraft would certainly respond to a request by radio for air support.  The same for Italy, Gibraltar, the US West Coast, the Baltic, etc.  I’m assuming this differentiation between airbases on islands vs. airbases on continents was put in for a reason.  Does anyone know what it is?

[Razor]

@almashir:

I imagine if German ships were operating off the coast of Norway they would be using ground based aircraft to provide a CAP.  And said aircraft would certainly respond to a request by radio for air support.

Well, we all know that Larry is kind of a history buff, and in real world this german battleship Tirpitz was operating outside the coast of Norway, when suddenly a couple of Lancaster bombers come all way from England and utterly bombed Tirpitz so much that he sank, and the funny part is that the germans had a very strong fighter base right beside Tirpitz, and they had only one job and that was to protect Tirpitz. It turned out that it was impossible to scramble enogh fighters to denie the brit bombers from attacking, because the coast was soo long. But if this had been an island, like Japan, then the fighters would easily have scrambled and shoot down the bombers. Hope you was amused by this rationale.

[almashir]

Razor,

Nice try  :-D  I was thinking it was probably something they discovered in playtesting.  But I just can’t think of a reason to differentiate between islands and continents for this purpose.  I know, for instance, that the Italians had a pretty good navy.  Their surface ships were mostly well-designed and fast.  They did not, however, equip them with sufficient anti-aircraft capability.  They didn’t have any aircraft carriers of their own, which forced them to hug the coastlines whenever possible in order to stay within range of land-based air.  With the current rules, they could be protected by an airbase in, say, Sicily.  But if they were in the Adriatic they’d have no defensive air cover, even if they had airbases in both Yugoslavia and Italy.