I have encountered a situation where lowering my plane group altitude from Low to Vlow results in an immediate warning that my planes are detectable and that I should turn on my radar.

 

I inadvertently have a near perfect example in a saved game. I was concerned that going to Vlow might crash planes from pilot error, so I saved the game before doing it.

 

I would upload it as an attachment here, but the forum tells me I am not allowed to upload a file of this type -- it is "autosave.hpq". So I had to cheat a bit to get past your security. If you get rid of the " - Copy" part of the filename and change the file extension from "txt" to "hpq", it should work and you'll be able to repeat the occurrence immediately upon entering the game.

 

A little more detail that makes the problem unambiguous. There are 3 Blue parallel fighter groups, AIA, AJA, and AKA, all flying north. Select any one of them, lower the altitude, and see the warning message. I thought for a bit they were all reaching a threshold at the same time, but no, the warnings appear explicitly attached to the action. Don't lower the altitude, and the warnings don't appear for any of the groups. They appear immediately after the altitude any group is lowered, specifically addressing that group.

 

The reason I mentioned "over water" was a question as to whether the surface the planes fly over has any influence on how detectable they are at various altitudes. In this game, all 3 groups are over water.

 

FYI, this game started as scenario #10 in WestPac, "The Back Yard II". It is simply a saved game version of it, less than a half hour into it by the game time clock.

autosave - Copy.txt

Forgot to mention -- all three groups have F-14A and B model fighters.

The norm for posting up files is to 'zip' them.

sounds interesting.

For future reference, the Issue Tracker would have been a good place for this since it is a problem you can repeat. Don is correct with the "zip" it up before posting.

I'm going to take a guess.

 

Surface search radar is spotting your Vlow aircraft.

I'm going to take a guess that CV32 is right, I used sneak view (ctrl alt S) to turn off all the enemy SS radar then went VLOW and got no detection warning.

I'm going to take a guess.

 

Surface search radar is spotting your Vlow aircraft.

Yeah, Tomcats aren't exactly stealthy.

 

I'm guessing the ships in question don't have air search.

You can fly at Vlow altitude and potentially avoid detection from air search radar, but then fly into the envelope of a surface search radar and get detected.

Interesting. Thanks for the info. I had no idea this was a possibility, though I should have. I have seen fighters detected by the surface search radars of recon planes like the Bear D if they get really close.