How to perform Carpet Bombing

It kinda utilises a button, but I think OP is talking about something like this:

If you have bombers in your selection a "Carpet Bombing" button appears in the command menu. When clicked, a marker will show up bellow your cursor on the ground area indicating the approach and the ground covered:



Assuming we have 4 bombers in the selection - we see 4 lines with approach arrows indicating roughly where the bombs would hit.
Holding RMB and moving the mouse will rotate the marker area toward the cursor. LMB will place the marker and execute the action. The bombers would move accordingly for the approach vector and do their carpet bombing job.

The challenges with this are - how you scale the area with 20, 50, 100+ bombers? Just cuz you can). It could be infinite ground cover but no one needs this, on the other side it could grow to a certain cap (say, 5x4) and then the more bombers there are the pattern is repeated. Or maybe even let the player set it through ui, but that adds a great deal of complexity to the ui then.

So:
Pros:
- it immitates actual carpet bombing.
- it "scales" with the number of bomber units selected.

Cons:
- it adds or may add (unnecessary) complexity to the UI
- also may prove buggy when selecting bombers on one planet and trying to set a marker while zoomed out on another one

...ok, I kinda like it, sucker for diagrams =P

How about the further you move your mouse away from the area, the wider the target area is?
And it wouldn't have to be a button necessarily, maybe just hold ctrl with a bunch of bombers selected or something

After the first pass, the direction would become irrelevant, how would they continue the attack?

Yeah, this is kinda tricky. I would imagine the bombers would return to the starting position from before the order was issued and stop, or maybe go around for the approach vector again. The downside of that second option would be that if we're targetting units they could be gone the next time they'd come back.
But still I feel like a consolidated approach would be more effective than going at it from all directions. But I can be wrong ;p there are probably situations where you don't really care about it.

Well how's about they just carry on bombing targets that they spotted in the area after the initial blanket strike? That would make most sense to me at least, since I can imagine that's what i'd probably end up doing after the first pass in any case. I'd use it as an aggressive scouting technique, then more precise strikes on anything that's left.

Since in SC I can never manage to drop a bomb on anything that I spot before i've flown over it the first time ><

I guess that would depend on what command you queue after carpet bombing then

I'm just new here guys and I'm just interested on your topics.

+1
and I agree scaling would be the main challenge - do I want my 8 bombers in 8 lanes or 4 lanes. something like area attack would work well for this