Explain how AA guns work?
 

Hello,

So I have a man assigned to AA guns, and his skill level is about 105.

I was on the surface being strafed by an enemy plane, but my gunner never fires a shot. What am I doing wrong?

"Battle Stations! Battle Stations! All hands, man your Battle Stations!!!"... ??

~Or~ did you tell him to shoot at something? There is a difference between manning the gun, and shooting the gun.

The "skill level" of a gunner is broken down into his skills with "guns", his "watchman" ability, and his "leadership". You don't care as much about his "electrical" there, so choose gunners wisely. :salute:

In the AA Gunner screen, there are commands to fire. Nearest target, closing target, and will. You have to press one of those. Then your gunner will keep shooting until there are no more targets. I don't like messing with airplanes, when one gets near, I dive and keep hidden until dark.

That poor Will feller gets shot at quite a bit around here...

Thanks everyone!

I was fairly certain I had told him to "shoot any feasible target" but I'll double check.

On that note, is there anything to be done about the incessant airplane sightings? It gets so bad sometimes that I resort to simply stopping underwater until dark, then move around only at night.

If you are doing Stock, then Webster's Better Air Patrols is the mod for you. It decreases the frequency of encounters, though it does increase their deadliness, so go and be careful... :salute:

The better thing to do, as fireftr18 mentions, is to not be seen. Once they see you, they keep coming back to look for your smiling mug. If you happen to have SD radar onboard, then do like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=Hidf8p64_CE

Actually, AA guns are very, very useful. Because you have two parallel barrels that are pretty long you can hang an awful lot of laundry from them and it dries quickly.

The "officer" manning the gun isn't actually a gunner, he's a "laundry technician." Sorry for the misunderstanding....

I pretty much just dive on plane contacts and go below 150 feet most of the time I get shot up more than the plane

I avoid the planes as much as possible quite a few times I've gone to battle stations and crash dive simultaneously( if they spot me when I thought they wouldn't.) To me risk/reward is too high. I never engage them

So do I. It's a long way back to base in a shot up or worse boat.

its ok to use the gun crew AI when on the surface, they should always be manned surfaced, but its much more of a gas to man them yourself, to really be effective, you should know how the gun sight works, there are things to know about the gun sight.
i loved destroyer command, playing as a united states destroyer in the pacific, the missions would throw tons of enemy aircraft at you, kates, betty's and zekes. betty's usually are flying to high to do anything about them , its much easier knocking the kates and zekes out of the sky.

one thing you really have to know is the gun sight tho, and how it works, usually an aircraft can be judged to be going either , slow, medium, or fast speed, there are 3 lead rings on the gun sight to model these three speeds.
the inner most lead ring is for aircraft going slow, the middle ring is for mediumn speed, and the outer, or largest ring is for fast speeds. aircraft can cross your line of sight, or come right at you.
first you have to judge the speed of the plane. a plane crossing the line of sight going slow, what you do is line up the plane on the edge of the smallest ring, thats the lead, just like torpedoes, you have to lead the target becus if you dont, when the bullets get out to the range of the plane, the plane will already have gone by, and you will miss, the middle ring is for medium speed targets, lining up the plane to lead it for medium speed. the largest ring is for the fast movers, lining them up on the edge of that lead ring, lining up aircraft with these rings applies the lead necessary to knock them out of the sky. judge the speed of the target and apply the lead that matches your estimation, and keep that lead until the plane has been shot down, or you have to reload.
when planes are coming right at you, you aim just a smidge above the nose of the aircraft dead center of the gun sight. hope that helps u understand the gun sight alittle bit better


well if im going to talk about the sight, i might as well say it all, along with lead rings, the sight is divided up with 12 lines, at 30 degrees, 60 degrees, 90 degrees and so on, those are there because assistent gunners might spot incoming that are more critical to hit than a current target or just before an attack, you can think of these lines as hours of the clock, the ag might see a target coming in at , and screams "zekes, 3 o'clock"! to the gunner who then knows where to turn the gun barrel in a hurry, those are aids to direction.



edit; first pic was labelled wrong, has been corrected, sorry



edit to edit....... the link did'nt work, i think i fixed it, very sorry


i forgot to mention that altitudes can also be given by the ag, such as in an old tv series i use to love back in the sixties called 12 o'clock high, about b-17 bombers planes in the air war over germany.
the gunners in the plane or pilots might spot incoming and warn other gunners by announcing (bandits, 1 o'clock high, or bandits, 7 o'clock low). for land based and ship based anti aircraft weapons, the low call of altitude is probably not used as much if at all, unless they wanted to shoot in the dirt or water, but the high call would definitely have significance and a height that the gunner can turn the gun to as well as a direction.



http://i1380.photobucket.com/albums/...pssnc5juif.jpg

The pilots name is Will - tell gunner to fire at him :know: