iv triad to blow the guns of but havent ben abel to but i can blast a destroyer to bits with the 4in gun and win agans it without a singal hit. id have thought we should be abel to destroy merchant guns but not the destroyer ones.

Here's one example from page 459:

"North of Marcus Island, Wylie found a large (600-ton) patrol craft and rashly ordered another battle surface. The patrol craft fought back fiercely, spraying Scorpion with machine-gun fire. 'We didn't do too well with our gun,' Schratz said later. 'Our aim was poor and we had a bad lot of ammo.' Reggie Raymond, manning a Browning automatic rifle on the bridge, was killed by enemy gunfire and Schratz and three of the gunners were wounded."

In William Ruhe's My War in the Boats, the author describes the USS Cavalla engaging a depth charge laden patrol ship on the surface. They were observing rounds hitting the target but not exploding and thought they'd gotten a bunch of dud ammo when someone noticed that a sailor, early in the 'ammo chain' was arming the rounds...they had a thing you had to turn to make them 'live', and the guy right before the gun had the tool to do so. The sailor, seeing with uninformed horror that nonfunctional rounds were being passed up to the gun, began turning the arming thingee with his pocket knife.

The problem was discovered and fixed, according to the author, about when the patrol boat was getting into a good return fire position. One or two rounds, and the depth-charges on the PC exploded.

One of the glaring problems with SH4 and surface actions is that the deck crew is invulnerable to even 20mm/25mm fire. If it were rtreated reaclistically, gun actions would be a lot more dicey. Upping the deck gun capability of them is somewhat of a balance.

While some PCs and small merchants were engaged with gunfire, the reality is almost no ships over 1000 tons were sunk with submarine deck guns, even in combo attacks with torpedoes (ie; US subs didn't seem to finish anything off with the deck gun other than very very rarely).

tater