Question About manning guns
 

Okay your probably going to kill me,
But is it possible to fire the deck gun?
like aim it up yourself.
Because sometimes the AI acts like a freaking idiot and misses shots it really should not be missing. :nope:

"But is it possible to fire the deck gun?" Of course, the purpose of the gun is that it should preferably be used against surface ships that are unarmed, I have interpreted your question correctly?

Yes! One of the most enjoyable parts of the game, until the merchants arm up.

Hit the deck-gun icon on the left side of the screen. You will find yourself behind "your man" on the deck gun. Hit tab to take the seat yourself, then tab again to zoom in.

And fire away.

Best results:

• Be 1000-1500m away. Too far, accuracy suffers. Too close, you can't depress the gun sufficiently.
• Aim for below the waterline. In GWX, flooding is what kills 95% of ships. What you want to see is the shell falling short of the ship, then -- a second later -- a brief, dim flash. It may not look like much, but terribly effective.
• How to do this? If his range is 1500m, aim for 1300. Walk your way up by 50m increments until you have him ranged.
• Be patient. As little as five below-the-waterline shots, from stem to stern, can sink a Large Merchant. But it won't go down in minutes. Note his speed, make your shots, bear off and observe. If the speed drops from, say, 7 knts to 4-5knts in 10-15 minutes of game time, you probably don't need to expend more ammo. If he doesn't go down in an hour, or maintains speed, go around to the other side and give 2 or 3 new punches to help things along.
• But if you are using more than 10 below-the-waterline rounds, spaced evenly along the ship, on a Large Merchant, you are not being patient enough.
• Think of your shells as 20 free torpedoes. If you are blessed with good weather and unarmed lone targets, you can easily bring down 80K-100K just with shells.

If your crew is not shooting well enough, they are probably not skilled enough. Make sure your gun crew is staffed with gunner-qualified petty officers, and that your watch officer is gunner qualified.

Also, on the watch officer station, you can instruct your gun crew to fire only at short range, and aim for the water line.

Finally, make it easy on your gun crew. Bring your boat to a course and speed that keeps it at around 1200 m range.

And, even if you do the shooting yourself, always have an elite gun crew on deck. If nothing else, they will reduce your re-load times.

Actually, you can. If you don't zoom the view, you can point the muzzle with your mouse instead of setting range on the range indicator (which is not visible anyway in this view). This allows to depress the gun for point blank shots, without the need for ranging shots - you just have to keep close (about 500 meters) and point the gun directly at his waterline or even a pixel-two below. Works with 100% accuracy unless you accidentally shoot on the up-roll.

I myself use the cannon at longer distances than 1000-1500 m, with no major problems, of course, depending on weather and other conditions.

I'll agree that they sometimes seem to just close their eyes and hope for the best. On the other hand, naval gunnery is probably the most imprecise of all war sciences. The average hit rate for WW2 was somewhere in the area of 7%, with the rate for shots fired under 5000 yards being about 12%. The target is moving, the boat is moving, there are no gyroscopically stabilized guns.

Author Peter Padfield, in his history Guns at Sea, likened it to shooting at a golf ball rolling across a fireplace mantle with a pistol, while sitting in a rocking chair being randomly rocked by someone else.

The GWX folks attempted to cripple the gun to make it "more realistic" in terms of accuracy. I don't care for how they went about it, though.

In any level of magnification, the gun will randomly not shoot down the vertical reticule. Each time you go into the gunnery view, it will change. It will shoot to the left or right of vertical some random amount. Once you figure out where it's dropping, you can account for this "windage". Pitching of the boat in seas obviously throws off the elevation, and you can watch the muzzle float up and down to see when it's OK to fire without shooting too high or too low, and this is realistic. But the GWX-induced windage sabotage is random and unrealistic - what it simulates is that your gunsight is broken. I understand the intent at making the gun less accurate, but the way it was gone about annoys me.

One way to avoid the problem is not to shoot using magnification - none of the accuracy impediments seem to apply in that view.

Of course, once you get into 1941 and beyond, merchants are as likely to shoot back as not. So close-range, no-mag shooting is hard to get away with. So in 1941 and beyond, I take manual control of the gun and pound away from 5000 meters. Once I get the range I can pound them in pretty good. The only reason I have gunnery qualifications for my crewmen is to speed up the reload times. I manually shoot all deck gun rounds as I'm far better than the crew.

Steve

I had totally forgotten that. But of course.

Yes, you can shoot and hit from far further distances. I simply said your accuracy will suffer. You might burn off 5 shots for every 1 hit, which is inefficient.

I think my range record was from 6000 meters, against a Granville. A decent-sized target, but it still burned up 50 shells for an estimated 10 hits. So DR's 5 in 1 is reasonable.

I find the AI deck gunners will be less accurate than you. Exact opposite with FlaK.

:yeah:

That's why I leave it in the hands of my qualified and capable gunnery crews.

Yeah there capable all right...
Cpable of skrewing **** upp... :x

Are you using Commander? If so, add a deck gun qualification to your Watch Officer next time you're in base. Or I assume you can do it in the game's crew management screen, altho I've never tried.

You can also give one to any POs who make up the deck gun crew, but in my experience having a WO on the bridge who is qualified for the deck gun maxes out the efficiency of the deck gun station no matter who is manning it.

That.

One more question.
If your with a crewman for a long time, say someone low ranked like a matrosengrefeighter, they can eventually become an officer if you keep promoting them in commander? (yeah its a dumb question but thats how i role ^_^) :yeah:

Yep. I do it all the time. Find it more fun to have a matrosenthingamieguy build his own career aboard my ship instead of recruiting a top-officer. Plus, it doesn't cost me any renown.

(Using the US method of denotaing rank here to try and keep things as simple as possible within the scope of the question)

For an E-1 seaman to become an O-1 officer it can't be done entirely through commander, it will require a few promotions ingame at specific spots.

To go from a seaman to a PO (E-3 to a E-4) you'll need to promote the E-3 sailor using an ingame promotion that you get at the end of your patrol. Using SHC it will give you an error that you can't promote the crewman to that rank. Once your sailor is now a PO, you can use SHC again if you choose for the promotions until he becomes a CPO (E-6).

Now to promote the CPO to an officer you must first promote him to a Fanrich Z. s (Easiest way to describe their position is an officer candidate; much like an OCS officer that hasn't completed his training yet and given his commission). To promote from a CPO to a Fanrich requires an ingame promotion as well. Until you get promoted to Leutnant you aren't a full officer per se, once you get the promotion you are considered an O-1 and treated (and expected to perform like) an officer.

Problem is that the game doesn't allow for officer candidates (Fanrich) to be part of the normal crew and they count against your maximum officer limit for the ship - when in reality these crewmen while experienced and adept are not ready to completely fill the position of officer and shouldn't really be counted as one. Also, no matter how bad you might want to promote someone or make them an officer, they still have to gain the necessary experience in order to make the cut for the ingame promotions (no way around that one, your men gotta earn their way) in order to become an officer which I believe requires 400 xp in order to become a Fanrich Z. s.

To be honest Colin, I gotta drop a RTFM here. :yeah:

A lot of the questions you have been asking are covered in the GWX manual that is included with the install. I reread it last week just for S&G's.

It's an excellent read, and you are missing out on a lot by not reading it cover to cover (The middle 300 pages or so are skimmable, as they are mainly tech details.)

Incase you don't understand RTFM?
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n..._2006/rtfm.jpg

*Facepalm*
I tried it already!!!
It takes like an F'n hour to load!and when it does load its just a bunch of random letters & numbers.
The file i Opend is called Manual_V3.0._final.
:nope:

The manual is a .pdf file, do you have a .pdf reader installed on your computer? If not, I don't think you will be able to open it in anything that will give you a readable document.

You can get Adobe Reader for free, also one called Foxit that I have used.

Just google the names above or "free pdf reader," there are many more out there. :yep: