Using the AA gun on a ship
 

I was in a battle using playing as a ship, the deck guns were hard at it but to aid them I got on the AA, I was firing at a couple of close targets, but the guns didn't seem to make a difference, I changed ammo type to see if that did anything but no.

So do the AA only shoot aircraft?

Col.

speaking only as a sub driver, you can use flak guns on a ship but only the 37 mm (Ger) and 40 mm (US) will have much effect.

for a brief time i attempted to get the flak guns to fire at ships as the deck guns do (automatically when crewed) but i could never figure out the protocols. one of the other modders gave me some hints but i could not get it to work and just moved on. i believe the posts are still here....somewhere.

does this answer your question?

:Kaleun_Salute:

Ah yes, too bad the guns were not made multi purpose where AI crew will fire at them or no one has been able to make them act as extra deck guns, such a waste and if youre playing right, much more likely to engage surface craft than aircraft.

if you get close enough to hit, 20 mms are effective against gun crews and deck crews on ships but not as effective as should be against sam pans and things. Although I used them to great effect on daihastu landing craft

I think for all mods & versions of the game you need to use the flak gun manually if you want to target enemy surface ships.

Will it work well?

Depends. Some mods would probably have what I consider to be overpowered flak guns.

IIRC the 20mm's are not very effective against surface targets in the mod I prefer (SH4: TMO). This is historically accurate. Even 88mm and 105mm shells were underpowered for sinking merchant ships. Small flak rounds of 20mm - 40mm were even worse. Sometimes, light rounds would even ricochet off of unarmored merchant ship hulls. So if it takes a long time to sink something with the flak gun, that's how it should be.

It is possible to have the flak guns open fire automatically, but YOU won't be able to man them anymore.

@ETR, I don't mind that, I'm not much of a shot anyway.

I know they auto-fire at aircraft but you say they will at a ship, so how is it done please?

Col.

There is a way to edit the damage value of all the guns. You have to use the S3D editor.


In the Data/Library folder there is a file called shells.zon Using the S3D editor you will see that all guns have 5 parameters.


Min Damage
Max Damage
Armor Level (AP)
Min Splash Damage
Max Splash Damage


Min and Max damage effect the total damage the guns can do, but the AP is the armor level that they are effective against. That is what keeps them from being able to do any damage to ships. All ship damageable zones armor level is typically higher than the AP of all AA guns. Increasing this level will allow your guns to do damage to the ships.



Be careful though. I was messing around with this. All of the guns in the .zon file do not identify which guns they are for. I had to cross reference the ID to the shells.dat file (Which you can also view in S3D), to know which entries were for which guns. However since it isn't the most apparent thing to know which guns your submarine will use, I had edited all the guns that were AA size guns. Well, the problem with this was that Aircraft also use guns of AA size. Japanese bombers will strafe you as they make a bombing run. If you make the guns to OP, their strafing runs can annihilate your submarine! :haha:



Needless to say, I put the gun values back to their defaults.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I thought I remembered the secondary mounts on AI ships firing on both, but it seems they can only target aircraft or ships not both.