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Originally Posted by keysersoze
The mysterious SH5 player has returned Skwiot's book, but unfortunately he has nothing to add about the Vierling's tracking speed. He describes the mount in great technical detail but doesn't mention how well it functioned.
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It turned out that, besides being untimely, our secret SH5 fan is also uninformed. I only hope that he made a better use of Skwiot's book than employing it as a paper older
Quote:
Originally Posted by keysersoze
After consulting Skwiot, I think I finally understand the M42...
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It makes sense. Thank you for the detailed explanation!
Quote:
Originally Posted by keysersoze
That is the best explanation I can come up with for our divergent sources. Unfortunately, I'm sure it would not be possible to model a six round clip for the first barrage and five round clips thereafter. I think for game purposes, the five round clip would probably be a more accurate representation of standard practice.
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You are right, the clip can be either of 5 or 6 rounds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by keysersoze
I cannot explain the wildly higher rates of fire reported in some sources except to agree that these sources probably confused the M42 with the 3.7 cm Flak M43 Gerät 341. This is what Skwiot says about it: "One advantage of this design was a significant increase in the automation of the firing process, thus increasing the rate of fire. The ammunition was loaded in eight-round magazines" (p. 343). I think the larger magazine size and the unspecified increase in "automation" account for these differences in the reported rates of fire.
What do you think?
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My opinion in numbers:
cyclic RoF: 170 rpm
practical RoF: 60 rpm
clip size: 5 rounds
reload time: 3.235 sec
do you like them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by keysersoze
It turns out I was totally wrong! Skwiot gives an even higher rate of fire than I remembered for the 8.8 cm: 15-20 rpm (p. 253). For the 10.5 cm gun, he gives a maximum rate of fire of 15 rpm. Sorry for the confusion... I must have hallucinated those imaginary figures 
I agree that these numbers should be the maximum rate of fire for the deck gun, based on crew experience and, if possible, weather conditions. |
Don't quote me on this, but I think that sea conditions are not taken in other account than for making guns' use impossible on high waves. But crew experience (and possibly their morale) is considered.
Just yesterday I have had a discussion with Webster on this topic; from my tests, I am almost sure that FlaK gun reload times (as set in their sim files) are the base times relative to best trained crew memebers. For lesser experienced gunners a percent extra time is added to this base time. A few weeks ago I tried finding the extra reload coefficients within game files, but to not avail...
More specifically about deck guns, I am not sure that their reload times are applied the same way as with FlaKs: Webster was convinced that they work the other way around (i.e. sim file settings are decremented by a percent for experienced crew, rather than being incremented for unexperienced ones). Another obscure point is wether deck gun's recoil time is added to the reload time, or not considered (i.e. gunners start reloading the gun while it is still recoiling). From stock settings, I am sure that when they calculated their settings, devs didn't take recoil times into account, but I ignore if they made it by mistake or for a reason.
Hopefully, we can solve the above doubts in custom mission, stopwatch close by hand; however, for a start, I lean towards decreasing the maximum reload times reported by you by 20%, i.e: 12 rpm for the 10.5cm deck gun, and 16 for the 8.8cm gun. This is accounting for climatic factors which are not considered by the game. What do you think?