Quote:
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Originally Posted by predavolk
I do a lot of gunning, and there's a couple of things I'd comment on:
1- You were unlucky. It is highly unusual for any ship to hit you consistently at that range. Even a destroyer. Maybe late in the war the RN could do it, but you just had some bad luck.
2- Large merchants are very dangerous to take on with guns from 1942-on. They tend to have a big gun (105mm?) on the stern, a 20mm (sometimes twin?) in the midship area, and sometimes even an 85mm on the bow. Liberty ships are another class that are heavily armed. Tankers don't seem to be so well-armed, but the general rule is that attacking the bow is much safer than attacking the stern.
3- You mentioned attacking with your deck gun and your AA gun(s). That means you're broadside to the attacking boat and therefore a much broader target. I like to go AoB = 0. That lets my gun hammer away at them while they can't shoot back at me with their stern gun.
4- Bigger guns (105mm etc.) can engage you from over 4000M. Smaller guns 3K and 2K respectively.
5- At longer distances, change your course to throw their aim off. Particularly if you notice that they are getting close. Or increase/decrease speed. The flight time of the shell is long enough that relatively small changes can make them miss.
Bottom line is that gunning is increasingly risky as the war goes on. As the link mentions, the biggest effect of arming merchant ships was to deny easy deck gun kills to U-Boats (a major source of kills for early WW2 aces and many WW1 aces). Deck gun kills were made late in the war, but generally against lone merchants in permissive (Southern) areas. Generally speaking, U-Boats tended to win those engagements cleanly.
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1) I think I am.
2) Totally agree. This particular ship only had one stern gun So I thought I'd chance it. Attacking the bow wasn't really an option because the rest of the convoy was up there somewhere. One ship shooting at me is enough.
3) I was pretty much following his wake. It was a different ship I hit with the AA gun. I only use it to attack ships at point-blank range and destroy their guns. It works well because they can't depress their guns low enough to hit me.
4) Once again, yeah, but they would have to see me.
5) That's one thing I didn't do. Both my gun crew and myself were having a hard enough time hitting the damn thing that I didn't really consider zig-zagging.
Actually, I think I may have to reinstall GWX. I think my game is broken. This morning I was cruising the Irish Sea and was startled to hear the "Enemy ship engaging us!" message.
I went topside to slap my watchcrew around a bit and look for the offending vessel.
After several 360 scans I could see nothing. It was a fairly pleasant morning with just a bit of fog/haze limiting visibility to 2 or 3000m. Somewheres in there.
I checked the map to see if a visual contact was plotted somewhere, but nothing.
Nonetheless, shells are splashing around my boat.
Finally I decided to cheat and use the external camera to identify my attacker, and backtracked his cannon shots. At some ridiculously crazy long distance, I saw a little coastal freighter chugging along, enthusiastically lobbing ordinance in my direction.
When I dove, completely mystified as to how I had been spotted, the hydrophones indicated he was 8km away.
Some kind of bug?