RUb 1.43 with Ops mod and Improved Convoys Now Available.

[Beery]

Regarding AA effectiveness, the problem was more the human ability to aim than the gun's ability. A bullet will travel straight for a very long distance before it loses its power and before its arc renders it useless, but the main factor of anti-aircraft gunnery was the shooter's ability to lead a target and judge its range, and beyond 300 yards the human limits on these abilities made gunnery ineffective unless you were able to throw up a blanket of fire as city defences could. Flak was really only truly effective 'en masse'. A single U-boat gun was effectively useless, which is why there were no U-boat gunnery aces (in fact I believe there were only two U-boats who achieved more than three aircraft kills in their entire time in service). The average anti-aircraft score for a U-boat during a war career was zero. Of those U-boats which achieved any aircraft kills the average score was one aircraft shot down over the service life of the boat, and only 97 U-boats out of 1153 ever shot down a single enemy plane, and nearly a third of those 97 boats were themselves destroyed as a result of the aircraft attack. Plus, since half of all U-boats destroyed were destroyed by aircraft, it's clear that U-boats were almost always better off if they dived rather than engaging an aircraft.

In terms of the game, this means that if players are routinely able to shoot down more than one plane per 10 careers, something about the AA guns' effectiveness is incorrectly modelled. Now I'm not trying for that level of realism, but I am trying to get the AA effectiveness down so that it is somewhat foolhardy to attempt to take on aircraft with a U-boat, as it was in reality.