deck gun inacurate.

[Sailor Steve]

I've seen a photograph of a Fletcher class destroyer firing at a sampan from a range of less than 500 yards. Both were sitting still, and the sea was dead calm. With dedicated stabilized fire control running the guns, three of the five shells hit the target. The fact is that naval gunnery is notoriously innacurate. In his book Guns At Sea Peter Padfield likened it to sitting in a rocking chair shooting a pistol at a golf ball rolling across a mantle while someone else rocked you randomly.

And on the NavWeaps forums many years ago a naval historian said that as near as anyone could count the average of hits per shells fired for World War Two was about seven percent, with about two percent outside of 10,000 yards and twelve percent inside that range.

Originally Posted by Kpt. Lehmann

All that being said, I was an artilleryman in RL for seven years... I like hearing the BOOM too. (The deck-gun soundfile in GWX was taken from an actual 105mm howitzer firing a big "bullet.")

I was having this discussion a few years back on another forum, and after some argument people started coming up with actual documentation from battles concerning shells fired and known hits. A former artilleryman got a laugh from us all when he suddenly posted "Well, the navy may not be too accurate, but our army guns hit the ground at least 98% of the time!"