Friday 2010-09-17 Dev. update and Discussions

[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

That's a good point actually. It's been brought up before and i think aknowledged by the devs as well at one point.

As for attacking ships, it sure does make for some very nice and challenging missions. I don't know what the extend of the ship's damage model complexity will be, but it will be great to be able to damage smaller parts of a ship even when using guns.

I don't expect to sink the Bismarck with just a rack of .303s, but being able to put a couple of exposed AA guns or their crews out of action on a big ship would be cool and make for interesting and varied missions, eg the fighter escort suppressing flak on the target ship so that the slow-movers can get in and hit it properly.

In a similar fashion, it would be just as welcome and quite realistic to be able to sink smaller vessels with gunfire from heavy guns. Armed trawlers might as well be sunk by machine gun fire alone, same for freighters carrying sensitive cargo as long as they could be progressively damaged so that they sink after some time by secondary damage. For example, strafing an unarmored freighter that has ammo containers or fuel drumms on its decks and in its cargo holds.

Finally, and this is visible in some gun camera films floating around, even destroyers could be sunk by concentrated gunfire and a bit of luck, or just by cannon armed aircraft using a combination of the on-board armament and bombs/rockets. I think a flight of mosquitos with their battery of 20mm cannons, rockets or even the 57mm cannon on the tsetse variant would have little trouble in severely damaging or even sinking smaller warships.

Short version: Guns have almost no effect at all on ships in IL2, it would be welcome if this could be changed in SoW

Excerpt from debriefing interview with Captain Joe Foss, USMC, Medal of Honor, Executive Officer VMF-121 which flew Wildcats and Corsairs:

http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Aircraft/VMF-121/

Originally Posted by Joe Foss, USMC, MoH

Q. Do you feel that fighter strafing is worth while in making the torpedo and bombing attacks more effective?

A. There's a lot of pro and con on that because sometimes it will cost you about 50% of your fighters. You really lose the fighters on that deal. When you do get out and get out alive on a strafing attack on warships, you just aren't good, you're lucky.

Q. It does silence the anti-aircraft?

A. Yes, it does on destroyers and transports, but on cruisers and battleships the anti-aircraft keeps pegging away. The only thing that I silenced on the battleship was pompom guns. The anti-aircraft there was still plenty of that around - I got one hit right under my wing. I had an idea of turning one way but just happened to turn the other way. It hit where I would have been.


Q. What was the effect of the strafing on the ships?

A. Sometimes it'll start a fire on a cargo ship, and on the troop transports the decks are just packed with men. When you strafe the deck on a troop transport, you really do some damage to personnel. When you strafe a destroyer, that's the end of anti-aircraft from that destroyer, if you're placing them good, up and down the deck. They'll stop shooting at you when you get to about 3000 feet.

There were two destroyers that came in one afternoon. Broad daylight around Savo Island, and they saw two of our little old corvettes. These two corvettes saw the destroyers coming, and started on down the channel, trying to outrun them. The destroyers cut loose and had them well bracketed. When the little fellows saw there was no use trying to run, they just turned and headed straight towards the two destroyers, shooting full blast with their 3-inch. I'll swear that one was sinking - there was a squirt of water coming up - and they were still shooting at the Jap destroyer, All the men on the two corvettes were saved. Then we went out and strafed the Japs. After they cleared Savo Island, one of them exploded, caught on fire, and sank. Then a little farther on, the other one did the same thing. They gave the last four planes credit for sinking two destroyers. But as for doing any damage to a cruiser or battleship, in my estimation, you don't do any. The main thing is to draw fire so that your dive bombers and torpedo planes can get in. When the torpedo planes were coming in on this battleship, the battleship would blaze away with big guns trying to cause geysers so that the torpedo planes would fly into them. They did that all day, but they didn't get a single torpedo plane. I saw one of Captain Dooley's hits, he got one right amidships. I was just a few feet off from the ship when it hit. Then I saw thousand-pound bombs hit on the battleship, and they still kept shooting their big guns; they never would shut up those big guns; torpedoes would hit them and thousand-pound bombs, still the big guns kept going.