Plane Crazy Flak

[Melia Hazinski]

WhatI find especially annoying with heavy Flak is, they are shooting all around, but rarely in the area in which the aircrafts, they should be shooting at, are flying. Something like, the enemies are east of the Flak and the Flak is shooting to the north.

You see that in period movies though. More or less anyway. Not when you see big formations of heavy bombers, which were more predictable I think, but often when there are smaller, sassier airplanes closer to the ground. Just dozens of flak explosions all over the place but too far to cause damage, and the aircraft just flying inbetween them in a straight line.

This is not what I am talking about. Like I wrote above, the aircrafts are in a completely different direction, than the direction the Flak is shooting at. Heavy Flak guns were not shooting on their own, their fire was led by the battery staff, which gave the direction, together with the other important informations to the guns. So all guns should at least shoot roughly in the direction, where the aircraft is.

In Rise of Flight there were two mechanisms... one generated a box of flak around an aircraft formation (largely cosmetic I think... blasts far from the aircraft in a cube)... and then there were the actual ballistic calculations for the guns themselves... because of the high traverse speed and lack of ranging errors the latter could be exceptionally accurate at some altitudes (which was a problem). Looking at the files BoX now seems to have fuzing ranging errors which might be an improvement...

Another thing about heavy Flak, that is quite odd is, when you fly an escort mission for bombers, the enemy Flak will, when the bombers approach the target, shoot at the escort fighters, instead of the bombers, which doesn't make sense, as the Flak would want to make the duty for the bombers as hard as possible. Plus the chance of hitting the slow bombers, flying straight in tight formation, is much higher, than hitting the small fast turning fighters above the bombers.

Or do as they normally did and create area flak for the bombers to run into. Perhaps 1C could code that in as an option. would work well for those missions giving a more realistic feel. I have seen some good flak out there. There have been some good flak experiences, but currently they just aren't right.

But right now it isn't nearly that dense or accurate. Don't know why. There was a time where the flak seemed to have sniper accuracy that would pick planes out of the sky with crazy precision. I cannot seem to find the video showing this, but I'm sure a lot of us remember it Hopefully they will fix this.

Also not sure how realistic this is, but i would like to hear the flak when it goes off around me. its just not as fun when the flak is a silent poof of smoke even when it blows up just a few yards from your head. It just seems a little quiet.

I fairly sure the flak will target a particular plane, starting with the first one that comes into it's "Attack Area - Air" command, which is a cylinder, so fighters could enter it first even if they are actually further away in a straight line from the guns. It will then stick to firing at that plane until it is out of range or shot down, then look for the next target. If the escorts were at some point ahead of the bombers, as they often are in career flying their racetrack pattern, then they could trigger the flak first which could still be firing at the escorts when the bombers are overhead. I could be wrong about that mechanism, but I have seen flak target the bombers, scoring hits, while on escort missions in career.

What was not right was the old style laser guided flak, even on low AI settings. You may find it immersive to have lots of flak bursting very near, but if it is you are likely to be hit. Careers are unplayable if probability of death or capture per sortie gets ridiculously high. If you want more close bursts set your SP mission flak to "High" and lobby your favourite server to do the same.

I do agree that a box barrage option would be good: instead of the guns tracking individual targets they would fire as fast as possible into a defined area as long as any enemy was in it. LAA guns currently stay facing in the direction of their last target after it has moved out of range: I would rather they reverted to their original heading: think of it as a priority arc.

I dont know about you guys, but i'd personally be in favor of the game throwing up a bunch of cosmetic effects for the flak and then having occasional shots which are actually simulated right. So maybe you throw 10 guns worth of flak into the air around an aircraft, but then 1 gun is reasonably accurate to score near-hits and hits.

You mean like making war ambience in a same manner I'd like to see artillery round hit flashes and ground weapons fire on the ground near battlefield. Not necessary inflicting any damage but giving suspension of disbelief (as they say in movie business).

There is a script mission editors can add to flak which can increase their firing rate by 10x. I used to use it Rise of Flight to create huge flak bursts around airplanes using Low AI setting to compensate. It looked awesome as you could make 4 entities act like 40 were shooting.

In Rise of Flight when I used to do it in my missions it was super impressive seeing so much flak around with only a few guns. I don't know if the ability to script it has been removed so you may have to ask in the beta forum

The flak could also shoot out a single 'shot' that turns into a randomly spaced series of explosions in a given volume, to free up ai and trajectory computation. Would be especially useful with ships where you have batteries consisting of tens of guns.

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