AAA at night

[Einherjer]

Hi there

In an nighttime mission I have placed many (120) zsu 23 AAA at the coastline to make my life a little harder. But they seem to ignore me ( or are they drunk from the party last evening?)

I can fly low level above their heads... And they doesn't even move their barrels!

I don't expect a nice barricade fire but this is too easy.

What can I do?

[Johnny Dioxin]

Don't mean to try and teach you to suck eggs, but you did set their allegiance to the opposition, didn't you?

[Einherjer]

Yup - so do you mean, this is not normal?

[Johnny Dioxin]

Well I would expect them to be shooting at you - always works for me, just placing anything that can shoot skywards, even simple BTRs and BMPs.

 

Which version are you using - 1.2 or 1.5?

 

Either way, I'll have a test to check it.

[Johnny Dioxin]

Okay - I just tested in 1.2.16

 

Mission and track are attached - all went as it should.

[Einherjer]

Nice one - yes in day time all works at it should - but in pitch black darkness the gunners stay in bed

[Johnny Dioxin]

OK - I'll test that, too :)

 

But I just did some checking and found this:

 

The weapon is aimed and fired manually, with the help of the ZAP-23 optical-mechanical sight which uses manually entered target data to provide limited automatic aiming

 

So it would be pretty useless in the dark! Unless the operator is wearing starlites or similar.

[Exorcet]

Vision detection is modeled in DCS, they might not be able to see you at night. Try to add the Russian AAA radar unit, I forget the name. It's just a radar truck, it has no weapons.

[Einherjer]

Thanks that answers my question! So when I add a radar to an aaa group, then they will be guided by it? Great news! Thanks

[Exorcet]

I am not completely sure if it will work, never tried.

 

The unit is Sborka under Air Defense.

[Einherjer]

Many thanks, will give it a try tomorrow!

[Einherjer]

Tested it this morning - 1 sborka and many different aaa guns in one group.

5 o'clock in the morning.

A-10a ai at 2000 ft overhead.

 

No response... It would be great if they just shoot in to the direction of the plane, but they do nothing at night...

[Johnny Dioxin]

Yeah, I was thinking about this quite a bit - I'm planning to have some fun testing it later today in various conditions and with different air defences and see what happens.

 

You are right, of course - cast your mind back to those images of Baghdad in 1991 - the sky was full of AA if for no other reason than jitters. But a blanket of AA is more likely to hit or scare off something than no AA. Then again, with a single unit, if you were the guy with his finger on the Zu-23 trigger and you knew that firing in the dark would immediately give away your position, how keen would you be to pull it?

 

All kinds of possibilities and scenarios can come up there, but at the end of the day, only ED can tell us how they have programmed it.

[Einherjer]

It would be absolutely great for the atmosphere of an mission. And as a deep strike aircraft with a primary objective that have to be hit, I would have no bomb to waste for one of these many many guns, but they force me to evade this yellow, green and red streams and this will lower my precision... And let me sweat especially when I can't fly high because of Sam and fighter threat.

[baltic_dragon]

I tested this and had different outcomes - my general feeling is that AAA was better at night in 1.2.16, but it still shot me at 2am over Batumi, although only when I was flying rather low. On another low pass I was attacked by ZU-23 at night and during thunderstorm, with almost zero visibility. One thing I noticed is that truck mounted AAA has better eyesight than fixed ones.

[ESAc_matador]

use radar guided ZSU and wait. Or use navigation lights...