Flak Suppresion Effect When Strafing Ships

[percydanvers]

Hello all! 

I post this in the Pacific forum because there are more ships in that environment but this also applies to Europe. 

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do something like this in the sim, but what if we had some means of temporarily suppressing defensive flak from ships when strafing them with machine guns. I was reading an interesting article today on how this became part of the tactical doctrine of the USAAF in anti-shipping operations in the pacific. https://ospreypublishing.com/blog/B_25_Mitchell_vs_Japanese_Destroyer/

We may not be able to fly the particular aircraft discussed in the article, but we do have planes with 8 .50 cals on them, and it seems like, down the road, it would be fun in MP to have one guy do a flak suppression strafing run to pave the way for a friend to follow up with bombs.

[AG-51_Razor]

I couldn't agree more!! +1000

[rkk01]

Best place to start is to tone down the AA accuracy

All flak behaves as if it has radar guidance, computer aided gunlaying / prediction and stabilised gun platforms

They didn’t 

[FlankerKiller]

+1 to this. Laying the ground work for suppression would be an amazing thing. 

[Mr_sukebe]

Interesting article, however, that appeared to be talking about actual damage to the ship and crew.  

My understanding of suppression is that it’s not the actual damage inflicted, rather that you presented enough of a threat to the enemy, such that they sought cover and stopped doing their jobs, not really the same thing.

[grafspee]

My understanding is the same, suppression fire main job is not damage or destroy target but rather to unable enemy to shoot back. But in order to suppression has any effect you need quite a fire power, i mean that single P-51 will not suppress whole ship at once.

Edited January 13, 2022 by grafspee

[upyr1]

On 1/13/2022 at 6:52 AM, Mr_sukebe said:

Interesting article, however, that appeared to be talking about actual damage to the ship and crew.  

My understanding of suppression is that it’s not the actual damage inflicted, rather that you presented enough of a threat to the enemy, such that they sought cover and stopped doing their jobs, not really the same thing.

While that may be true, for us I don't think the distinction is that important. I think changing the damage model so that guns can get knocked out would be a good place to start. 

[Mr_sukebe]

37 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

While that may be true, for us I don't think the distinction is that important. I think changing the damage model so that guns can get knocked out would be a good place to start. 

 

I wouldn't quite agree with your comment.

For example, a couple of ideas to implement could be used, e.g.

1. To enhance the damage model such that you could permanently damage the gunnery stations

2. To Temporarily disable the AI for the Flak/AAA guns on the ship, to emulate crew members temporarily ducking for cover, or being killed and then replaced say a couple of mins later

From the point of coding the solution, the above would be quite different to each other.

[upyr1]

17 hours ago, Mr_sukebe said:

 

I wouldn't quite agree with your comment.

For example, a couple of ideas to implement could be used, e.g.

1. To enhance the damage model such that you could permanently damage the gunnery stations

2. To Temporarily disable the AI for the Flak/AAA guns on the ship, to emulate crew members temporarily ducking for cover, or being killed and then replaced say a couple of mins later

From the point of coding the solution, the above would be quite different to each other.

True, anyhow I'm just saying stage 1 is give the guns a proper damage model and stage 2 would be add the crew reaction. I think adding crew reaction would be a good addition to land based AA. 

[Bozon]

“Suppression” does not necessarily means destroying the AA gun/crew. Real people duck when they are sprayed by 20mm or a bunch of 0.5s barrels - the AI gunners are zealots with balls of steel and keep shooting until their last breath.

Coastal command used strafing Beaufighters/Mosquitoes as part of their combined tactics. The strafers went in 1st and raked the decks along the length of the ship. Beyond the immediate effect of making the gunners duck for cover, this started fires and injured some crew. The defenders were then more busy with putting out the fires and dragging injured crew below decks, and less busy shooting back at the rocket totters that were immediately following.

”Suppression” can be implemented by making the gun stop firing for a brief time when “near hits” are recorded, even if they do not do direct damage. This means that the bullets/shells have another “fear” explosion radius that is larger their normal damage explosion radius.