• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Ship AA DP Question

Thanks

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the info.:applause:

I'm on track. Those pictures are very good.

Cheers,

Stuart

P.S. - UncleTgt, There is a bit of golf near you. I haven't been to Hoylake (or Lytham or Birkdale) and I can't even watch it on the tele as we don't have fox sports. Looks like an awesome course from the website.
 
Its always windy at Hoylake :pop4:

and they replaced the local trains with a bus service so it doesn't upset the "World Class" golfers ... yeah right :hopelessness:

Good job is the other side of the River from me...:costumed-smiley-034
 
Heavy AA performance in game

I decided to do some testing, so I created duplicate missions:

Player F6F trailing 2 x F6F on a strafing attack on Stock Kagero Jap DD. Stock dp file altered to give the 5" fore & aft a trace time of 10 secs (to reflect published ranges)
Player F6F trailing 2 x F6F strafing attack on stock Kagero Jap DD, with Blue Devil's ACM dp

The effect is night vs day

Blue Devils method really makes you feel like Flak is dangerous, whereas the stock dp file is harmless

I think there are two issues

Irrespective of the stated trace time, I think the game stops tracking rounds after 2 seconds.
I noticed most of the stock airbursts where within a 2000mtr radius of the DD, even though a 10 second trace time should have given it a 9000mtr+ radius. It also seems to wait until the previous round has gone before firing the next (not certain, needs more testing)

The Fire Control model is suitable for MG & cannon, but not suitable for airburst barrages. Consequently the game AI does not predict target path, so airbursts are never close enough to worry you until the time of flight is small (ie close in AA ranges, where the MG & cannons take over).

Blue Devil's solution was an elegant way of faking the game AI fire control to emulate realistic Heavy AA barrages.
I think there must be some scatter built into the game fire control for flak, as you don't have to tweak up/down left/right angles to reduce the laser accuracy of bomber gunners at long ranges. Just adjusting time between rounds & speed of round so that the trace is within 2 seconds, & the rate of fire approximates the firing cycle for the barrage works well enough.

Note:
Stated ROF can be misleading, it's the sustained firing cycle time during an engagement that is important.

The ship Fire Control System effectiveness is also an issue - only the US seems to have deployed a fully capable 3-axis High Angle FCS during WW2, so everybody else's real-life engagement performance was less effective than advertised - particularly against Dive Bombers.

As the game AI FCS is fixed, we only have tweaking the dp files as ways of simluating these differences. The main impact seems to have been reduced rates of fire, as the prediction/ correction control loop either slowed everything down, or made everything much less accurate.

This needs more work.

Bloodhawk,

Currently I'm collecting info from:

Naval Weapons of WW2 - John Campbell, 1985
US Naval Weapons - Norman Friedman, 1983

Once I have a table of data that I think is useful I'll ping you a copy - most of the older WW2 guns were useful for WW1 as well :playful:
 
It would seem that Blue Devil had a lot figured out. I think MS had trouble with the ballistics calculator. It seems it can not cycle fast enough. Which would explain why it waits for the next round when dealing with the FLAK.

Do you have the rest of Blue Devils notes? It seems to be missing some points.

A new arms.dat file is needed for WWII guns. It would be nice to include historical data that looks as it should in the sim.

I don't have reference books to go by. Anything you can get would be helpful. Do check out the website I listed earlier. They include references with each entry. I'd love to see how the site stacks up.

Not sure if this will help but here is a sample of my data collection format...

3"/50 (7.62 cm) Mark 11 AA gun 1914-1918
RoF: 15-20 rmp
Weight: 24lbs (convert to ounces for round weight)
Velocity: 823 mps
Range: 9270m max
Range Effective: 2000m (engagement range)
Elevation: -10min +85max
 
Hi John,

navweaps uses some of the books I'm trawling through as source data, but it fills some gaps. I think Blue Devil annotated the top of each ship dp he did with some notes of the changes he made. These give a clue to the thought process, but like you I've struggled to find a complete explanation - I just know the changes he made result in more realistic flak (IMHO)

I will mail you with what I have collected so far.
 
Thats great UT. Good to know that you have some of the same sources. It helps me to validate the info.

I have a PDF copy of Janes Fighting Ships 1919 that I've been using for my WWI ships. saddly it only covers the Royal Navy. Which is great to have but its only the RN and no one else. It seems that the publisher bought the rights back and the person who made the PDF was only allowed to do the British ships. I wish he could have been allowed to do the German as well.

Anyways, between that and Wiki I'm getting the correct guns for each ship and class of ship. Then I'm making the ARMS.dat info based on the navwep data.

So based on what I've done, do you see any changes that need to be made?

If you need to see them in DPED you can copy and paste them to your arms.dat in the DPED folder. Then just open DPED and select Guns. Then under edit select armaments. You can scroll down to each one and hit add on the one you want to look at. If you can follow the entries themselves then that would save time. What ever way is easiest for you.
 
Bloodhawk,

I have "Janes Warships of WW1" in hardback. Let me know what you need - if I can scan it I will, otherwise I can get the info you need some other way. Just don't say "all the rest of the Nations!":stupid:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top