Aeroplane guided artillery

[GrinBird]

When I read in the news section on the AcesHigh front page that we would get "shore bombardment batteries" I wondered if aeroplane guided artilley has ever been seen in any other Arena Sims. AcesHigh is my first Arena sim so I dont know.

I just try to imagine how that would be for gameplay in the main arena. The idea of using planes as guiding for the artillery was used a lot in WW2 both by naval units and landbased troops. In arena I think that everything that encourages cooperation is  fun.
Imagine following conversation on channel 2:

BigGuns: I am in Battleship within firing range of A21 can anyone give me guidance?

HiFella: I am over A21 in P51 Fire away BigGuns!

BigGuns: First salvo fired!

HiFella: I can see grenate explosions ábout one mile SE of 21 BigGuns

BigGuns: Thanx ... Aim is corrected I am firing second salvo..

HiFella: Whow! Very accurate shooting BigGuns, correct a little to the left and you will hit in the Hangar area.

Etc..

The most important thing about this however is that the new feature wouldent be too strong, so it would screw up the gameplay of main arena.  

 

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GrinBird

[Ghosth]

Dawn of Aces had artillery controlled by spotter in either rear seat of 2 seater plane or Zep.

Very well done IMO and loads of fun.

Was a pretty simple interface.
".spot" put a spotting round at your current location.
".correct xx yy" corrected from last spot, xx = compass direction for correction, and yy = distance to correct.

".Barrage" put a slightly scattered group of 20 rounds on your last shot.

Would love to see something similar here.
(along with manned moveable arty)

[Tuomio]

Dawn Of Aces has plane guided artillery. You have to make 1 pass to fire spotting round, then you are free to correct fire and fire for effect. You are very vulnerable when you are guiding artillery, because you have to look where the shells hit.
Secondly you have to have artillery ship within range and if the ship is far away, it takes more time to shells impact (And making spotting much harder because the waiting time).

Its same thing with tanks and osties now. If you let them freely roll to your airbase, you can be sure, that they make fast lots of damage. Thats why i think they wont unbalance the game. You just have to keep them out of shooting range.

Artillery fire is inaccurate and i´d like to see, that it takes multiple ships to make devastating attack on airbase. Continously arying would also make takeoff impossible and it would make lots of craters on base. I think artillery should be number one thing to model for AH.

[GrinBird]

Thnx for the replies Tuomio and Ghost. I havent tried Dawn of Aces so the answers are most appreciated. The main difference between the version you describe and the one I imagined is that my version takes two players: One battleship gunner/Landbased artillery gunner who is doing the shooting and getting the kills/damage points and one pilot who helps him out without getting any else for it, except advantage for his country.
The other way to do it could be to have the option to take an artillery spotter airplane the same way you can take any other plane. Maybe you should have the option to pick a spotter hydroplane from a Battleship ( as if it is an airfield and then fly from it and use the artillery from the battleship. That way it would be you who bombed a target and you who got the kills, allmost same way as if you had taken a bomber. This way all the enemy has to do if they want to stop the artillery fire is to shoot the Artillery spotter plane down.
I dunno what way would be the most interesting.. sounds fun both of them.

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GrinBird

[Dinger]

The current problem with using FOs (either in A/C or chuted) in AH is that Tank rounds are just big tracers; Each FE receives from the host something like "Plane Z:Tank gun is pointing direction X, elevation Y. Plane Z: Tank gun fires".  So you can see the general direction tracers go, but precision work is impossible.
Much cooler would be to change the "Tank gun fires" bit with a more complex "Tank round fired, will explode at location X,Y (Z if AGL)" and let the FE calculate the trajectory back to the gun.  YOu'll still get weird stuff happen if a plane gets in the way, but you could even add a "tank round exploded" bit and make the comms code really baroque.
Then you could have accurate spotting for naval bombardments, shore guns, C47-dropped artillery pieces, battleships, and so on.

[Wardog]

Yup..

Used to love killin fields with Arty in DoA   And the Zepplin just rocks...

Think spotting could be coded here to. Depend on how HT has bombardment setup. If it is player controlled this could make for interesting add ons down the road, Like shoreline Pill Boxes to fire back at the Ships  

Now we are talkin about fighting  

Pyro, think about Pill Boxes as well please .


Dog out...

[GrinBird]

I wonder if anybody knows which planes were used for artillery spotting during WW2.. anyone? I have checked Fieseler Fi 156 Storch and the Lysander, both very versatile STOL planes, they were both used for battle field observations, but does that mean that they were used for artilery spotting?

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GrinBird

[Fishu]

One thing with artillery just is that you shouldn't see tracer...  
I wonder if 75mm had tracers... I thought those were just dumb AP's and you were supposed to look for the explosions to see where it hit..

Of course you could do so that it would require someone to be in visible range to the target and then the spotter would be that same guy who owns the arty ship.
So that he could just jump to the plane and be his own spotter while the other guy flies.

One problem with some random plane (p51 example) is that I believe that artillery spotters had extra equiptment with them..
like range charts or whatever coordinate papers.. weren't those planes also two seaters (or more).

I'd like to have SdKfz 251's artillery fire command version    (i don't recall sub version now  )


Spotting in DoA was fun..
I did once kill about 47 planes in an zeppelin parked over an airbase and sending artillery barrages to the field  
I also landed that mission and got 8 kills out of planes that came to intercept me and I landed that zep too..
I were quiet about that, I didn't want it to get too popular.  
(no kills awarded of the artillery barrage casualties, but I saw the explosions in the magnificed map.. explosion near by shadow of plane and soon after the debris flying all around)
I *think* that I was first one to make CL-II popular of its ultimate turning radius.. very first thing in the version where it got boosted up, I was flying it and trying to kill with nose gun... popularity did just get boosted when I were talking about its ability.
One reason to keep quiet about zeppelin + artillery vulch ride  
(CL-II was enough of annoyance already)

*sweet memories*

[arhurb]

Fieseler Storch  

Also for picking up downed pilots.

Pepino.

[Jigster]

L-4's and Kingfishers

heck Kingfishers did everything, recon,  VERY LIGHT anti-sub duty, spotting for battle ships, picking up one downed pilot at a time, etc  

Thats one float plane we GOTTA get