furball,
Your experiment confirms one I did myself a while ago... That was one of the triggers that made me take a break from AH (complaining about it on the BBS was part of what got me banned) and it's still one of the (IMHO) few parts of the game that need some big changes. At the very least, there should be a lag in aiming equal to the shell's time of flight, and in practice there are several delays. Here's a simple list of things that go into the system in RL...
You maneuver
They detect your maneuver
They watch you long enough to determine your new flight parameters
They input your new heading, alt, and speed into their director computer (mechanical slide-rule stuff)
The computer operator jiggles his slide rule computer around and comes up with a new azimuth, elevation, and fuze delay
The loader sets the new fuze delay into the shell (even prox fuzes have a self-destruct timer)
The loader puts the shell into the gun
The gunner pulls the trigger
The shell flies out and explodes one time-of-flight later
Add up all those delay times and if you haven't maneuvered away from the parameters (speed, heading, and altitude) they entered into their gun director computer, the shell will get pretty close. If you have maneuvered more than a few hundred feet or 5 degrees or so in heading in that TOF though, it's going to miss. This is somewhat compensated for by salvo firing and an inherent shotgun-pattern to multiple shells fired by multiple guns, but that will either spread the pattern out very widely or cause a shotgun effect that is still where you would have been had you not maneuvered. A flak battery that can follow a zooming me163 apparently doesn't have to contend with the real world's 4th dimension, ie. time.
A bomber will have a tough time maneuvering against heavy ack due to relatively slow speeds and slow turn rates, plus in WWII and other wars the volume of ack was simply much greater than what is modelled in AH. But your experiment shows that the SYSTEM behind heavy ack simply isn't modelled, or it's modelled in an unrealistic fashion for some reason. Maybe the intent is to do it right but it's broken right now, who knows.
The ack rarely intrudes into gameplay right now except as an annoyance, but when it does it just highlights how it's not at all realistic. I'm very glad that light AAA has some lag in it and maneuvers work pretty well against that stuff unless you get too close.
--edited to alter complaint/comment ratio and hopefully keep my post from getting deleted or me getting banned again
