Agreed... My friend was goin 500 at 15k in a 262 atleast 4 or so miles away from cv and was picked off...bogus 
Ya cant have good battles when ya got laser guided puffy ack blasting away at ya...no matter what ya do.
Look at that picture that Guppy just posted ... there is nothing "laser guided" about flak.
You use a little Kentucky windage along with some luck and lob the shells out there. Why do a lot people think that they have been "directly" hit by the "puffy ack".
Our puffly ack uses radio proximity fuses ...
A proximity fuze (also called a VT fuze, for "variable time") is a fuze that is designed to detonate an explosive device automatically when the distance to target becomes smaller than a predetermined value or when the target passes through a given plane. There are different sensing principles:
* radio frequency sensing
* optical sensing
* acoustic sensing
* magnetic sensing
* pressure sensing
Radio frequency sensing is the main sensing principle for shells and this is mostly in mind when one speaks of "proximity fuzes".
The WWII patent works as follows: The shell contains a micro-transmitter which uses the shell body as an antenna and emits a continuous wave of roughly 180 - 220 MHz. As the shell approaches a reflecting object, an interference pattern is created. This pattern changes with shrinking distance: every half wavelength in distance (a half wavelength at this frequency is about 0.7 meters), the transmitter is in or out of resonance. This causes a small oscillation of the radiated power and consequently the oscillator supply current of about 200 - 800 Hz, the Doppler frequency. This signal is sent through a band pass filter, amplified, and triggers the detonation when it exceeds a given amplitude.
The proximity fuze was developed mainly by the U.S. (with British collaboration) during World War II. Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during this war, credited it with three significant effects. It was important in defense from Japanese Kamikaze attacks in the Pacific. It was an important part of the radar-controlled anti-aircraft batteries that finally neutralized the German V-1 bomb attacks on England. Third, it was released for use in land warfare for use in the Battle of the Bulge, where it decimated German divisions caught in the open. The Germans felt safe from timed fire because the weather prevented accurate observation. Bush cites an estimated seven times increase in the effect of artillery with this innovation.So ... you are never hit DIRECTLY with a shell ... when you and the ack shell get within a certain range of each other ... BOOM ... people need to stop thinking that it's impossible to get taken out by puffy ack because ... "I was going 6 trillion miles per hour ... BS !!1!!".
Think of as ... You flew into it's flight path range, and got too close. These types shells are a rare example where ... "Close is good enough".
I don't have a problem dying to puffy ack ... I have a problem when it senses you and continues to fire at you even though you may have ducked behind mountains or flown far enough away where, in real life, they wouldn't be bothered trying to shoot you down.
