Originally posted by Pepe:
It's not a toning down petition, It is asking for a more realistic approach. It has NO sense at all the IFF Flak. If an airplane dives to chase into its own flak, chances are It will be hit.
I have shot down quite a few friendly planes while manning ship acks, especially with the 5" guns on the CV. There was a time when PTs were attacking on the port bow so I in the forward twin 5" mount (not wimpy little 88mm
) was shooting flat across the forward flightdeck at them. Meanwhile, many friendlies were trying to take off. I blew a lot of them to bits.
But at the time, I couldn't be sure because I was seeing this out of the corner of my eye while fixated on a swarm of PTs 3k away. So when that was over, I decided to test it. I saw one of my squaddies flying straight at me so I shot at him. Black puff right on him, he lost some important pieces, and tumbled immediately into the drink.
This is hardly surprising because I learned how to shoot the 5" at aircraft offline by shooting at drones. As you know, the drones are all friendly, yet I was blowing them to bits.
You can easily tell player-controlled 5" from AI 5". AI 5" shoots time-fuzed rounds in salvos of multiple guns, so you get periodic clusters of bursts all around the target, most of which are too far away from the target to damage it at all. Hence, you can often fly through AI 5" fire for some time without taking any, or at least much, damage. Also, AI 5" fire only starts at a relatively close distance, like 6-8kyrds from the fleet.
OTOH, player-controlled 5" shoots VT-fuzed ammo. It ONLY explodes when the shell comes very close to a plane, and it only shoots 1 shell at a time. So if the gunner player is on target, you see a line of single bursts following the target's path. And because the shells only explode when they are very close, each burst usually does damage. Thus, 5 or 6 such close bursts AT MOST will do any target. Hell, I often down planes with a single shot. And I can start firing at longer range than the AI will. Good 5" gunners can knock planes down well beyond icon range.
And I am thinking, especially, in mannable fleet ack. I think killshooter for fleet gunners should be off. Of course, something must be done to prevent green dweebshooter. But I don't know ANY player that agrees with the actual stat of fleet flak, wether it is otto or human.
Killshooter doesn't seem to be on. Like I said, I've hosed many friendlies (only 1 on purpose, tho <G> ) and have never heard myself taking damage like I do in a plane. Which is good, because otherwise idiots insisting on taking off from fleets in heavy action, or chasing nmes into flak because THEY want the kill themselves, would be very detrimental to fleet defense.
But this makes it hard to prevent amazinhunks deliberately fragging everybody on their side. However, I think the $30/month keeps most such people out of AH to begin with. But everybody "snaps" sometimes. So what I would recommend is that when you get fragged by acks, you get a message to that effect, as well as knowledge of who did it to you. This should make it pretty obvious when it's intentional, and then you report it and the amazinhunk is no longer with us.
Basically, I favor community-based controls rather than things like killshooter. I'd like to see killshooter removed from air-to-air, for that matter. Somebody cuts in front of you to steal your kill, you should be able to teach him not to do that instead of dying yourself.
-Bullethead <CAF>
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