The flak and the facts

[Tac]

I converted the pic from a good looking 24 bit bitmap to a lousy jpg. Better to put up a 100 or so k file than a 1.4 meg one  

Im not familiar with UBB.. I dont know why HTML is off in these forums. Ill try and put up this pic as a download, apologies to all you 9600 modem users  

[Jimdandy]

 

Originally posted by eskimo:
At any alt, the flack seems to track you like a guy with an MG would at 100 yards.

eskimo

Yep it sure does. I will give them this the Star Wars defense ack has been toned down to a tolerable level. Not realistic but tolerable. Like The Wobble said 5 degrees and a 1000ft should be plenty to throw it off. The high alt flack was laid out in a checker board fashion in front of incoming bomber formation. They would fire barrages along the anticipated route of the bomber formation as tex said. They would use a combination of radar, radio, and visual detection and signaling. Do to the time it took to triangulate, set fuses, and reposition the gun (for the large flack guns like 75mm and up), these batteries were better suited to firing at large bomber formations. It isn't that guns of that size never shot down fighters it was just a very rare occasion that a fighter was shot down "on purpose" by a gun that size. It was normally shot don't do to the combined fire of several batteries producing a large field of ack. Then it was more than likely that the fighter was unfortunate enough to be so low on fuel or something that he had to remain on a fixed course to get home. The flack was good for bombers that had to remain on a fixed course for several miles to line up on target. Now the smaller AA pieces (37mm and lower) could be very good against fighters. They traverse quickly and have a high rate of fire. Thus you can "walk" your tracers into the target.Great example of this was the US 37mm M54 AA gun.The army had found that with the previous version (the M1) the gunners weren't using there gun sight. They were just walking the tracers into the target. This meant that a lot of 37mm rounds were going to waste. So they came out with the M54. This version had a .50cal mounted on each side of the 37mm. The .50 and the 37mm were ballistically similar. This meant that you could walk the more economic .50cal rounds into the target and then open up with the 37mm. Well you might have guessed what actually happened. The gunners just opened up with all of the guns and walked all of the tracers into the target. LOL! Those G.I.'s weren't going to let any of that fire power go.  

[This message has been edited by Jimdandy (edited 01-12-2001).]

[texace]

Yeah...I see the point...flying a Stang at 500 MPH in a dive and get hit once and blow up, that's unreal. Fighters were close to immune to flak, due to speed and sudden course changes. Usually flak batteries left fighters alone or only took potshots cause afer that first puff they moved fast.

<G>

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Lt. Col. Aaron "txace-" Giles of the 457th BG
    "Fait Accompli"

[Jigster]

Tac what kind of converting software are you using?

Normally if you reduce color count to 256 (use octree method with error diffusion) you lose almost no graphic quality, then 30-50% Jpeg compression will bring the size down to 70 KB with most AH screen shots. Also, in the size of the image by 50-75% will give you about half that. I use PSP 6.01.

This is a full sized screen shot, at about 70 KB (50% jpeg compression)

 

[Tac]

Good old PAINT. what else? Im a cheap bastard  

Anyway, in my pic you see the looping/barreling trail of flak along the exact route of my p38 at every salvo. Thats whats really annoying. =)

[Jigster]

You can get PSP from www.jasc.com

It tells you there's a 30 day trial limit but it keeps going  

I prefer it over most other graphcis programs (mostly because I'm so use to using it) , and the evaluation program is no different then the 109$ version I use  



[This message has been edited by Jigster (edited 01-13-2001).]

[TheWobble]

I use netscape composer for the image translation, couldent get PSP to do it right.

[Tac]

Yeah, besides PSP automatically associates all pictures in windows. Its damn annoying to load PSP every time you want to see a picture. Eats memory like a starving fat lady on an all you can ear restaurant and is as painfull to completely uninstall as it is to read's loser11's posts.

Im cheeeeep.... and laahzy

[Jigster]

Um...very simple solution to file associations...it gives you a choice when you install and from the main file menu which files are associated.   It's only automatic if you check the "automatically  
assoicate all image files with PSP" option  

On average PSP takes about 10MB of RAM with nothing on the clip board. Now once you start editing and cutting on 24bit, 1024X768 ya it can be a resource hog.
 
I've been using PSP since 5.0 and uninstalling was never a problem. A few bad setup settings can make it a hassle tho.

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33rd FW www.33rd.org

[This message has been edited by Jigster (edited 01-13-2001).]

[TheWobble]

After trying to attack a CV earlier, I think that this thread should be renaimed to
"the flak and the SMACK"  due to the gut wretching <SMACK> sound that always marks the removal of your wing.

[Jigster]

Ha...I removed that sound and replaced it with a cut from that Bugs Bunny cartoon with the plane gremlin.

[Jimdandy]

Jig plz e-mail me the sight you found the sound on. I love that kinda stuff. My cousin found one that has a whole bunch of cartoon music and them songs on it. I will get it from him if you want it.