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I was looking at the aircraft database and see that a number of the Allied aircraft have gun values in the hundreds as a result of adding rockets as an aircraft cannon device. I know (or at least think I know) that these weapons are intended primarily for use against surface/ground targets. I note that their accuracy is very low, but I am concern as to what effect this over weighted gun value has against other aircraft.

I welcome your comments Sid.

two tenths of b*gger all.
 
they seldom hit.

Rockets work better than I expected in RHS. In theory rockets should "reload in the air" - but they never do. Also in theory - you might get more than one rocket hit per salvo - which is possible - but very unlikely. I have yet to see a single instance of either.

Rockets DO work well when skimming the surface - at 100 feet - strafing for ships. You average 1 hit per AIRCRAFT - which is about right.

Rockets may work in air air combat - there is no way ever to know for sure - but it appears either they never do - or they do so rarely it matters not. Ideally they should work very rarely - but it is impossible to know given how reports are generated. All we can say for sure is that the number is zero or close to zero - because the same plane with or without rockets generates virtually identical air combat results. It might be that a fighter type would get more hits - but an attack type (e.g. Swordfish) probably never does.

The low ROF of 1 appears to be the reason for this rare hit rate - which is fine by me.

I have seen 8 Swordfish score 6 hits on Katori - hurting it so bad it sank eventually. They were designed to penetrate pressure hulls of U boats - which are almost exactly the same difficulty.

Thanks

How do they work in 44-45 when the Allies have a decent number of high experience pilots?

Wouldnt they be more likely to score hits in A-A?

The alternative is to create them as PGM type weapons, the problem here is they can be dropped from 30,000ft though with low accuracy they dont hit much[8D]

I too was thinking that they shouldn't be classified as Air Cannons.

Ideally there should be a special device intended for this use. We experimented with various options. The air craft cannon with ROF set to 1 works best.

AA rockets were important by 1945 - in particlar vs bombers. Post war USAF believed in them so much they refused to invest in Sparrow or Sidewinder (Navy projects) - preferring all rocket armed fighters. Eventually they had to adopt a Navy fighter (F-4) designed for use with proper AAMs. Even so - in the 1944/5 era, the AA rocket is a valid concept. At the ranges that matter for guns - which are not very great - they can matter. IF they turn out to work sometimes - it is fine by me. Evidence so far is that they won't work very often.

Even so - I prefer a proper rocket device. I wish the actual rocket devices worked for ground attack, ship attack and air air - but only guns do that.

Sid,

I understand that A-A rockets became a weapons system post WW2, but the USAAF/USN etc still used guns over Korea.
They only became a usable weapons system in the '50s.

I agree that WITP & AE needs "Rocket" device, the Western  Allies & USSR made heavy use of them.

IMHO, if available, they should only be usable if an attack height of ? 2000ft or less was chosen.

(I'm now looking up the stats for the Typhoon & Tempest to add them to the mix!)

i've experimented with classifying rockets as PGM. I rate them by salvo.....8 rockets with a accuracy of 10 and a higher effect (about 180). The penetration is low (about 25 for 3" rockets, 75 for 6" rockets), range is set to 2 (2,000 yards) so they demolish small ships (PC,PG etc) but a lesser effect on larger armoured vessels.


As rockets tend to have more use against ships and ground attack is more abstract it seams to work OK

ORIGINAL: JeffK

Sid,

I understand that A-A rockets became a weapons system post WW2, but the USAAF/USN etc still used guns over Korea.
They only became a usable weapons system in the '50s.

I agree that WITP & AE needs "Rocket" device, the Western  Allies & USSR made heavy use of them.

IMHO, if available, they should only be usable if an attack height of ? 2000ft or less was chosen.

(I'm now looking up the stats for the Typhoon & Tempest to add them to the mix!)

ct

Aircraft rockets were effective and important late in WWII. While aircraft mounted rockets were originally a British concept -
just before our games start - and they appear when the game begins on Swordfish in RHS - these were intended for ASW use.
They turned out to be useful for attacking ships and ground units as well. But the Germans - and later the Japanese probably
influenced by them - thought of fighter mounted rockets as bomber destroying weapons - and indeed they were pretty effective
in that role. This is the role USAAF decided - somewhat in retrospect - was what they wanted. In that era "strategic air power"
meant bombers - and the only role USAF really believed in for fighters was as bomber destroyers. They also came to think in terms
of nuclear armed air to air rockets - see Genie - again - however - mainly for use against enemy heavy bombers. There was even
a sort of unpiloted fighter plane - a missile - which was supposed to do the same thing. Korea came as a bit of a surprise in many ways - not least that we might face high performance fighter planes equal or even superior to our own - and that we might have to engage in classical battles for air control (involving hitting enemy bases, not just air to air combat). The key point is that rockets were triple purpose - and SHOULD work vs ships, ground targets and aircraft - something difficult to achieve in a system not designed for them. I am surprised how well the compromise of the RHS rockets works: I was willing to kill them entirely if need be - but it appears this works in practical terms far better than we had any right to expect. It is likely that they work oh so rarely in air combat. It is likely we will never know unless a test bed is built to run thousands of tests and collect the data. What is clear is they don't work very often - which we would notice.

ORIGINAL: trojan

i've experimented with classifying rockets as PGM. I rate them by salvo.....8 rockets with a accuracy of 10 and a higher effect (about 180). The penetration is low (about 25 for 3" rockets, 75 for 6" rockets), range is set to 2 (2,000 yards) so they demolish small ships (PC,PG etc) but a lesser effect on larger armoured vessels.


As rockets tend to have more use against ships and ground attack is more abstract it seams to work OK

The PGM route is an option. It has problems because of the way hard code interprets them. They are likely too effective - although one can play with numbers - and far too effective from high altitudes. But they are not effective in air combat ever. No matter what you are mounting them on - in rare circumstances one might fire them at an enemy aircraft - and it should not be nice if they hit. It is like the GAU-8 on an A-10: it isn't really an air combat weapon - but woe to the plane hit by its 30mm shells.

PGMs might be adaptable for pure ASW rockets (e.g. on Swordfish) - but we have another problem: slots. We hardly have the option of having more kinds of rockets - and there are not enough slots as it is. We have 75mm pretending to be 88 mm and so on. Fewer slots mean we need more generic devices able to be used on several kinds of planes in different roles. If we get more slots in AE - but no rocket devices (which we might get) - we might devise different kinds of rockets for more specialized application.

The modder's art is one of compromise. There is usually no "right" compromise - just a set of trade offs - and the modder needs to balance these for the "best" solution. Different people will have different opinions of what that might be. Also - IMHO it is not good enough to make a compromise choice: one then must test the choice to see how well it works - 'calibrate' the numbers used by comparison to real data - and modify as indicated by the testing. Often what seems like a good idea has problems not anticipated. In this case - the compromise works better than I expected because of the theoretical problem of "reloading in the air" - which de facto seems not to happen - but which I expected to be fatal originally. I wish all awkward compromises worked this well.