Some AA improvements to aid in making realistic missions for the C-47 and CG-4A

[Charon]

We're getting the CG-4A as a collector plane, which is cool, but I feel like the current state of AA fire at night limits the ability of mission designers to create satisfying airborne missions. Since flak, rather than fighters, is the primary adversary of the glider pilot, some improvements here would be welcome.

 

As I understand it, much of the fire facing the troop carrier flights was fairly wild: small arms and light AA aimed at shadows. While searchlights were certainly present and dangerous, lots of fire came up without the aid of searchlights, and many accounts make no mention of searchlights. But, as far as I can tell, flak currently will not target planes at night at all unless a searchlight is present, and I don't believe there's a good way to simulate diffuse small arms fire without adding a ton of light machine-gun AA units.

 

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Quote

“Big day! Flak heavy, strings of red beads, orange golf balls. I’m scared! Released in wrong territory, dark, can hardly see, still shooting at us. Little field.

Zane Graves,  https://militaryhistorynow.com/2023/02/20/crash-landings-only-the-harrowing-job-of-the-ww2-combat-glider-pilot/

 

Quote

AH: Tell us about the flak.

Chandler: I guess our ‘great surprise’ didn’t last for long. It would be hard not to notice 2,000 aircraft at 1,500 feet. Once we crossed the coast, the Germans started throwing everything they could at us. I doubt if there were any Dakotas that weren’t hit somewhere. It was a frightening fireworks display, but the noise of some ordnance penetrating your aircraft was a bit unnerving.

...

AH: At what altitude did they jump?

Chandler: Six hundred feet. Once the shroud line was pulled, those guys were on the ground in seconds, with as little time as possible as a target. However, at that altitude and at 90 mph, we were a pretty large target and in range of every type of small arms. I was glad it was still dark, but at that moment we all felt like sitting ducks.

...

AH: What was your greatest fear?

Chandler: Actually, friendly fire. After exiting the drop zone, we broke formation, and it was basically a race home, with every man for himself. The safest location was down low, so we were screaming back across the Channel just above the deck, and suddenly this large shape appears through my windscreen and starts firing its entire portside armament toward us. I never identified the cruiser that we encountered. The encounter was reminiscent of a previous incident in which our Navy had shot down nearly 50 of our own C-47s returning from a drop zone in Sicily on July 10, 1943. Although I wasn’t involved in the previous encounter, others in my unit were, and they always reminded us of the fact that 30 percent of the aircraft used in the airdrop were shot down in such a manner. This only heightened our anxiety.

https://www.historynet.com/aviation-history-interview-with-world-war-ii-c-47-pilot-russell-chandler/

 

Quote

The course was planned to fly west of London to avoid the trigger-happy anti-aircraft gun crews in that city. They would fire at any overhead planes, and ask questions later.

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We settled down on tow, holding our position behind the C-47 by keeping the faint blue formation lights on top of the plane centered up in line between the faint glow of the tow plane’s engine flame dampeners. This is not the easiest job in the world at night; the longer you stare, the more your eyes start to play tricks on you. I turned the controls over to Bruner occasionally so I could look away and get my eyes to refocus again. The added problem we faced was the extreme turbulence caused by all the planes ahead of us.

Shortly after we crossed the coast of France, small arms fire and heavier flak started coming up at the planes at the front of the formation, and intensified the closer we got to our landing zone (LZ). It looked like fluid streams of tracers zigzagging and hosing across the sky, mixed in with the heavier explosions of flak. One wondered how anything could fly through that and come out in one piece. After the front of the formation had passed over the German positions and woke them all up, we at the tail end of the line began to get hit by a heavier volume of small arms fire which sounded like corn popping, or typewriter keys banging on loose paper as it went through our glider. I tried to pull my head down into my chest to make myself as small as possible; I tucked my elbows in close to my body, pulled my knees together to protect my vital parts, and was even tempted to take my feet off the rudder pedals so they wouldn’t stick out so far. I really started to sweat.

 

https://amcmuseum.org/history/troop-carrier-d-day-flights/

 

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So some requests for tools for mission authors:

 

• A "diffuse small arms fire" unit that generates inaccurate tracer or non-tracer gunfire and muzzle-flashes from a large (e.g 200x200m) area, simulating individual soldiers on the ground firing inaccurately at low-flying planes. There's no need for a 3D asset associated with this, since it's just representing infantry that aren't modeled in the sim.
• A night-firing order for AA gunners, so that they will engage low-flying planes with very inaccurate fire, even without the aid of a searchlight.
  • This can somewhat be done already with an "attack ground" order placed well above ground level, but it's fiddly and maybe a bit too inaccurate.
• An option for AA to ignore nationality of the target and fire at anything. Obviously real AA gunners struggled to identify targets, especially at night or in poor visibility, and there are plenty of documented instances of friendly AA fire (Sicily and Bodenplatte being some of the most infamous).

 

Some additional requests for the new CG-4A:

 

• Romel's Asparagus.
• A wide variety of static crashed glider assets. Not just one, but maybe a dozen different gliders in various states of wreckage, including some which have collided with each other, so that landing fields aren't crowded with the same copy-pasted glider crash.