Anti air gun and shell tips?

[CanadianCogs]

Building a frag/flak timed fuse anti air gun at 100mm with 10 modules shell layout is (from tip to bottom) is flak head, 3x flak body, 4x frag body, Timed fuse, stabiliser fins. Rail draw of 2000 per shot. 45 degree frag cone

I have a some questions on this. 1 Im aiming for a fire rate of 8 rounds per second (that may be hard so if not 8 I want to have at absolute minimum 4 per second). Should I stick with the stabiliser fins or would the tracer be better for this fire rate?

2 is 800M/s and a 0.30 inacuracy good for a AA gun? (No gunpowder or rail cases. just base railgun stats. 2000 energy per shot. This is without useing any power for accuracy.

3 Should I use beltfed autoloaders (shells already 100mm) and have a high firerate with periods of downtime. or normal autoloaders for constant fireing?

4 Because this is a pure railgun. do I set it up for burst fire or is constant better for anti air?

5 Any other tips or things I should change about the gun or shell?

[Eudaimonia]

To be honest it's not really important how you make an AA APS gun, because they are extremely bad no matter what. So really you should just focus on making it as cheap as possible, since it's a purely aesthetic thing...

1. You should have tracers in every rapid fire gun. But you don't put tracers on every shell, you put tracers in one of the autoloaders and regular shells in every other loader. As for fins, they are a kinetic component and should never be used on a chemical shell, and even on kinetics they are extremely niche.

2. Having it be a railgun in the first place is already inefficient, but at least you're not using any of it for rail accuracy which would be super bad. The speed and accuracy doesn't really matter in this case, cause all you want to do is throw as many shells in the air as possible and hope the enemy runs into some of them.

3 and 4. Burst damage is good for getting through active defenses like LAMS. But when it comes to shooting aircraft with APS it's all about shooting at the right time, usually shooting them in the ass just after they have done an attack run. If your weapon shoots in burst then it's not unlikely they will come when it is impossible for you to hit, and then they reload when it is possible for you to hit. Better to go the more reliable route of even ROF.

5. Don't use flak. Flak is designed to only work against munitions, as ciws. Currently it is capable of damaging dediblades and wings, but that will change after the next update where it becomes effectively unable to damage anything other than wood. If you actually care about performance and efficiency, use a laser.

[Big Dog]

Another option you can do if you are using a pure railgun with no gunpowder is to have a "shotgun" / burst style gun instead as with no gunpowder the APS is able to shoot multiple shells at once.

[Rufus Shinra]

Originally posted by Eudaimonia:

3 and 4. Burst damage is good for getting through active defenses like LAMS. But when it comes to shooting aircraft with APS it's all about shooting at the right time, usually shooting them in the ass just after they have done an attack run. If your weapon shoots in burst then it's not unlikely they will come when it is impossible for you to hit, and then they reload when it is possible for you to hit. Better to go the more reliable route of even ROF.

Heh, I'm rather in favour of heavier DP guns, the idea being to have an APHE shell capable of getting through the armour usually found on aircraft that aren't flying fortresses, AKA a few layers of metal and alloy. Then fire at 60-90 RPM, knowing that every hit will be very painful for densely-packed planes.

[Dakota]

Just use 50mm beltfed HEAT rounds, also pure gunpowder, no rail, 3 intakes per beltfed loader. like HP tip, secondary HEAT head, tracer, 17 gunpowder. There ya go.

For hitting aircraft you need speed, aircraft also have armor here, so HEAT is used to ignore that armor, HP tip does some extra raw DPS and makes sure you don't bounce, tracer gives you some accuracy to hit the tiny things. Flak is an anti missile round as stated by the balance developer himself, it's terrible anti air and useless at the caliber you're using it at. Frag also is gonna have a hard time at such a low caliber since you're just spitting a few fragments in the direction of the target with most of them missing anyway. So ideally you just wanna hit the thing and kill it when you do hit it.

[The n00b A]

My experience with railguns for AA is to take advantage of the speed (above 1000m/s) to hit reliably and a heavier caliber to deal effective damage. Also tracers work if your gun shoots more than 1 round/second (above 60 rpm) so i'd go with tracers instead of fins.

About beltfeds, you can make them have a consistent fire-rate but its weird. I'd use them still, unless you are low on materials (since they are expensive). Just set their reload timer (press Q on them) to a short time, since most aircraft attacks are "hit and run". The Belt-Fed vs Normal Loader dillema is more about having clips (which can explode) vs having only auto-loaders (safer).

Also flak is more efficient against wings and missiles, not conventional armor. And, if you do change the ammo to gunpowder, go with 2/3 gunpowder 1/3 warhead to have high speed.

[Vivicector]

Flak and frags are IMHO only good in large calibers. I'd say you need high ROF medium spread (yes, you don't want AA gun to be 100% accurate, its different from anti-missile gun) and as much speed as you can get.

[Siger]

aps is absolute trash as AA,simply because lasers exist.

if you really want a AA gun that can actually kill decent planes then you will need a stupid aps gun to even hit the target like the size of a main weapon...so......use lasers or agile medium missiles

[Tuesdak]

Frag works better for <180mm Flak works better for >180mm though HEAT works as a one shot with medium to small planes

[Rufus Shinra]

Originally posted by Siger:

aps is absolute trash as AA,simply because lasers exist.

if you really want a AA gun that can actually kill decent planes then you will need a stupid aps gun to even hit the target like the size of a main weapon...so......use lasers or agile medium missiles

Just make an universal APS that switches shells depending on target, then you can have a large gun that does the work.

[Mr.YaR]

Originally posted by Rufus Shinra:

Originally posted by Siger:

aps is absolute trash as AA,simply because lasers exist.

if you really want a AA gun that can actually kill decent planes then you will need a stupid aps gun to even hit the target like the size of a main weapon...so......use lasers or agile medium missiles

Just make an universal APS that switches shells depending on target, then you can have a large gun that does the work.

+1

Keep the shells fast