After assembling your Board, you got to talking with everyone.
Janzen, as a pilot, was quite conflicted on the topic of flak. In the War, it hadn't been a major issue unless you were going after something like divisional command with bombs or an artillery spotting balloon. Most flak, to him, had been based around the enemy's machine guns, and generally surrounded the balloon in three to four positions. When he was attacking a balloon, the two times he succeeded (attempt number three nearly taking off a wing of his) his technique was to make sure he was always flying tangentially to the guns, as if he was flying straight at them he'd get shredded. By his estimation, it took ten light and heavy machine guns to really put up a hard and fast no fly zone, and anything less than that was only discouragement. You could press an attack through flak, mostly if you had speed and altitude, but the early war eindekers didn't really enjoy either if you didn't baby them.
Kaptain Adler, meanwhile, thought Janzen was a bloody idiot and backwards fighter jock till the day he died. In terms of flak, the importance wasn't on the number of guns pumping lead, but rather on the ability to aim them. On the Carragian Front, there were several incidents where only three guns beat off four or five fighters, but the planes were all coming in from specific angles and the gunner had low closing rates- meanwhile, the Balhks tended to fill the sky with lead and shell shrapnel to little effect because they had no trigger discipline. If you went for a shell firing gun as the solution, Adler thought, you'd need to make sure you had an accurate firing solution on either a barrage point for transverse shots, or you had a solid bead on the plane with no more than fifteen degrees of closing angle, ten if the gun had a hand traverse. Anything with limited traverse, less than ninety degrees or so, needed to be immediately axed too. A light machine-gun based solution needed a certain amount of armor so a suppressive burst of the plane's synchronized gun didn't panic the crew. There'd only need to be one or two guns for the lighter pieces, but the catch was that they'd need to be both highly reliable, and more importantly be able to fire a lot of rounds. Once the gunner had a target, he was going to hold down the trigger, track the bogey, and pray he hit until the plane was out of his sights or he was out of bullets.
Vizewachtmeister Lang in large part agreed with Adler, and the two promptly blocked together to avoid some of the other unwise ideas floating around. Experiance with shell-firing guns in the War revealed they needed specialized mounts, and there was an old 8,8cm long gun concept they'd pulled out in a couple of regiments to serve as a flak cannon. The main issue was training the gun, since a wooden carriage trained about as fast as the ass hauling it. For lighter guns, he thought four guns under competent aims could bag a plane every time, and preffered ensuring there was both density of fire, and more importantly that a gunner could actually keep a lead on a target that was conducting a terminal attack near his position, which meant an increasing angle difference. Most planes were shot down on terminal attack runs, many after releasing their ordinance. The most important thing that Lang was concerned with, though, was good sights and good training. A gun crew had to be up at a moment's notice, and light flak units had to be able to keep their weapons in a ready state, even with the engines off.
Volkkstrupppe wasn't much help, but explained your smallest time fuse would result in a twenty to thirty percent dud rate in a 5,5cm gun, and you'd probably need a long barrel and wide bore to get good performance. Likewise, you'd need to drop spades and possibly even use a packing mount for a dedicated flak gun that fired shells. Anything smaller than the 3,5cm guns wasn't his problem, though.
Mittlewesk, meanwhile, was chomping at the bit to go if you needed a new gun. The old 8,8cm guns were a Royal Armory exclusive, but he'd be able to go around and get you a new option in roughly the same caliber if you needed a shell-firing gun. A machine gun would be notably harder to build since they were more mechanically complex, but he had high hopes on the "Embiggening Project" the team had been working on, and with long recoil weapons for vehicle mountings.
At this point, Hauptman zie Himmel Janzen reminded you that you still needed an idea on how to test firing at a moving target, and one moving in three dimensions, no less. God, you were going to be in deep on this one.
Votes
(Plan Vote)
[] Work on the Test Apparatus
-[] Write-in ideas
[] Work on the Weapons Specifications
-[] Write-in ideas
[] Work on the Chassis Specifications
-[] Write-in ideas
(Ok, since this is easily two or three times as complicated as your other projects, I'm breaking it up some. Before you write the RFQ and kick off testing, you need to decide some general ideas for this thing, and more importantly find a way to see if it works without shooting down friendlies. That last bit is bad.)
