crsutton
Posts: 9590
Joined: 12/6/2002 From: Maryland Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mikeg1218 Well, I was just reading about the Sicily landings and all AK and AP type ships were six miles or more off shore. Really not a feasable range for smaller caliber guns. I assume other landings would also set these ships far out of harms way. Landing craft, should however take a severe pounding if there area a lot of smaller caliber guns that have not been suppressed. The amount of damage my AK, AP, and LSD's were taking was pretty much what got me looking into the whole landing craft thing. However, and to be fair, the range of a dual purpose 5"/38 was around ten miles so, while I expect such guns to be more occupied by trying to stop the landing craft rather then ranging shots out to the transports, it is within reason that some damage, even serious damage, could be caused to anchored thin skinned targets with all their main hatches wide open. While I may have a little problem with those ships taking as much damage as the LST's I'm happy to accept some ship system damage to damage and sinking of those ships landing craft. But that still leaves me puzzled by the manual and it's equating barges to Mike and Papa boats to be built on the transports and just what is happening to those landing craft and should I be worried about building them. All in all six miles makes for a long swim for a fully loaded Marine and underestimating or under portraying the importance of the Higgins boats seems a little shaky to me. In the category of weapons they played a hell of a lot more important part of the pacific war then the 18"er's of the Yamato did, just ask D. D. Eisenhower. I really don't want to start a shooting war over the whole thing, I just want to understand what is actually happeing. MikeG. You are right about the DP 5 inch gun but that is under optimal conditions. I doubt that you would find similar guns in most shore defenses. Of couse there are many varieties but most shore guns were casemated and set up for direct fire. They also tended to be older more obsolete guns with primitive fire control and should not be compared to modern shipboard guns that benefited from radar and sophisticated fire control and targeting systems. This is expecially true of the Japanese. Factor in other conditions such as visability (lots of haze and fog near beaches) and I don't think it would be unreasonable to think that six miles is pretty far off for your average small costal gun to have much effect. None the less, my point was that the allies tended to park invasion AKs and APs out of range of smaller guns-be it six miles or ten. But in the game, the APs and Aks can get pretty beat up by small guns. No biggie though. I can live with that.
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