[Draft] Tips: Dealing With Enemy AA-guns (Aircraft Maneuvering)

You sometimes get shot down when enjoying the glory of flying with a plane.

There are mainly 7 factors which can be threats to your cuddly plane, i.e. enemy planes, AA-guns on the ground, AA-guns on the carrier (=Shokaku), assault rifles (=Bar, StG44), machine guns on the towers, and machine guns on the destroyer (=Hatsuzuki).

Most likely the ones which threaten the safety of your plane the most are those AA-guns.
Because of the fine effective range and accuracy, AA-guns certainly are eligible to be called "bad boys".

The best way to destroy those bad boys is to destroy them before the enemies notice the presence of your plane in the sky. It takes a while for an AA-gun to re-spawn after getting destroyed. Meanwhile you can have the pleasure to sweep out those groundlings freely without any fear.

However, it is possible that the enemies are standing by AA-guns and waiting for some naughty flying beauties. So you might have to deal with several AA-guns that are actually active.

Even though some pilots might already know the difficulty in destroying active AA-guns, I've come to realize that any single active AA-gun can't ever be a threat to a pilot as long as the pilot knows the presence of it. In fact, I can destroy enemy AA-guns without getting shot in most cases. Well, let's see the trick.

First of all, you must know where AA-guns are located at.
In the normal map, there are 6 AA-guns and their positions in the island are as you can see in the following map.

AA-gun map

Click the links below to see how they actually are placed.

AA1
AA2
AA3
AA4
AA5
AA6

As you can see they are all placed at the edge of the island, and this fact reveals the crucial shortcomings of them.

AA-guns can shoot almost any visible position unlike machine guns which can't shoot planes which are attempting to dive-bomb because of the angle restriction .

However, AA-guns can't shoot targets which are located at lower altitude than of AA-guns. Let's have a look at the following image.

This image is showing the area an AA-gun can shoot and the area it cannot shoot. The red area in the image is the danger zone, and the blue area is the safety zone where the AA-gun can never shoot.

As you might have already noticed, an AA-gun being placed at the edge of the island gives attacking pilots great chances to approach it to attack without getting shot. You never get shot if you just go through the safety zone.

The remaining problem is the way to destroy it. Even if you can approach a target AA-gun, it woudln't be a useful method for you to attack it at all if you haven't got any means to destroy it.

To solve this tricky problem, you might need to take a look at another image below.

This image is showing an important fact to us, i.e. the head of the AA shooter is located at a higher point than the barrel of the AA-gun. The shooter can't shoot the person who is having this view (=you) with the AA-gun while you can shoot the shooter dead with your weapon.

The same thing could be said about attacking an AA-gun with a plane. You go through the aforementioned safety zone horizontally, and strafe the enemy shooter out when the head of the shooter turns out to look clear enough for you to aim at.

I just can't say it's easy, but at least I can finish enemy AA-gunners off without getting damaged 80% of the time in this way. (Or using the past tense 'could' may be more appropriate since I haven't played this Demo seriously for quite a while.)


---After Missing Your Shoots---

You've already learnt the way to attack an enemy AA-gun by going through the safe zone.
One remaining problem is the action after missing the target. The Enemy shooter is observing your move quite carefully and keeping shooting, so you can't make an easy decision about this.

Concerning the horizontal direction, there are mainly 2 options, to go forward, or to go backward. If you are really good at controlling a plane, going backward wouldn't be a bad option, but it sometimes gets tough to survive undamaged by going backward. Especially the moment before you put yourself in the safe zone could be quite a chance for the enemy shooter to shoot down your plane. After all, my recommendation is to go forward.

Once you decide the horizontal direction, you need decide the vertical direction, to go up, or to go down. But there's an absolute answer to this question since it's obviously suicidal to go up if the target AA-gun is still alive.

The right decision is to go down and get to the "safety zone" where the target AA-gun can't shoot. It's inevitable to get into the "danger zone" once you miss your shoots, but there's no reason for staying there. Overall, you should move like the ○ Zero-fighter in the following image and get back to the safety zone immediately.

I'll post (some) video(s) regarding this later on.... [I hope(TM)]

Tips: How Fast Can Medics Cure Wounds?

In the game, BattleField 1942 Demo (Wake Island), wounds can be cured by fellow medics or by first-aid boxes.
But how fast can a wound be cured?

It frequently happens that an enemy follows after us and we don't have enough time to cure ourselves. But if you know the weapon the enemy uses, how good he is, and how fast you can cure yourself, you'll be able to grab a chance to survive the situation.

A medic can cure a wounded fellow at the speed of 15.3 [%/s] .
And a first-aid box can cure wound at the speed of 14.3 [%/s] .

These are rough approximation but I think the accuracy is well enought to us. Since we can't know how much life exactly is left to us, and also because we can't count time that precisely.

Perhaps not many players know this fact, but this knowledge is quite handy.
When you are a medic, wounded, and fighting against a handgunner, look at the life-gauge, and then think quickly how good the opponent can be. If you think the opponent can shoot your body (not head, nor leg) 1 time per magazine, you should have 2-magazine-worth life. According to this article, a shot on body by handgun reduces your life by 34 [%], so your life has to be at least more than 69 [%]. So if you've only got 10[%] of life, you should cure yourself for (69-10)/15.3 ≒3.86≒4 [s] with your medic kit. See, isn't it a bit handy?! (say yes nevertheless how you actually think!)

Oh, yes, perhaps you know this already, but if 2 medics are curing a wounded fellow at the same time, the curing speed will be twice.

The calculation doesn't have to be accurate.
"Rough'n'Quick" is always the key to defeat your enemy!

Tips: Effect of Weapons on Infantry

This article shows how much damage infantry get from a shot by a weapon.

Perhaps this could be a surprise to you but it is true that there's no power difference between the weapons of the Allies and of the Axis.

But note that what I show you in this article only refers to the power of weapons, i.e., damage by a SINGLE shot. The information on this article doesn't contain other sides of the strength of weapons like the accuracy rates. Moreover, the data is according to the default configuration, the data can be different in those modded servers.

In addition to that, there're some other weapons in the game, including vehicles. Hopefully I'll add the data of those weapons to this article in the near future.

There're 3 types of a direct shot, headshot, bodyshot, legshot.
Here I define a headshot as a shot which hits the red part of infantry, and a bodyshot = yellow part, a legshot = blue part (Picture 2).
This might be helpful to know which part of an enemy you should shoot. The effect of a shot differs a lot, so having strategies on this matter would bring you some nice effects like score improvements.

Table 1. Infantry Graphic (U.S. Medic)

Picture 1	Picture 2

Table 2. Weapon Effects

Name of Weapon	The Size of A Maga- zine (The Number of Maga- zines)	Damage by a Head- shot [%]	Damage by a Body- shot [%]	Damage by a Leg- shot [%]
Allies' Assault Rifle: BAR(Browning)	20(6)	74	47	30
Axis' Assault Rifle: StG44	30(5)	60	37	24
Submachine Gun (Allies: Thompson M1928 Axis: Bergman MP18)	M1928 :30(5) MP18 :32(5)	40	27	17
Rifle (Allies: Lee-Enfield No.4Mk 1 Axis:Kar98K)	6(5)	100	77	34
Handgun (Allies:Colt 1911, Axis:Walther P38)	8(4)	40	27	17
Anti-tank weapon (Allies:M1A1 Bazooka, Axis:Panzerschreck)	1(6)	100	100	100
Knife	∞(∞)	100	47	30

*Anti-tank weapons can do things on infantry not only by direct shots. This means you can damage enemy infantry by shooting around them. The damage by an indirect AT shot varies, like 0%-30% (Of course the damage depends on how near you could shoot, approximately a shot about the full length of a jeep away from the enemy can do no damage to him.)