Flak towers?
 

Idea popped into my head (which is always a bad thing :D)... what about flak towers? We've never had them in the game before. I'm not even sure if anyone in MOD land has ever created one.

These are what I'm talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower

I realize they were for city defense... but I thought some smaller ones were used for airfields too? Perhaps they could be created using stationary ships or armor with the necessary weapons already on them?

UP3 has 4 new flak units that each simulate a 'battery' of flak guns. So you only need to place one unit in order to simulate an entire battery of flak defense. As a mission builder, I find myself loving this new toy in the FMB. I wish we could get this in stock IL-2.

I suppose this is the closest thing to a 'flak tower' we have right now.

Aviar

That would be generally easy to make. But since the freely placeable flak units in game are always on ground level, we would have to make a choise of:

1. having a few types of tower objects with fixed armament
2. importing many new AA versions, which are to use only on top of the unarmed objects

I think these are a bit excessive and not very useful anyway as we do not have suitabl maps and certainly not the CPU power to have the vast number of AA guns firing at once.

A rather simple solution for now would be to have combinations of the exsisting bunkers and varios AA guns, cause right now you can't use the bunkers as intended as the AA guns always end up inside and not on top.

Any of these are good options! I prefer the second one but the first will be ok.

A couple of types with fixed armament wouldn't be a terrible thing. Aviar is right, something along those lines would be useful for building missions in some cases although copy and paste helps in a big way these days and is the single most useful addition for me in the FMB.

Flak towers were in "Aces Over Europe" (Dynamix - 1993): it's a pity that each new software house does not start from the "state of art".

GB

I do remember trying to convince some AI planes to ram the tower while chasing me. I can't remember how successful I was :)

There's been some talk among modders about how to do flak towers.

The big obstacle is that you can't elevate flak guns (or most other objects) off the ground, so you can't place flak guns in flak towers. The ways around this might be:

1) Define the flak tower as a "ship" which is immobile but which can be placed on land. AA guns on the tower are part of the larger model and the tower can be "sunk" if it takes sufficient damage.

2) Define the flak tower as a "mountain" on which other objects can be placed. This idea is based on the premise that it's possible to place objects on the Mt. Suribachi object.

This sort of object would be indestructable and wouldn't require the flak guns to be part of the larger object. It would mean that individual flak guns would need to be placed on the object by mission builders, however.

So far as I know, nobody with the 3d and coding skills has had sufficient interest in flak towers to explore these options. They would be welcome additions to many German and English Channel maps.

The elevation is done within the 3D modelling program and by the use of hooks. That is definitely not the problem.

All you need to do is load the artillery object and the bunker object into your modelling program, place the artillery ontop and remove the ground level hook of the artillery and rename the one of the bunker. Save and done.

The code will be 100% the same as the one of the regular artillery on the ground so no work involved there.

Should be done in a day for all light and medium artillery pieces we have for the three nations.