This is strange.

Been on a few balloon-busting missions now expecting
a very tough time with the old archie: but no, really
quite - dare I saw it - easy with archie notable by its
relative absence.

Anywhere else over the line - dromes/rail-yards and so on, archie
aplenty with mg fire mixed in if you go below 2000ft.

Anybody else experience this puzzling Absence of Archie?

RS

(should say that this is my experience with RFC missions)

Personally I agree. I noticed that although there is archie, I rarely feel like it's accurate. I have read that it was quite ineffective back then, but the amount of it was still high in certain areas. That's just me though.

RamblingSid, I have had a few "touchy" balloon missions but have found them overall easy. Matter of fact, I just finished one and nothing until the balloon was down, then they woke up. That being said, I find it hard enough to stay alive in WOFF so I will take it as it is. Might be one for the "wish list."

Yeap, this one needs a tweak... now where to look????

The anti-air artillery was very ineffective at the time but machineguns on the ground were something to be feared at low altitude.

The balloons generally had numerous machineguns on the ground nearby, defending them. I think that was SOP late in the war, at least. There were pilot accounts telling of the crazy amount of MG fire you'd receive when making such low altitude runs on balloons. While a good portion of it may have fallen behind the aircraft due to misjudgement of the lead angle, there was still enough lead flying around to make it quite dangerous. That's my impression from the accounts, anyway.

I also read that they would set up flak walls to counter enemy planes trying to shoot them down.Since the ballon was at a known height it was easy to adjust the flak to create this and hard for enemy planes to attack thru.

Man, I must be unlucky at times because I've wound up full of machine gun bullet holes attacking a balloon. Not alays, but enough to cause me to be cautious.

As for flak burts near balloons, the location of the balloon to other ground objects matters. "Normal" ground gunnery is usually plenty hard for me. "Hard" ground gunnery I find rather suicidial.