Something for the flak to shoot: carrier strike planes

June 26, 2026 · naval combat

Last time the warships got anti-air guns — and then stood watch over an empty sky. So the naval theater now launches air power of its own: a wing of AI torpedo bombers that hunt the enemy fleet, run in at wavetop height, and put fish in the water under the ships' flak.

The threat from above

Each side keeps a wing of carrier torpedo bombers aloft. They pick the nearest enemy hull, transit toward it, then drop to the deck and bore in low and slow for the drop — the only way to lay a torpedo that runs true. A fish in the side of a warship does solid damage and opens it to flooding, exactly like a destroyer's tubes, so a clean strike is something the captain has to fight with the damage-control party.

And the run-in is the dangerous part: it takes the bomber straight down the throat of the ship's secondary and anti-air batteries. The flak we added last time finally has its targets — it tracks the incoming planes, leads them, and throws up bursting fire to break the attack before the drop. Bombers that loiter inside the envelope don't come home.

A torpedo bomber running in low over the sea toward a warship, the ship throwing up anti-air flak bursts to meet it — A torpedo bomber boring in at wavetop height while the warship's flak reaches up to break the run.

Almost no new machinery

The striking thing about this feature is how little of it is new. The air game already had torpedo-bomber bots, the torpedo-run flight model, the aerial-torpedo physics, and the damage path for a fish hitting a warship hull. The anti-air mounts were already on the ships. A plane is the same Player a human flies, run through the same flight model, and the ship AA already locks onto any enemy aircraft on its own.

So the whole feature is mostly orchestration: a naval-only brain that hunts warship hulls instead of the anchored fleet, a launcher that puts the wing in the air off each team's flank, and one extra line so an air-dropped fish bites a warship for a balanced amount (the air game's Swordfin warhead would one-shot a 255-HP hull). All of it lives behind the same theater seam that keeps the sea war and the air war apart — the air game's bots are byte-for-byte unchanged. Share the machinery, isolate the orchestration.

The sea war now has a sky over it. Next we can let players take the bomber's seat themselves.