The guns that aim themselves: secondaries and flak

June 26, 2026 · naval combat

A warship isn't just its main battery. Around the big turrets sit dozens of smaller guns the crew works on their own — rapid-fire secondaries for a close brawl, and anti-air flak overhead. Both now run in the naval theater, and they aim themselves.

Secondaries: the price of a knife-fight

The main battery is yours to aim. The secondary battery is not — it's a hail of small high-explosive shells the crew throws at the nearest enemy ship all by itself, the moment one sails inside range. You don't point it; you just have to be close.

That makes range the whole decision. A destroyer rushing in for a torpedo run, two cruisers circling at three kilometres, anyone caught in a brawl — the secondaries open up and start bleeding the target between main salvos, each round with a chance to light a fire. It's a hail, not a laser: every shell carries dispersion, so plenty miss at range, but up close the stream is relentless. Keeping your distance keeps you out of it; closing for the kill means eating it.

Two blocky warships circling each other at close range on open water, dense streams of small high-explosive shells crossing between them as their secondary batteries open fire — Inside secondary range — the crews work the small guns on their own, a dense stream of HE crossing the gap between main salvos.

Flak overhead

Every hull that carries it now also mounts an anti-air battery — a twin flak mount that tracks and leads aircraft and throws up bursting fire exactly the way the land and battleship AA already do. In a ship-only theater it mostly stands quiet watch, but it's wired and ready: the moment the sea war gets aircraft of its own — carrier strike planes are the obvious next step — the flak is already up there waiting for them.

How it sits in the engine

Neither of these is new machinery. The flak mount is the same engageAir auto-gun the airfield and battleship flak use, just bolted to a warship instead of the deck. The secondary battery fires the same naval shell the main guns and torpedoes already ride through the snapshot, so it renders and does damage with nothing new on the wire. A warship simply fits its auto-worked mounts when it spawns, and a single per-tick call works them — the secondaries against the nearest ship, the flak against any plane.

And as with everything in the naval theater, none of it touches the air game. The batteries live entirely in the naval combat code, behind the same seam that keeps the two modes apart — share the machinery, isolate the orchestration. Next stop for the sea: putting something in the air for that flak to shoot at.