Hi Red baron,
Regarding having aircraft attack ships...
Unless an (AI ) aircraft is carrying ordinance , it won't attack ships.
Even though historically such attacks were carried out to either divide ship anti-aircraft fire ,
to target anti-aircraft gun mounts ( or other specific ship operations - depth charges , torpedo
launch stations etc ) , to disable the bridge and thereby the ship's command and
control functions and probably other useful tactical reasons , Ship AI coders did not feel this
would be a useful characteristic.
Ships damage models ( experts in ships correct me if I am wrong here ) are (generally?) not
broken down to the level where strafing attacks are effective for any of the above reasons.
Of course if you are flying online with humans , they can always attack ships , but the effect
is going to be minimal due to how the damage models are constructed.
It is for this very reason you will find some small ship models in the vehicular object list in some
separate mods - I don't know if any mod packs have included them in this way.
I always thought is would be a more elegant solution to recode all (Armed) aircraft to attempt to obey a
direct command either from a GAttack Waypoint , or from an ingame human flight lead command to
Tab/6/7 ( or Attack Ships ).
If coders were worried about lightly armed aircraft blazing away until ship AAA obliterated them ,
they could always limit the attacks to one or very few attack runs before the aircraft broke off.
Even if inneffective in game terms , the appearance of the attack happening would reflect real historical
actions in desperate situations , and thereby raise the level of immersion for the player.
Just my thoughts.
Kopfdorfer