Standard Flak

The Standard Flak is a defensive weapon used in FreeSpace 2. Flak guns fire highly visible projectiles that explode violently near enemy targets, damaging anything within their blast radius. While flak projectiles do negligible damage against shielded targets, their effective blast radius, coupled with the guns' high rate of fire, makes flak guns a considerable threat against unshielded or partially shielded targets; prolonged exposure to flak fire can also wear down even the most heavily shielded fighters and bombers. The Standard Flak has the highest rate of fire among all flak guns in the game, but it has the shortest effective range. Standard Flak is a ubiquitous weapon during the Second Shivan Incursion, used by the Terrans, Vasudans and Shivans, and mounted on a wide variety of ships ranging from gas miners to destroyers.

Weapons in Descent: FreeSpace

Primaries Secondaries Turrets Weapon Comparison Table, FS1

Weapons in FreeSpace 2

Primaries Secondaries Turrets Weapon Comparison Table, FS2

Performance

Statistics

Range	1050 m
Rate of Fire	6.67 s-1
Velocity	700 ms-1
Base Damage	30*
Armor Damage	Full	30*
Shield Damage	Full	30*
Subsystem Damage	Poor	6*
Shockwave Radius	20 / 30 m

Notes

• The shockwave doubles the damage against any target that takes a direct hit

Veteran Comments

Please read the Veteran Comments policy before editing this section.

The meat-and-potato point defense weapon in FreeSpace 2. It is used by every race and virtually every warship (GVC Aten doesn't count), and some non-warships (GTFr Triton); the GTC Aeolus actually makes most of its warship kills with flak rather than its two weak SGreens.

Flak is primarily a danger to a fightercraft with a breached shield quadrant, ANY breached shield quadrant, even if it's on the other side of the fighter from the flak gun. Pay close attention to your shields and equalize their strength often if under flak fire.

As said above, if you have any breached quadrant, you will die very fast. When you have to destroy the first Sathanas's beam turrets, you should pipe more power into the shields to avoid being killed by the flak.

In relation to bombs, the problem with flak is that it rarely makes direct hits on anything smaller than a Seraphim. Bombs have to be hit directly in order to blow up, not by a shockwave.

Probably the worst problem with Flak guns is that they will prevent you from gaining aspect lock with your torpedoes if you are playing in first-person view (which is the default view). You could have your shields boosted all the way up and sit there for half an hour waiting for your Cyclops to lock if you have flak rattling you around. Pick the turrets off with Trebuchets, Stilettos or Maxims before you go for aspect lock or switch to Chase View, which isn't affected by the shuddering.

Flak can also be used on hostile warships, and it is considerably more effective in this regard than other point-defenses.

Note to modders: if standard flak is allowed to fire at its tabled rate (e.g. by removing $don't insert random turret fire delay: and $Hostile AI Fire Delay Scale:) it becomes insanely powerful, dealing 200-400 damage per second and destroying most strikecraft before they can escape.