Down her stacks: the dive bombers

July 10, 2026 · naval combat

The strike wing learns the other classic carrier attack. Alongside the wavetop torpedo bombers, each side now flies dive bombers: they ride in high over your ships, chop the throttle, coast just past the stern, wing over onto their backs, pull the deck up into the sights, and let the bombs go straight down the dive. There's a new threat overhead, and it doesn't come from where you're looking.

Death from directly above

The torpedo bombers taught you to watch the wavetops. The dive bombers make you watch the sky. They stack up on a perch high above the fleet, then tip over one after another and plunge near-vertical down your funnels — the hardest attack to shoot at, because the plane is a shrinking dot coming straight at you and there's barely any angle to lead. Bombs walk down the dive line and burst close aboard, throwing up walls of water and stinging your hull through the splash.

A dive bomber plunging near-vertically toward a cruiser, two bombs falling along the dive line, flak bursting around the plane — The whole attack in one frame: the plunge, the falling stick, the flak trying to meet it.

Two threats, one sky

Dive bombers don't replace the torpedo wing — they fight alongside it, and that's the point. A fleet that hunkers down to comb torpedoes at wavetop height has already stopped watching the perch; a fleet with its flak trained on the high divers is wide open at the waterline. The two attacks pull your gunners in opposite directions, and a good enemy air group makes you choose.

There's a rhythm to reading it. The wing stages up high, well outside your flak, reforms, and only then turns in and commits. The moment they tip over is your window: throw up a wall of bursting fire on the way down and you can spoil the drop before it releases. Miss that window and you're combing splashes.

A near miss still hurts

Dive bombers aren't snipers. A dead-centre hit down the stacks is a jackpot, not the expectation — most sticks straddle close aboard, a ship-length or two into the water beside you, stinging through the splash rather than gutting the hull outright. The clean deck hit is the one every bomber pilot dreams of and rarely gets. Ship-killing stays the torpedo wing's job; the divers are there to hammer you, split your flak, and make the whole sky dangerous.

And once a bomber commits, it commits — it presses through your flak screen, drops, pulls out low, and runs out flat on the water before climbing away to reform for another pass. Next: letting a player fly the dive themselves, with the wing as squadmates.