We are currently on station to the south of Pelee; HMAS Stuart has detached from the task group to complete a Naval Gunfire Support serial against shore targets on Pelee. HMAS Anzac has just completed a replenishment at sea (RAS, also known as underway replenishment--UNREP) with our high value unit (HVU) HMAS Sirius in preparation for transit of the Ceram Sea to RP Oscar.

Naval Gunfire Support (NGS) is often overlooked in the age of cruise missiles and air power, however naval gunfire has some advantages that missiles and aircraft lack. Aircraft and missiles are vulnerable to air defences, and while shells from naval gunfire can be countered with specialized systems they remain relatively uncommon and do not maintain their effectiveness well in the face of sustained attack.

Your frigates are equipped with Harpoon II cruise missiles which can be used against land targets or surface ships, and their MH-60R multi-role helicopters can also be fitted with Hellfire missiles to attack land and surface targets. The Harpoon IIs and Hellfires are limited in supply, with your frigates carrying 8 of each as standard. Ammunition for your 127mm guns on the other hand, is plentiful--with 300 rounds of high explosive point detonating (HE-PD) ammunition that is extremely well suited to NGS. You may recall from Basic Surface Operations 1.3 that HE-CVT ammunition is loaded by default to defend against unexpected air threats; assigning HE-PD ammunition to a target means the crew will automatically reload the desired ammunition before firing.

Select HMAS Stuart and use the manual attack order (Shift+F1) to assign 127mm/54 HE-PD shells to each target in the NGS Target Field on Pelee. You can allocate a fixed number of shots to each target in the target list by first selecting the firing unit then pressing Shift+F1 to order manual weapon assignment, drag-selecting the target contacts, then using Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click to select multiple targets in the target list, and finally entering a number in the "Allocate weapons to selected target(s)" field and clicking the associated button. Since we have 300 rounds of HE-PD ammunition and six targets, we can allocate 50 rounds to each target using that method. Once a target is destroyed, any weapons allocated but not yet fired are de-allocated and available for use on other targets.

Once you have allocated your 127mm HE-PD ammunition to the 6 targets on Pelee, start time by pressing Space or clicking 'Close & Resume'.