Big J goes to her real wars

July 7, 2026 · /battleship

The walkable USS New Jersey shipped with a fictional 1944 gun duel — the fight the Iowas trained for and never got. But the Big J did shoot in anger, twice, and neither time at a ship. The battleship page now opens on a mission select: the what-if surface action, the Vietnam gunline of 1968–69, and Beirut in February 1984. The new ones needed a whole mechanic the game didn't have: shore bombardment.

The battleship title screen mission cards: Surface Action (the Pacific, 1944 — what-if) alongside her historical deployments — The mission select — one invented action, the rest straight out of the deck logs. (Wonsan, 1951 joined the board in a later update.)

Land the shells can hit

Shore fire needs a shore. Each historical mission builds a coastline as an analytic heightfield — a single heightAt(x, z) that is the one source of truth for the terrain mesh, the radar landmass paint, target placement and, crucially, shell impacts. Off the DMZ that's a beach berm, paddy plain and jungle foothills with the Cua Viet cutting through; off Beirut it's the city's narrow shelf and then the Shouf stacking up to a February snow line. A 16-inch round now flies its ballistic arc until it meets that function, and bursts in a climbing column of earth exactly on the hillside you can see from the director's optics.

The voxel New Jersey firing a main battery salvo toward the Vietnamese coast, muzzle smoke over the forward turrets, the fire-support tasking checklist on screen — On the gunline: six guns answering a call for fire, the DMZ coast on the horizon.

A spotter on the net

There's no enemy fleet out here, so CIC works for someone ashore. A spotter — ANGLICO callsign LEATHERNECK 2-6 in Vietnam, the Fire Support Coordination Center off Beirut — calls fire missions over the net: target, description, bearing, range. Called targets appear on the PPI scope as hand-plotted gold diamonds beside the radar's own landmass paint, and they designate to the main battery exactly like a skunk: same Mk 8 rangekeeper, same solution quality, same F. The spotter talks you on in his own language — ADD 200, RIGHT 100 instead of the naval OVER and SHORT — and reads back battle damage when the target dies: guns silent, pits burning, end of mission, out.

The SG radar PPI scope in CIC with the coastline painted as a green landmass and four gold diamond fire-mission plots labeled TGT A through D — The scope earns its keep: coastline painted from the same heightfield the shells hit, four fire missions plotted in gold.

Sixteen-inch shell bursts walking across an NVA artillery battery on the coastal plain, one gun pit erupting in flame, the message log reading TARGET DESTROYED — Effect on target. The 122 mm battery stops being a battery.

They shot back, so we do too

New Jersey was taken under fire repeatedly on the gunline — coastal guns near Cap Mui Lay straddled her more than once and never touched her. So: fire your first salvo in the Vietnam mission and the coastal battery unmasks, counter-battery radar plots the flashes, and 130 mm rounds start arriving with a whistle. They go through the same shell simulator as everything else, flagged as the splinter threat they were — the armor scheme treats them with period-honest contempt, but a lucky one topside can still start a fire in the spaces you actually use. Silencing that battery is on your tasking.

Beirut: gunnery as a rules-of-engagement problem

The February 1984 mission is the interesting one. The targets are artillery positions nine hundred meters up the Shouf — and the rangekeeper solves for sea level, so the game's fire control had to learn altitude. The range table now records each trajectory's angle of fall, and for an elevated target the plot walks out along the descending branch until the arc crosses the target's height — aim long, drop on top. And because Beirut sits under your gun-target line, the mission adds the constraint the real ship lived with: rounds into the city are counted, and three relieve you of command. Suddenly a 98% solution isn't a formality.

The New Jersey on station off Beirut, the city shelf and the hazy Shouf mountains rising beyond her bow — On station off Beirut: the city on its shelf, the Shouf in the February haze behind it — and every round has to clear one to land in the other.

Also: you can find the bridge now

Play-testing the missions surfaced a nest of embarrassments. The first order is “lay up to the navigation bridge,” and the nearest ladder to your spawn point climbed four meters into a blank wall — the aft fire-control tower sat directly on top of it. The route that did work was a 197-tile maze around the far side of the superstructure. Worse: ladder cells are non-solid, the greedy mesher only draws solid and glass, so every ladder on the ship was climbable but invisible — and the trunk up to the Mk 38 director topped out against the platform deck because the deck plate was stamped over the hatch after it was cut.

All fixed, with witnesses: ladders are now real brass rails-and-rungs geometry (one instanced mesh for the whole ship), they land where a sailor can step off, climbing magnetizes you gently onto the column so one-meter deck hatches thread cleanly, SHIFT beside a hatch grabs the ladder to go down — and a Playwright test now physically climbs the director shaft with simulated keys before we ship. Every order projects a gold beacon through the steel with a name and a range on it, on the HUD and the deck plans. And for the impatient: press T, and the ship's seven stations are one keypress away — teleport straight to the helm, CIC, plot, the director, and you're manning it. Walking her decks is the point; being lost on them isn't.

From the quarterdeck spawn: two brass ladders flanking the aft deckhouse door and a gold beacon column marking the navigation bridge objective, chip reading NAV BRIDGE — 65 m — From the spawn point: brass ladders you can actually see, and the beacon saying where they lead.

Same ship, same walk, three wars. Report aboard: warbirds.io/battleship.