Big J learns rate control
Until now the Big J's fire control was honest about everything except the interesting part. You designated a target on the CIC scope and a quality percentage climbed by itself until the battery released — the Mk 8 rangekeeper as a progress bar. The real machine didn't work that way, and the real method turns out to be a better game than the fake one. This update rebuilds the plot around rate control, opens the whole ship to teleport, and fixes the two stations that stared into steel — then lets you ride your own salvo out on a chase cam, call your own spots from the director, and steams her back to the war this page had been skipping: Wonsan, 1951.
Only one combination is the solution
The Mk 8 rangekeeper was an analog computer that generated the target's motion: from own ship's course and speed (measured by gyrocompass and pitometer log, and therefore trusted) plus an estimated target course and speed, it dead-reckoned present range and bearing continuously. The operator's whole job — the doctrine called it rate control — was to compare that generated track against what the director and radar actually observed, and crank the target estimate until the two agreed. The manuals are lovely and blunt about it: only one combination of target course and speed will cause both range and bearing rates to agree, and that combination is the solution.
So that's the game now. Designate a target and the spotter passes plot a rough guess — "target angle three-three-zero, speed twenty" — deliberately off. Man the Mk 8 rangekeeper on the third deck and you get the machine's actual working surfaces: a time-range plotter where radar ranges arrive as phosphor dots and your generated range draws as a continuous pen line, and two needle-matching meters — range rate and bearing drift — each with a green observed bug and a gold generated bug. A/D cranks estimated target course, W/S cranks speed. Wrong estimate: the pen line pulls away from the dots and the gold bugs sit off the green. Right estimate: everything lines up, the SOLUTION lamp comes on, and the battery releases.
Wrong rates now miss
The old quality bar was cosmetic; the new one is measured agreement, and it has teeth. Salvos are aimed with the plot's own estimate of target motion — the lead comes from your cranked-in course and speed, not from the truth. A 15-knot rate error across a 40-second time of flight puts the pattern 300 meters from the target, exactly as the arithmetic says it should. When the target turns, your rates go stale and the plot tells you so; when radar ranging is knocked out, the dots stop arriving and you're back to optical cuts from the director, like a night action with the Mk 8 radar gone. The fire-control team still works the knobs when you're needed elsewhere — slower, and never quite exact — so the ship fights without you, just better with you. That division of labor is the period-correct one, too.
Nobody gets lost on their own ship
The honest feedback from the first week aboard: walking a 270-meter ship is glorious twice and a commute after that, main battery plot on the third deck was a spelunking expedition, and two stations manned you straight into a wall of gray voxels. All fixed. T now opens the whole ship — seven battle stations by number, and every compartment by letter, grouped by deck, from the chart house down to Fire Room No. 4. The turret periscope eye now rides the gunhouse roof between the barrels (it used to sit in the officer's booth, staring at the turret's rear plate at 8×), and the plot desk looks across the rangekeeper table at its own glowing board.
Ride the salvo out
Nine guns fire and everything interesting happens eleven miles away. Not anymore: press V and the camera rides the last round out — a chase position off the shell's own tail, time compressing through the cruise phase so a 40-second arc doesn't feel like one, then real time again for the plunge and the burst. The shells were always simulated individually; the camera just finally went along. It ends on the explosion, lingers long enough to watch the smoke climb, and puts you back aboard where you left yourself.
The spot is your call
Corrections used to apply themselves. Now, if you're in the director when the salvo lands, the splashes come up as pips on the Mk 8 spot scope — the radar picture the real operators said was like "drawing the splashes on paper" — and the correction is yours to key: U/J add or drop in hundreds, H/K left or right, deflection then range in the traditional order, C to send it to plot. Park the gold bug on the splash group and a good call cancels the miss almost entirely; dither past the window and the weaker air-spot correction goes in without you. With the radar out, the pips scatter and spotting gets honest-hard, like a night action should be. And the plot now freezes its own rate corrections while a salvo is in the air — applying spots and rate corrections simultaneously is the "pyramiding" the gunnery manuals warn about, and it double-corrects the same error.
Wonsan, 1951
The mission select also grows a fourth card, and it belongs between 1944 and Vietnam: the Siege of Wonsan, the longest naval siege of the century, where the recommissioned New Jersey fired her first rounds in anger since 1945. Rail lines and gun caves above the harbor, a supply point on Hodo Pando — and the Kalmagak batteries, which had been registering on the anchorage for weeks. They unmask the moment your first salvo commits you, shooting like they know the range, because historically they did: on 21 May 1951 they hit her, the only combat casualties the ship ever took. If their gunners get lucky here too, the damage-control game you've been ignoring stops being optional.
And the ship got furniture
Every compartment picked up the fittings that make a space read as itself at a glance: gauge boards and firebox doors glowing in the fire room, a brass trick wheel back aft in steering gear, the wardroom's sideboard and coffee urn, red vinyl stools at the gedunk, stacked lockers in the berthing compartment, a red cross inlaid on sick bay's bulkhead, cable trays and battle phones where cable trays and battle phones go. Three new voxel types — gauge faces, conduit, polished brass — and a pass through all thirty-odd compartments. The salvo buzzer rings twice in the turrets before the guns go, because of course it does.
Same ship, real fire control. Report aboard: warbirds.io/battleship — and if the pen won't sit on the dots, remember the trainer's rule of thumb: along the line of sight, speed moves range rate; across it, course does. Long hours of practice in tracking actual targets alone will provide the experience required.