Bomber crew: the Leviathan gets a tail gunner and a top gunner
The Leviathan has always worn a tail glasshouse and a dorsal dome — painted on, guns for show. Now they're seats. One player flies the bomber; a second and third crew the tail stinger and the top turret, each a twin .50 cal modeled on a B-17's defensive blister positions. It's the game's first multi-crew aircraft, and it changes what it means to press a bomber's six.
Two seats, one airframe
Pick BOMBER CREW on the spawn screen — it sits right next to AIRCRAFT — and choose the tail or the top. The server seats you on the first friendly Leviathan with that station free, preferring human pilots over bots so crews of friends form up naturally. From the seat, your view is first person over the barrels: the tail gunner owns the rear cone, a ±72° arc around dead astern; the top gunner rides a full-circle ring with elevation from the horizon to nearly straight up. Mouse slews the mount, the trigger fires both barrels, and the lead pip does the same firing- solution math the wing guns get — deflection plus gravity drop — so leading a crossing fighter feels exactly like gunnery everywhere else in the game.
The crew shares the airframe in every sense. Rounds that hit the bomber hit the bomber — there is no shooting the gunner out of his blister — and if she goes down, pilot and gunners go down with her, each a kill for whoever did it. Your own kills are your own: a fighter that comes apart under your tracers goes on your ledger (and counts toward the manned-gun daily missions). Bail out with F anytime; die with the ship and the sticky seat choice re-forms the crew on the next friendly bomber that's flying.
A gun that lives in the airframe's frame
The interesting engineering is in what frame the gun aims. A flak emplacement aims in world space — yaw against north, pitch against the horizon. Bolt that onto a bomber and every bank would swing your point of aim across the sky. So a turret's aim lives in the airframe's body frame: zero yaw is over the nose, and the traverse/elevation arcs are properties of the mount, not the world. The server integrates your slew inputs in that frame, clamps them to the seat's arcs, and only converts to world space at the moment of firing — rotating the aim through the bomber's attitude quaternion and adding the bomber's velocity to the muzzle velocity, so rounds are born moving with the ship like real defensive fire.
The client mirrors that integration for its local aim prediction, the same trick the manned flak uses: your view answers the mouse instantly, and the 20 Hz snapshots only nudge the predicted aim back toward the server's truth. The snapshot grew a small turret section — who's in which seat on which airframe, aiming where, trigger down or not — so every client can pose the articulated turret meshes on every bomber in view. When the top turret swings to track you across a formation, that's another player's hands doing it, and everyone can see it.
Why a bomber, why now
The Leviathan flies straight and level by doctrine — it's the only plane with a bombsight, and its whole job is holding a run while the flak hunts it. That made it the game's most defenseless ride and its most natural social hook: the pilot is busy walking the pipper onto the target, which is exactly when a fighter parks on his six. Now that parking spot has two .50s waiting in it, and the counter-play writes itself — attack from the low front quarter where neither arc reaches, or pay for the lazy saddle-up. A crewed bomber with an escort is a flying strongpoint; an empty one is the same fat target it always was. Man the guns.
Multi-crew is the cheapest kind of content: no new map, no new mode, just two more chairs in a plane that already flies — and every one of them is a friend you talked into the sortie.