Down the sights
The report was one line: “the shot seems to go up in the air, not down the sights.” Put the crosshair on a Paladin a kilometre out, pull the trigger, and watch the tracer climb over its turret and burst somewhere in the clouds. That’s fixed. The round goes where you aim.
Over the shoulder, on the money
You drive a tank from behind and above the hull, and the crosshair in the middle of that view used to be honest at exactly one distance: four hundred metres. Past that, the gun was actually pointing over whatever sat under the crosshair, and the farther the target, the higher the miss. A tank a kilometre out on open steppe could watch the round clear its roof by the height of a town house. Inside four hundred metres it went the other way and chewed up the dirt short of the target.
Now the crosshair sits on the round’s path at whatever you’re aiming at, near or far. Lay it on a Paladin across the steppe or a Jackal lurking three hundred metres off in a treeline, fire, and the round goes there. You don’t have to duck into the gunsight to hit anything; the gunsight is for magnification now, not for honesty.
The sight reads the tank, not the hill behind it
Every tank’s gunsight finds the range to what’s under the crosshair and raises the barrel to match, so the round drops onto the exact spot you picked without you holding over. That’s the RNG readout in the gunsight, and the gold ring on the ground in the outside view.
Trouble was, it looked straight past enemy tanks. It read the hillside behind the target and lobbed the round for that. Worse, with a tank parked on a ridge against open sky, it read the sky itself and threw the round as far as the gun could reach. Now it reads the tank:
- A crosshair on the hull reads that tank’s range, wherever it stands: in a valley, on a crest, silhouetted against nothing at all.
- A crosshair just over the roof still reads that tank, so the round skims the turret. It’s the near miss you actually aimed, not a shell in the clouds.
- A house wall in the way reads as the wall, because that’s where your round will burst.
- A second tank off to one side, closer to you, no longer steals the range from the one you’re laying on.
The Paladin’s dart flies so flat that a sloppy range barely moved it, until the sky got involved. The Jackal’s slow, lobbing round is where you’ll feel it most: its sight now judges the drop from the tank you’re laying on, not from the field behind it.
The Gulf’s tankers get their own eyes
In combined arms, a tank’s gunsight was measuring the range as if the gunner stood on a warship’s mast. Lay it on a tank a kilometre out and it read three, and the round went high even through the gunsight. Every tank now ranges from its own turret, on the Brick Steppe and on the shores of the Gulf alike. It still ranges a destroyer standing off the beach, too: lay on her waterline and the dart goes into her side.
Pick your target, put the crosshair on it, and squeeze. If you miss now, the gunner is to blame, not the gunsight.