Harmonize your guns — pick the range where your burst meets
Every fighter in the hangar has always left the factory with its guns set to meet at one range, and you flew it that way whether it suited you or not. The real squadrons never did. Now you don't have to either.
Where the streams cross
The guns on a fighter's wings don't point straight ahead. They're toed in a touch, so the port and starboard streams cross the nose line at one range out and every gun on the airframe lands on the same spot. That spot is the harmonization, and until now the factory picked it for you: 280 m for the Spitfire's quad fifties, 340 m for the Mustang's cannon, 380 m for the Lightning's chin gun.
The pilots who flew the real ones set their own. The ones who liked to close until the enemy filled the windscreen pulled their guns in tight for one knockout blow. The ones who took their shots from further out pushed them long. Now you can do the same.
The GUNS bench
Under the hangar card, next to 🎨 PAINT, there's a new door: 🎯 GUNS. Open it and you get the armorer's bench for whatever airframe is in the spotlight: a dial from 150 m to 600 m, − and + for a thumb, and FACTORY to put it all back.
Under the dial is a little top-down sketch of your two wing streams crossing at the range you picked, with the factory setting ghosted behind it, and one line in gold that tells you what you just bought.
It's a trade, not an upgrade
At the range you pick, every gun on the wings lands in one fist. Inside it, the streams haven't met yet and straddle the target. Past it, they've crossed and fan apart. So every setting says something about how you fight:
- KNIFE FIGHT (200 m and in). Close the range and the whole battery hits as one hammer blow. Take a long shot, though, and the two streams fly either side of a fighter with room to spare. - THE CLASSIC BOX (the middle). Where most scraps are actually won, and where the factory puts most airframes. - LONG REACH (400 m and out). For the snap shot across a turn or the bomber you can't get close to. Up close, the streams bracket a target instead of meeting on it.
Every airframe keeps its own setting. Your Spitfire can live in a phone box while your Mustang snipes from across the ring, and the Corsair can stay exactly how the factory built it. The settings stay on your device, so they're waiting for you next time you fly.
Nose guns get a line of their own. The Lightning's chin cannon and the F-104's gatling already fire down the middle, so for them the dial just sets the range where the stream crosses your pipper.
Your sight follows
You don't have to relearn where to aim. Change the range and the gunsight changes with it. In the cockpit, the pip in the middle of the reflector ring drops to wherever your rounds now meet, and in the chase view the cross moves too. Put the pip on the gold lead diamond and the burst still goes where the diamond says. It just arrives as one fist at the range you chose.
The bots fly the factory numbers, same as always. Whether a knife-fighter beats a sniper over the Brick Sea is for you to find out.