Sparks off the plate
Rake a tank with your wing guns and it felt like shooting a wall: tracers streamed in, the hull sat there, and the only sign you were on target came seconds later when it finally brewed up. The rounds just vanished into the steel. A strafing pass should throw sparks — and now it does.
Fire that hit nothing you could see
Armor is unforgiving on purpose — a rifle-caliber round can rattle off a tank's front plate all day. But when your hits made no mark at all, you couldn't tell a burst that was biting from one sailing wide, or a hull that was shrugging your rounds off from one you were slowly killing. You held the trigger, watched the tracers disappear, and hoped. Half the skill of a strafing run — walking your fire onto the target and holding it there — was flying blind.
Every round throws a spark now
Whether a round punches clean through or skids off the plate, it now throws a bright spark right where it struck — pinned to the tank you can actually see, so your fire visibly rakes across the hull. The same goes across every front: gun hits on a warship's deck or another plane's skin spark the same way (a warship, after all, is just a very large, very heavy target). One rule keeps it honest — sparks only ever bloom on an enemy you've already spotted, so a stream of hits can never give away a hull hiding in the fog of war.
Bright enough to read at dusk
A spark is no good if you can't see it. The old hit flecks were fine at noon and invisible at dusk, when the whole blocky world goes dim together. So the spark now carries a white-hot core — the same glow the muzzle flashes use to punch through the dark — a hot point that pops against a hull in any light. Every hit spark in the game inherited the upgrade: plane strikes and shell splashes read hotter now too.
A stream, not a strobe
Wing guns and autocannons throw a lot of rounds, and a whole flight working one tank could turn a spark-per-round into an epileptic flicker. So the sparks are paced: enough to read as a running stream skating off the armor, never so many they drown the target in strobe. Lively, legible, and it finally tells you the one thing a gunner needs to know — you're on.