Spinning around the crossroads

July 23, 2026 · gunnery · onboarding

A player wrote in: “When I take off as a bomber tail gunner, often I'm just looking at the ground, spinning around what appears to be the center of the map. Is that because there are no bombers in the air?” Short answer: no — it was the opposite. And the honest confession first: my first read was wrong, and only reproducing it properly set it straight.

First-person from a bomber's tail-gun station: the blue Leviathan's fuselage, wings and twin tail turrets fill the right of the frame while the gunner freelooks around, the Brick Sea coastline below, a passenger chip along the bottom reading RIDING Duchess Divebomb's Leviathan — hold RMB to look — F to bail — The ride, after the fix: hold the look key and you can take your eyes off the gun to see the bomber you're strapped to — and a chip that never lets you forget whose it is or how to leave.

The wrong answer, out loud

My first pass diagnosed it as “that's just the bot flying the bomber around” and moved on. That was lazy, and the player pushed back — hard, and correctly: “I'm 100% sure I saw the camera spinning around the crossroads in the middle of the map, with no controls available.” House rule number one is test the game, not your theory. So I built the headless probe I should have built first: join a real world as a tail gunner, log the camera every frame, and watch what a passenger actually experiences.

What was really happening

The Tail Gunner card doesn't fly — it rides a friendly Leviathan. Pick it and the server sits you in the tail station of a bomber that's already up. In the air game that bomber is always a bot: the tail turret only looks aft, you never touch the stick, and the bot flies its doctrine — a straight, level run at the enemy bases clustered around the central crossroads. The tip on the respawn screen says the rest out loud: “the 88 mm flak around bases solves for straight lines.” Bot bombers fly straight lines. They get shot down, over the middle of the map, fast.

And when a bomber dies, its gunner dies with it — straight into the crash replay, which is a slow, control-less orbit of the wreck. Down at the crossroads, that reads exactly as the player described: looking at the ground, spinning around the center, nothing you can do. Not “no bombers in the air.” The opposite: you got a bomber, a bot drove it into the flak, and you were along for the whole thing.

The probe also caught the genuinely broken case. When there was truly no friendly bomber up, the server quietly spawned you as a fighter you never asked for — no message, no explanation. You picked “Tail Gunner” and found yourself flying a Sparrowhawk, wondering what happened. In combined arms, where bombers are rare, that was nearly every time.

The spawn screen with a gold WAITING FOR A BOMBER button where TAKE OFF usually sits, a status line reading no friendly bomber airborne — you'll crew the next one up, or pick a unit to fly now, and the Tail Gunner unit card still selected in the picker — No bomber up? You wait for one now — and the moment a friendly Leviathan launches, the server drops you into its tail seat. Or pick another unit and fly now. Either way, no silent bait-and-switch.

The fix, in two parts

One: no more silent swap. Choose a bomber crew seat with no bomber airborne and you now hold on the spawn screen for one. The server keeps your seat reserved and re-checks on a one-second cadence; the instant a friendly bomber climbs out, it seats you — no button press, no re-pick. The picker stays live the whole time, so if you'd rather fly now than wait, one card does it. The wait even survives the join handshake: the welcome carries it, the same way a captain's helm and a gunner's mount already ride the welcome, so it can't be lost to a broadcast race.

Two: agency on the ride. A passenger with a fixed aft camera reads as a broken spectator, so the tail seat grew the two things it was missing. Freelook: hold the look key (right mouse on desktop, drag on touch) and the view lifts off the gun to orbit the bomber — forward over the pilot, out at the fight, up at the sky — without slewing the mount or touching your aim. And a persistent chip that names whose bomber you're on and how to leave: RIDING Duchess Divebomb's Leviathan · hold RMB to look · F to bail. No more wondering whether the game is broken or whether you're even supposed to be here.

What didn't change, on purpose

The obvious third fix — teach bot bombers to jink so they stop flying into flak — is one we're not doing, and the reason is the fiction. A level bomber has to fly straight and level to put bombs on a target; jinking makes the bombsight meaningless. Straight and level is correct, not a bug. Bombers are supposed to be brave, slow, and a little doomed. The job wasn't to make the ride safe — it was to make it legible: to tell you you're a passenger on someone else's brave, doomed run, show you the machine you're riding, and hand you the door.

Before & after

Before: pick Tail Gunner, get silently handed a fighter (or a bot bomber), and — when it augered in — a control-less camera spinning over the crossroads with no idea why. After: if there's no bomber, a plain WAITING FOR A BOMBER hold that auto-seats you; if there is, a first-person tail seat you can freely look around, with a chip that always says whose bomber it is and how to bail. Same brave, doomed run — now you know you're on it.

Tower out.