Game feature Idea. Artillery sight

Hello,
the game has some tanks that are moving artillery.
And artillery can shot at enemies in a straight line or in a curve when they shoot nearly straight up.

For the direct shot, they can use the gunner sight. But when they want to shoot in a curve to shoot over a house there is no indicator where they are shooting at.

To solve it i have some idea’s.

  1. The what i believe is the simplest is to add an angle indicator to the gunnersight. That number represents the angle the barrel is aiming relative to the horizon. With that data players can calculate where the round is going to land. There could even be a perk that the crew can learn. If it is not learned the number is moving in 5 degree steps and if it is fully upgraded, it is acurate to 0,01 degrees.

  2. Just add another gunner sight that we can use. It could be like in world of tanks where you can look from above, the targeting sight from the fleets or like the artillery in hell let loose. You could also check what kind of sight real artillery are using and implement a sight that is working like that.

  3. Add in the minimap where the round is going to land

  4. Make an calculator like the range finder that shows at which distance the round is going to land horizontal to you.

No.

That is the realism of War Thunder.

Blind fire is possible. The reason it doesn’t work on WT “well” is because WT’s maps are atrociously small.

5 Likes

This is such a common suggestion yet never thought through well as to why it wouldn’t work.
-1

4 Likes

i dont think that normal howitzer can indirect fire within the ranges that we have in game. Something like a self propelled mortar like the amos is able to, but thats not the case for most artillery systems that we have in game

1 Like

afaik artillery is one of the reasons why lots of players moved to WT from WoT

3 Likes

If you truly wish for controllable artillery to have a place in War Thunder you need to advocate for two things.

  1. Ammo resupply in Spawn

You will need to be able to rearm at a safe distance to maintain both your possible arc of fire and your vehicle. This also benefits SPAAs and is something that’s been suggested for their benefit in the past.

  1. Larger maps

You can’t arc a shell if the edge of the map is your shortest arc. Maps need to be larger to offer this style of gameplay. This is something that benefits top tier vehicles which are designed to engage at long distances rather than the knife fight / arcadey fights they’re currently faced with.

1 Like

Your video, how did he know which angle to use?/ was it try and error , luck or has he used a triange on his screen?

Ingame range finder, minimap grid sector.

image

6 * 550m = 3300m set your rangefinder, fire.

1 Like

Other than grid sector plotting

Since Gaijin added scout drones you can have your squad mate tag for you although you still need to guesstimate the range.

1 Like

almost, a 550x550 square has the diagonal length of about 777m sp 6x777=4662m
also, setting rangefinder to that gives the lower angle, not the higher angle the video is showing.

1 Like

General answer:
maps are too small, the shell would fly far out of the map even at the most extreme angles.

Math answer:
media_9ea_9eac1e11-ef59-44cc-97c8-8f7b5d4bcb1a_phpIswoTX

as you can see the distance of a shell (given no air resistance) is the same at 15 degrees as it is at 90-15=75 degrees.
problem here is that almost all shells has a higher initial velocity than the maximum possible angle of the barrel.
formula for distance of an arced toss:
Length=initial velocity squared divided by gravity times the sine of twice the initial angle.
or:
sin(2θ)v^2/g , where θ is the angle, v is the initial velocity and g is acceleration due to gravity.

so take the American M109A1 for example,
initial velocity of round: 684m/s
maximum angle: 75 degrees
that gives a range of sin(150)x684^2/9.81=23845.8715596m or about 24km that would overshoot all ground maps that exists in war thunder.

Edit:
this could be countered by stopping the tank on a uphill to get a steeper angle sure, but then the flight-time is so long that you probably would miss everything you try to aim at that does not stand still for a very long time.
i wont bore you with the details again but the flight time of a shell going 4km at a high angle (in this example that would be 87.6 degrees) and the initial velocity of 684m/s would be 139seconds (or 2min and 19 seconds). i don’t think anything that stands still lives that long anyway or have definitely moved by the time the shell gets there.

3 Likes

I was just hoping that with getting the angle that we could at least get a abysmally small chance of achieving such a 89° shot.

Looks like I have to ask again when they maybe add variable proppelant

you could manually (or with a ballistic calculator) try to do it, but it would be close to impossible given that the difference between 87 degrees and 88 degrees is 4987m vs 3328m. and i don’t think anyone is able to gauge that sort of accuracy by eye.

even if they do add variable propellant its going to be VERY hard to pull of. take the archer system. i think the slowest it can do is 300m/s. to get 4km range that is still an angle of 77 degrees and a flight-time of 59 seconds. and going from 77 degrees to 78 degrees makes you miss by 300m. not impossible, but also not really viable in the game.

Thats why I had the Idea to add an angle indicator into the gunner sight so I can get the angle. and when it is acurate to 0.01° then the difference is not 300m but only 3m. and with that its in my opinion a usable precision. they can then even implement vehicles like the M1129 Stryker MC

It’s actually 4200 by my calculations.

How to announce you failed high school trig without saying you failed trig.

26 days later Bruce wanted everyone to know he’s a very smart and good boy.

Nah, just wanted to point out you’re kinda dim. Never an expiry date on that.

You gave advice to other players that was spectacularly wrong. The fact it’s been there for a month and you haven’t fixed it yourself yet isn’t something I would have pointed out personally. FIFY. You’re welcome.

1 Like

Neither of your comments have explained what was wrong or provided the correct “answer”. Another user in this thread did though when this thread was active, immediately after my comment in fact.

Thank you for letting everyone know just how smart you are though. We really wanted to know.