Manual mortar control

[ghost]

ISSUE

Currently, mortars use the built-in artillery computer, and have no accurate way of judging the correct angle of fire manually.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

• Create a system aiming mortars with either mouse or keyboard movement for fine-grain control. Currently, when the built-in tracking computer system is disabled, the mortar movement reverts to mouse control, which is useful for larger adjustments, but poor for fine control.
• Include accurate azimuth / elevation numbers as the mortar is repositioned.
• GUI-based range-tables to show approximate values which an assistant would need to read out to the gunner (elevation required for certain distances).

THOUGHTS

Far more complicated than ordinary system but also facilitates more co-ordination, requiring a 2 man team to load, aim and fire mortars efficiently.

Provided that the GUI was intuitive and the range-table was easily readable, the system could be fairly easy to learn, but with a fairly high skill cap when it came to faster loading, aiming and firing.

[Taosenai]

I am opposed to making the use of a mortar require two people simply to effectively operate it. The artillerist role is already of limited interest to most players, and requiring two players to stand in a field looking at tables and doing math while clicking buttons is far worse than requiring one. Now, I do think that it's fine if there are palpable benefits to having two people crewing the mortar, but it should not be necessary.

I will definitely implement a traverse-elevation display for mortars and range tables. The range tables will be loaded on the Datapad (when it's implemented), just like rifle range tables. Ideally there will also be an artillery computer on the datapad which can accept grid, current grid, etc. and calculate a firing solution.

The benefit of having two people would be having someone else run the artillery computer and the radio while one player focuses on getting the mortar lined up, selecting the correct rounds, etc. One player could do all of this at a lower efficiency.