Indirect Fire

[AgitatedTofu]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The mod provides an amazing framework for warfare, so why not make it even better by supporting indirect fire?

Describe the solution you'd like A targeting option should be available such that projectile-based weapons (guns, rockets, unguided missiles etc.) could be aimed without line of sight; I'm talking about shooting behind mountains, creating artillery platoons that can remotely fire a barrage on a location designated by a spy plane. Give mortars and howitzers a use!!

Additional context

[BrettRyland]

Technically, this is already possible, at least for guns (I'm not sure about rockets). You need to use a datalink to relay targeting information from an observer to the gun.

However, there are a number of caveats:

• The aiming calculations don't currently detect obstacles in the way, so the gun will blindly shoot the side of a hill that's in the way.
• Once the observer has observed the target, if it's then turned off/disable/destroyed, the gun continues to track the target for some reason, which it shouldn't be doing.
• The bullet trajectories don't include drag (drag is only calculated on impact for impact velocity purposes), this is required in order to simplify the trajectory calculations to root-finding of cubic polynomials and to satisfy the conservation of symplecticity requirements for the accuracy of the numerical integrator (which allows us to simulate trajectories with much higher time-steps for performance reasons).

The first two caveats can be fixed once one of us has time to look at it, but the last one is most likely not fixable in a reasonable manner.

[BillNyeTheIE]

Added GPS targeting in version 1.5.3.0. Combined with the "Remote Firing" option allows for manual control of artillery in addition to Guard Mode datalink.