War Thunder Ground Force Basic Range Skill

Hello! Ladies and gentlemen! Darius here, and welcome to war thunder basic tutorial, we have taught how to fly planes and now let’s learn how to shot more accurate when you are driving tanks! Meanwhile, we give you access to some military mobile mobile games on our site. Pay a visit after you read!

It’s very easy for you to shot in the arcade mode( There are 3 modes in war thunder: Arcade, Realistic, Simulator), because there is distance indicator in arcade mode, and you can see a cross that indicate the round drop point which will show you how high will you raise your cannon(the further, the higher, because rounds will drop because of gravity).

But in realistic mode or simulator, it will be much harder, no indicator will show armor piercing possibility or round drop point, so you have to learn how to find range between your targets. That will make you hit your enemy first too.

During World War 2, there are no laser or radar equipment helping to find distances, but gunners always use mil/Range methods to estimate range:

This is a tool for those RB/SB tankers, that are tired of being oneshot across the entire map and want to oneshoot back.

If you ever played Realistic or Simulator battle in Ground Forces, you will know there is no aiming assistance, you need to elevate the gun by your own estimate to hit an enemy at distance. This is of course entirely correct, historical and realistic, WW2 tank (and anti-tank) gunners had to be properly trained to be able to score a hit at say 1km distance. Meanwhile, some mobile video games may interest you if you visit our site!

In sniper mode, you can see two scales. The vertical scale indicates shell drop over distance, and tells you how much you need to elevate the gun to hit a tank at known distance. One unit on this scale corresponds with 200m distance. Generally, longer guns (also known as high velocity, high performance, sniper guns, etc) do have less of a shell drop over distance, so are more accurate and allow bigger margin of error at vertical aiming, than shorter barrels. Compare the scales on some notorious examples, like Panzer IV C and ZiS-30, respectively.

Now, how do you know a target is 655 meters away? That's what you use the horizontal scale for.

In armed forces all around the world, knowing the distance to the target (may it be a tank, a car, a person, or a building) is essential for being able to knock out the target quickly and safely. You don't always have the luxury of lasers, radars and GPS to do this for you and you certainly didn't in WW2. That's when you use the mil system.

If you know at least approximate size of the target, you can measure how large it appears in your targeting optics, and by pretty simple calculation figure out the distance. At 1000 meters, a 1-meter sized object would take up 1 mil.

You need to remember this calculate formula: Distance=Target Size/Mil (km). So use this tool, properly, you of course need to know the size of the tank you're aiming at! Luckily, WW2 tank dimensions are well known and documented.