Setting up for offline gunnery practice

Was talking with MacViper today about offline practice, and thought it would be helpful to go through some of the tweaks you can use to imporve gunnery.

First -- time spent with the drones can be very useful. Learning how to lead shots, how to keep the wings aligned with the target's wings,. and how to do snapshots is MUCH easier there. In the arenas, you have 5 or more minutes of positioning to set u p a shot opportunity that may only last 2 seconds. It's hard to get ahead that way, just on a "time spent" basis.

Now, here's how I make the most of my flight time in the offline practice.

1) Before taking off, set up the arena for maximal efficiency. On the clipboard, navigate the menus to Options/Arena Setup/Environment/ Arena settings. In this table, you can do everythign from set ammo loadouts to change the color of the sky. We'll jsut modify a few things.

Scroll down to "Flight Mode Flags" and click change. Check the boxes for lead computing gunsight and dive bomb sight. These enable the little green crosses you see in the TA when you have missiles or rockets, but now you can see the same thing for your guns too! When you select a bomb, you can see the green cross to show where it will hit. This is a HUGE advantage while you're getting used to dive bombing, and will add greatly to your accuracy. But we're mostly interested in the gunnery right now; to use that feature, you'll select a target by centering on it and hitting the tab key when in flight. Now, the program will use the green cross to show you where you need to have the gunsight in order to get hits on the selected target. It works well when you're close to having a shot, but can be weird at extreme angles.

OK, back to the settings. Scroll down to plane auto ammo mult and plane gun ammo mult. (there arent any spaces on the table.) Click each and then click change; I have mine set at 10, which gives me ten times as many bullets as the planes normally carry, with the weight per round dropped to 1/10th usual -- so the planes handle the same.

Those are the main things. You can also use that table to change the offline fuel multiplier, and to change damage settings for bullets and targets. I've never messed with those, partly beacuse I want to keep the same feel as with real targets.

Save your work, and go to the hangar.

Once in the air, your targets will be circling 3000 feet above the base altitude. Start with as many "cheats" as you need, using the lead computeing gunsight etc, until you're geting the idea. Try to avoid cruisng around and firing from the dead 6 at 300 -- not very close to MA environments! Instead, Do yo-yos, rolls, slice across their path. Practice keeping them in view at every point of your maneuvering. Get ued to the defelction you need when you're above or below, and closing on them. Pretend the drone circling gently in a left turn has really started to break -- and cut inside teh circle so you can judge the snapshot. Get the feel for how long a burst is needed to do critical damage. When you're closing fast, do a yoyo or a barrel roll to prevent overshooting your target. When you're really brave, try running arpund the circle in the OPPOSITE direction as the drones, for those quick adjustment flash opportunities. (But dont HO -- slide from side to side so you';re actually defelction shooting. HO habits are devastating to any thought of staying alive, or getting multiple kills.)

Start with tracers on, so you can see which way you're off. Once that's comfortable, turn them off so your brain is SEEING the gunsight/target relationship[ and not watching the pretty flashes, walking them onto the target!

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