About — Warbirds.io

The fight

Two squadrons — CRIMSON and COBALT — battle for the golden SKY RING floating above the central island. Hold the ring to bleed points out of the sky, shoot down enemy planes for bounties, strafe the flak guns ringing the enemy base, and reach 1500 points before the round clock runs out. Crashing into the scenery is canon.

A crimson Spitfire firing on a cobalt Mustang beside the Sky Ring's golden blocks — High noon at the SKY RING — hold it to bleed the enemy's points out of the sky.

A crimson Spitfire close in on the right with muzzle flashes on both wings, its cannon and machine-gun streams reaching away downrange in two different weights of tracer; above it a Bf 109 firing down its nose, and a Navy-blue cannon Corsair beyond pouring four streams of its own — **Every gun they really carried.** The Spitfire IX's two Hispanos and four .303s, the Bf 109's 30 mm down the spinner between two 13 mm over the cowl, the cannon Corsair's four 20 mm — each gun firing its own round at its own beat, every stream laid onto one point at the harmonization range.

Two crimson Spitfires high in a blue sky, each drawing a long white contrail that stretches back across the frame, a smoking cobalt fighter diving away below them under a gold kill-confirm banner reading SPARROWHAWK, Baron von Brick, and more cobalt fighters writing their own contrails low over the horizon — **The sky remembers.** Above 900 m every plane writes contrails the whole map can read: an unbroken white rope off each engine that spreads, drifts on the wind and hangs for twenty seconds. The top cover's threads are free intel, and the bounce they warn about ends in a kill-confirm stamp: a breath of slow motion, the camera leaning after the victim, and the banner. Pull hard and thin white **streamers** peel off your wingtips.

A cobalt fighter gone up in a rolling orange-red fireball against a blue sky, its edges already going to smoke and a brighter second lobe blooming in front of it, scraps of airframe flung clear, and the crimson Spitfire that shot it climbing away past the blast — **Fireballs that roll.** A kill goes up in a white flash and a fireball that cools through orange into a pall of black smoke drifting off on the wind, a second lobe bursting a beat behind the first and scraps flung clear. Bombs throw up walls of earth, shells stand **columns of water** taller than a battleship's masts, the 88s hang **black flak puffs** where their fuses run out, and every gun speaks with a flash that's never the same twice.

A line of dark, soft thunderheads over green hills, the heart of one tower lit from inside by the stroke, rain curtains hanging beneath and a lightning bolt striking the ground — **Storm rounds.** Some rounds the weather is an actor: a front of anvil-topped thunderheads marches across the map, a rain-black base under slate-dark towers, lightning flickering in its belly and cracking down at the leading edge, rain dragging the ground beneath. Every pilot sees the same storm at the same instant — the sky is computed, not streamed.

A night storm over the island: one thunderhead lit blue-white from inside by a lightning stroke, the cells either side of it dark against the night sky — **Lit from inside.** Every stroke lights the cloud it comes out of — the puffs around the flash flare blue-white while the cells beside them stay black. After dark it's how you find the storm at all.

The end-of-round intel summary card showing a score timeline, per-team tallies and the round's top guns — When the bell rings, the **round intel card** tells the story: the score timeline, who downed whom, ships sunk, ground razed — and the round's top guns.

Combined arms: the Brick Gulf (new)

The fourth theater puts all three wars on one front. The Brick Gulf is the land theater's steppe west of an authored coastline and the naval theater's open sea east of it — four capture zones run along the front line between them, and the harbor at Brickhaven falls to whichever arm reaches it first: a tank platoon in the streets or a destroyer alongside the quay. Planes are the glue — the fleet's guns can only reach armor somebody has spotted, so a fighter orbiting the steppe is a battleship's rangefinder, and the Sky Ring over the Gulf mouth multiplies your side's zone points instead of paying its own. Pick any unit from one spawn screen: fly, sail, or roll out (-combined-arms server flag).

A destroyer under way on the Brick Gulf with the conning HUD live, a sister ship ahead among the low islands, an enemy hull burning to starboard, and the combined-arms minimap showing the four-zone front — **Sortie on the Gulf.** A Fletcher puts to sea from the anchorage — the DETECTED warning means the shore already has eyes on her, and the minimap carries the whole four-zone front.

A main battle tank rolling across the smooth coastal steppe toward a treeline, enemy contact carets over the woods, the land crew panel showing smoke, artillery and overdrive chips — **The same war, ashore.** An Abrams works the treelines between Crossbrick and the coast — the same facet armor, concealment, and crew kit as the land theater, with warships in shelling range behind the hill.

A fighter banking hard over the coastal steppe, forest blocks and a bare rocky crest below it, the Gulf's shore and the Sky Ring beyond — **The glue.** A Spitfire runs the coast between the fleets and the front — every hull it overflies lights up for its team's guns.

The land theater (new)

The third theater takes the war onto the ground. The land theater is a rolling steppe built for tank country: long grassy sightlines folded just enough to hide a hull, steep-flanked hill masses that funnel movement into passes, lakes in the valley floors, impenetrable forest blocks that stop both hulls and sightlines, and five towns whose street grids are the map's choke points — three of them are the domination zones. You crew one of four vehicles, Gunner-HEAT-PC style: the Abrams main battle tank carries a stabilized 120 mm gun behind a front plate almost nothing defeats; the Bradley IFV shreds light armor with its 25 mm autocannon and wire-guides anti-tank missiles into heavy; the Sd.Kfz. 7/1 quad-20 half-track sweeps the strike planes out of the sky; and the MUTT gun truck races the flanks with a recoilless rifle that has to halt to shoot.

Every round is modeled the way treadheads want it modeled. A shell strikes a specific plate — front, side, rear, or turret — thickened by the angle it arrives at. Glancing kinetic hits ricochet; rounds that can't beat the plate shatter; penetrations roll behind-armor damage through the fighting compartment (tracks, engine, gun, crew — or the ammo rack, and the whole hull goes up); and a dart that vastly overmatches thin armor punches through and through, flying on out the far side with what's left of its energy to find whatever parked behind. Sabot penetration decays with range; HEAT doesn't care. Angle your armor, learn the weak points, and swap AP/HE (X) for the target in front of you. You're hidden until an enemy has a sightline inside your spotting range — ridgelines, treelines and town walls are real concealment — and the crew carries a full kit: field repair (R), smoke launchers (C), an artillery fire mission called on your crosshair (T), and an engine overdrive (G). Each vehicle looks through its own gunsight (Z): the Abrams' fine day sight, the Bradley's amber missile optic, the Sd.Kfz. 7/1's flak reflector rings, the MUTT's iron ring — and an unstabilized mount bounces with the hull, so the MUTT shoots from a standstill or not at all. Nothing ranges the gun for you: the round drops, so read the target's range and hold over by the range marks hanging under the crosshair (10 is a kilometre).

Two main battle tanks duelling across a fold of open steppe, a sabot tracer streaking between them, a forest block and rocky hills on the horizon — **The armor duel.** Two Abrams trade sabot across a fold of the steppe — the round strikes a specific plate at a specific angle, and either bites, bounces, or punches clean through.

A tank and an infantry fighting vehicle pushing down a town's main street between brick houses and shops, dust rising off the lead tank's treads — **The towns are the objective.** An Abrams and Bradley push the central market town's main street — three towns carry the domination zones, so every round funnels into their crossroads.

A soft-skinned gun truck tucked against a treeline firing its recoilless rifle, a main battle tank burning out on the open steppe beyond — **The MUTT's ambush.** The gun truck's HEAT round can't beat an Abrams' front plate — so it lives on the flanks, in the treelines, where the side armor is.

A tank round's tracer running in low over the grass, kicking up a spurt of earth where it strikes the ground, and bending up off it into the flank of a light armored vehicle beyond — **The skip shot.** A dart that falls short across the flat steppe glances off the grass instead of burying itself — a spurt of earth, a whine, and a tumbling round that can still hole a Bradley parked just beyond.

A quad-20mm anti-aircraft half-track hammering a strafing attack plane overhead, four tracer streams converging on it in the sky — **The Sd.Kfz. 7/1's war.** AI strike planes hunt spotted vehicles all round long — the quad-20 half-track is the reason they don't get to do it for free.

Through a MUTT's iron-ring gunsight: the crosshair held high in the sky over a brick market town a kilometre and a half off, and the ladder of range marks hanging under it, labelled 2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, with the 15 mark laid on the town — **Hold over.** Nothing ranges your gun for you: the round drops. Lay the crosshair on the target to read her range, then raise the gun until the mark for that range sits on her — here the MUTT's slow recoilless holds its crosshair clean off the top of the town to put the 15 on a hull 1,500 m out.

An infantry fighting vehicle's wire-guided anti-tank missile a third of the way to a distant tank, its motor burning at the head of a billowing white smoke trail that reaches back to the launcher — **Riding the wire.** The Bradley's missile flies where the gunner's sight points, all the way in (SACLOS) — hold the crosshair on the target and the warhead beats any plate in the game. Its motor smoke hangs back to the tube, so everyone downrange can see where it came from.

A knocked-out fighting vehicle burning under a storm sky, flame roaring from its hatches as its ammunition cooks off and a column of black smoke climbing off it — **The cook-off.** A penetration that finds the ammo rack detonates the hull outright — the catastrophic kill every gunner is hunting for.

An Abrams tank rolling at speed across open steppe toward a battle: enemy contact carets over distant hulls near a treeline, wrecks burning on the field, kill chatter in the corner, and enemy blips on the minimap — **Finding the fight.** Half a minute out of the spawn and the battle is already on your screen: carets over every contact your team has spotted, edge arrows when they're off-screen, and the fight itself waiting over the next rise.

A storm front over the steppe: a bright tower of cloud between dark flanking cells, rain curtains falling to the grass and a lightning bolt striking a hill near a small town — **Weather walks the steppe too.** The same storm fronts that cross the air war march over the tank country — one shared sky for all three theaters, thunder arriving late from far strikes, exactly as slow as sound.

The naval theater

The fleet war is splitting off into its own game on its own map. The naval theater is open ocean — mostly sea for maneuver, strewn with low islands to fight around, and a continental coastline along the north edge. You don't fly here; you take command of a warship and sail it, World-of-Warships style. A destroyer is fast and nimble; a cruiser trades agility for armor and heavier guns; a battleship is slow and ponderous but wrapped in thick belt armor that shrugs off cruiser shells, with devastating main guns that reload at their leisure. Hulls handle like real ships: the throttle is an engine telegraph you spool up and down (no stopping on a dime), and the rudder lags and bites harder with speed — a near-stopped ship barely answers her helm, so you learn to think a ship's length ahead. The guns train independently of the bow, so you line a target up with the mouse while the hull holds its course.

A top-down tactical chart of the naval map: a continental coast across the north, open sea scattered with island clusters, range rings, and the Crimson and Cobalt put-to-sea flanks marked west and east — **The map, top down.** A continental coast to the north, open sea strewn with island cover, and the two fleets putting to sea on the west and east flanks — they steam toward each other across the central islands.

A destroyer steaming across open blue ocean on the naval map, scattered green islands around it and a long continental coastline stretching across the horizon — The **naval map**: open water to maneuver, islands for cover, a continental coast to the north — a sea built for ship duels, not dogfights.

A grey Fletcher-class destroyer under way from the captain's chase view, her five gun mounts and twin funnels along the deck, a friendly cruiser steaming past a wooded island beyond — **Under way.** A Fletcher at speed, a friendly cruiser off the island beyond — W/S works the engine telegraph, A/D the rudder, the mouse trains the main battery.

Three warships in line on open water for scale: a Fletcher-class destroyer, a three-funnel County-class cruiser, and a long Iowa-class battleship with three triple turrets and a tall bridge tower — **The roster, full size.** Three hull classes, smallest to largest, each a real warship at her real length — the 115-metre **Fletcher** destroyer, the 192-metre, three-funnel **County** cruiser, and the 270-metre **Iowa** battleship, each under her real class name. Every turret on the model trains with your aim; the ones your class fires are the ones that flash.

A task group steaming in line ahead across open blue ocean: a cruiser leading two destroyers in column, broad wakes off their sterns, an island and clouds on the horizon — **Task group at sea.** A cruiser and her destroyer screen steaming in line ahead — the kind of column that puts to sea on each flank and steams toward the centre to fight.

A torpedoed destroyer broken in half on the open sea, its bow section reared up out of the water with the nav lights skyward while the stern folds under, secondaries and steam at the break — **Broken back.** A torpedoed destroyer doesn't just slide under — the hull **jackknifes at the hit**, the bow rears up dripping, secondaries ripple down the deck, and she goes down in a shroud of steam. Gun-killed ships still settle and list, so the death tells you the weapon.

The whole fighting line is yours from your first sortie: pick the Fletcher destroyer, the County cruiser or the Iowa battleship straight off the hangar wall and put to sea — no grind between you and the big guns, just three honest trade-offs of speed, armor and firepower.

Two hulls are earned. Forty ships sent under wins the Des Moines, a premium heavy cruiser with autoloading guns. Where a normal cruiser works up to a salvo every few seconds, the Des Moines' three triple turrets cycle in barely over one — the highest sustained rate of fire in the fleet, a relentless storm of shells and fires. Your tally rides your pilot record between sessions, a callout fires the moment she's yours — and she's a player's reward alone: you'll only ever meet a Des Moines in another captain's hands, never the AI's.

Seventy-five wins the Yamato, the second premium and the top of the ladder: 263 metres of super-battleship carrying the biggest guns ever put to sea. Her nine 18.1-inch rifles fire the Type 91, a shell of her own — it hits harder and punches deeper than anything the Iowa throws, flies visibly bigger, and raises a fall-of-shot column a third taller than any other ship's. She pays for it in handling: the slowest reload in the line, the widest turn and a hull that takes a long time to get moving. Line her up broadside, and every ship on the Brick Sea knows where she is.

The warship picker in the naval hangar, walked to the premium Des Moines heavy cruiser, greyed out with a lock badge reading SINK 40 SHIPS, the Fletcher, County and Iowa a click of the arrows away — **The line is open.** Destroyer, cruiser and battleship are yours from the start; only the premium **Des Moines** and **Yamato** wait behind a career of sinkings.

The Des Moines heavy cruiser at speed on open water: a long flush-decked hull with twin funnels and three triple turrets trained out across her deck on the beam — **The prize.** The **Des Moines** — 218 metres of premium heavy cruiser, her three triple autoloader turrets throwing the fastest sustained fire on the Brick Sea.

The Yamato super-battleship firing a broadside: a long tan-decked hull with a stepped pagoda tower, a raked funnel and three triple turrets with red team roofs, muzzle flashes at the forward guns and two great clouds of gunsmoke rolling up off her deck — **The top of the ladder.** The **Yamato** lets go nine **18.1-inch** Type 91 rounds at once — the heaviest shell ever fired at sea, and the biggest fall of shot on the Brick Sea.

And they fight like ships. The main battery loads armor-piercing or high-explosive (swap with a key), and the choice is the whole duel: AP has to beat the target's belt armor to penetrate, and a hit on the citadel amidships is devastating — but AP shatters on armor it can't crack and over-penetrates a thin destroyer, so you load HE to start fires instead. Fires and flooding then bleed the hull until you spend your damage-control party to put them out — on a long cooldown, so timing it is its own decision. Two more consumables ride alongside: a repair party (T) that heals the hull back over a few seconds, and an engine boost (G) for a burst of flank speed to close, kite, or run from a torpedo spread — each on its own cooldown, so a captain is always juggling when to spend them. The destroyer also carries torpedoes (press B): a fan of fish that run dead straight and flood a hull they hit, so closing the range is a real threat. An AI warship patrol puts to sea on each side and fights as a fleet, not a loose mob: the hulls form into a division around their heaviest ship as flagship — the cruisers and battleship in the line, the destroyers thrown out ahead as a screen. They thread the islands to make for the capture zone together, concentrate fire on the one target the flagship picks, and fight to each class's strength: the battleship standing off at long range, the destroyers boring in to torpedo water and laying smoke to cover a hard-pressed heavy. Every captain has their own gunnery skill, so a division is no wall of identical marksmen — and a hull that's badly hurt slips behind an island to break contact, repairs, and rejoins the line.

An AI division steaming in line across open sea between two islands: several warships strung out in formation, the destroyer screen leading and the heavier ships trailing in the line, main-battery splashes bracketing a target mid-frame — **Fleet doctrine.** An AI division underway — the destroyer screen out ahead, the cruisers and battleship in the line astern, all making for the cap together and concentrating fire as they go.

And it isn't only about sinking. Three capture zones — rings of gold light laid flat on the open sea, a contested one at the centre with a flank zone north and south of it — score points for whoever holds them: park a hull inside with no enemy contesting and the points tick your way, and holding more zones ticks faster, so a team can win on map control as well as kills. This is domination, and it forces a fleet to split — you can't hold the whole map with one massed line, so the destroyers race out to the flanks to grab and garrison those caps while the heavies fight for the centre. Each ring glows your colour when you hold it, the enemy's when they do, and gold when it's neutral or contested; the zones spread north–south so neither side has a nearer cap. A ZONES readout on the HUD counts who holds how many, the minimap rings show the whole picture at a glance, and a callout fires the moment a zone changes hands.

Three wide capture-zone rings spread across the open sea, coloured by who holds them — a red ring to the north, a gold contested ring at the centre, and a blue ring to the south — with warships fighting over them among scattered islands — **Domination.** Three capture zones strung north–south — here Crimson holds the north ring (red), the centre is contested (gold), and Cobalt holds the south (blue). Hold more than the enemy and the score runs your way.

A wide ring of red light laid flat on the open sea marking a capture zone, islands inside it, with a crimson cruiser holding the line and a cobalt cruiser crossing in to contest it — **Holding a cap.** Hold a ring to score — here Crimson holds (red) while Cobalt crosses the line to contest. Islands inside the zone are cover to fight around.

A warship's view on the open sea, the HUD's ZONES chip counting how many capture zones each side holds and the minimap showing the three zone rings — **Reading the caps.** The HUD's **ZONES** chip counts who holds how many, the minimap rings track all three at once, and a callout fires as a zone changes hands.

A Fletcher-class destroyer firing her main battery, fireballs blooming at both gun mounts, a downed pilot drifting under a parachute and a friendly cruiser off an island beyond — **Steel rain.** The main battery at work — both mounts laid on the ranged spot and firing together. Every turret lays its own guns onto the point under the crosshair, so a salvo lands where the sight says it will.

The naval binocular gunsight: a magnified vignetted view of the sea horizon with a long horizontal lead scale of notched ticks, the slim gold ring riding the water at the aim point under an enemy destroyer as a salvo's shell trails come down on her, the rangefinder reading RNG 4.4 km AUTO, and a second enemy burning on the horizon — **Lay the guns.** The fight plays out across kilometres of open sea, so press Z for the binocular gunsight — a spotter's-vantage view at 7° magnification with a World-of-Warships-style **horizontal lead scale**: notched ticks where one numbered unit is a hull's travel over one shell flight. The vertical axis is a **range dial** (the guns **auto-range**, snapping to a hull when the sight crosses one), and the slim gold **ring** rides the water where your salvo comes down — lay it on a ship, or where she’ll be when the shells arrive, and her side takes the broadside. Walk it to the horizon and the guns lash out to **maximum range** (the readout flags MAX and the ring turns red), which is how you answer a ship shelling you from distance.

An Iowa-class battleship broadside-on with her turrets trained out at a distant enemy, brown-grey cordite smoke billowing off the guns that just fired, her secondaries streaming fire across the water, and the reply coming from a bow-on battleship's forward turrets, one of its shells standing a column of water off her bow — **Fight for the broadside.** Turrets are real mounts with real **firing arcs** now: bow-on, your aft guns are masked behind the superstructure and only the forward pair fires — swing **broadside** and every turret trains out and joins the salvo. The HUD counts **GUNS 4/6** under the sight so you always know your weight of fire, and the AI plays by the same arcs (and the same **spotting rules** — no more unseen fire from over the horizon).

An Iowa fires across open sea at an enemy beyond a wooded island; a thin red X stands on the island's crest and her shells burst right on it, while the readout under the sight reads GUNS 9/9 · 4 MASKED BY LAND — steam clear in red — **Masked by land.** Your director rides high on the mast and sees clean over an island your turrets, twenty metres lower on the hull, can't clear — so the gunsight flies your salvo before you fire it. When land stands in the line of fire the readout under the sight turns red and counts the rounds it will take (**4 MASKED BY LAND**), a red X stands on the rock where they'll burst, and if the island would eat the whole broadside the ring on the water goes slate. Steam clear for a firing line, or open the range.

A warship under engine boost on open water, its conning panel reading the loaded shell, smoke, repair party and engine boost active, and damage control ready — **Consumables.** The conning panel tracks them all — smoke, the repair party (T), the engine boost (G, “all ahead flank”), and the damage-control party (R), each on its own cooldown.

Two County-class cruisers trading broadsides across open water, salvos of main-battery shells streaking between them and one ship afire — **Broadsides.** Two cruisers settle into a gun duel — salvos crossing the water, splashes straddling the targets, one hull already burning.

A destroyer launching a fan of torpedoes across open sea, five parallel wakes streaking from her tubes toward a distant cruiser — **Fish in the water.** A destroyer swings broadside and looses a torpedo fan — five wakes running straight for a cruiser that has to comb them or flood.

A burning cruiser settled low in the water at dusk under a column of dark smoke, the sea and sky glowing gold — **Going down.** Fires and flooding win in the end — a cruiser settles by the head under a smoke column as the sun goes down.

It all fits in two thumbs. On a phone the left thumb works the rudder and a drag on the right trains the guns, the sight stopping wherever your thumb stops. The naval HUD keeps the sea as glass: the conning chips stack in a slim column on the left rail between the speed readout and the engine telegraph, torpedo readiness rides the BOMB button itself, and the DETECTED banner, fleet orders and gunnery status each get their own lane instead of stacking on the horizon. Raise the gunsight and the range dial takes the top-right corner while the minimap steps aside — every control a labelled, thumb-sized target, and the whole battle band stays clear.

The naval theater on a phone in landscape: a slim column of tappable conning chips on the left rail (loaded shell, repair, boost, damage control), a DETECTED banner and RNG rangefinder stacked cleanly under the score bar, the binocular gunsight's lead scale across the sea, a range dial on the right edge, and thumb-sized ZOOM / BOMB / FIRE buttons bottom-right — the horizon itself left clear — **Two thumbs at sea.** The whole warship — drive, guns, gunsight, torpedoes and consumables — on a phone screen without the pile-up: readouts in their own lanes, chips you tap, and a range dial parked where the minimap was.

Not every gun is yours to aim. Around the main turrets, the crew works a secondary battery on its own — once an enemy ship closes inside range, it throws a hail of rapid-fire HE at it without you, each round with a chance to start a fire. It's shorter-ranged than the main guns, so it only speaks in a brawl: closing for the kill (or a torpedo run) means eating a stream of small shells the whole way in. Every hull also carries an anti-air battery — a twin flak mount that tracks and leads aircraft exactly like the airfield and battleship flak, standing ready for when the sea war gets planes of its own.

A County-class cruiser and a Fletcher-class destroyer circling at close range on open water, streams of small high-explosive shells crossing the gap between them as their secondary batteries open fire — **Into the brawl.** Inside secondary range the small guns open up on their own — a dense stream of HE between main salvos, the price of closing the distance.

And the sea has a sky over it. Each side keeps a wing of AI carrier torpedo bombers aloft: they hunt the nearest enemy hull, run in at wavetop height, and drop a fish that floods the ship it hits — so the threat isn't only on the surface. The run-in takes them straight down the throat of the ships' anti-air flak, which tracks and leads them and throws up bursting fire to break the attack: the guns finally have their targets, and a careless bomber doesn't come home.

A torpedo bomber running in low over the sea toward a warship, the ship reaching back at it with streams of anti-air tracer fire and bursting flak, a torpedo already running in the water — **Carrier air.** A torpedo bomber bores in at wavetop height, its fish already in the water, while the warship's flak reaches up to break the run.

And the torpedo wing no longer works alone. Each side also flies dive bombers that attack from the other end of the sky: ride in high over a hull, chop the throttle and coast just past her stern, wing over inverted, pull through until the deck fills the sights, and plunge straight through the flak — then firewall the throttle and run out low on the water. The torpedoes stay the ship-killers: most sticks straddle, bursting in the water close aboard, and the clean deck hit is the jackpot, not the expectation. But a captain still has to split his flak between the wavetops and the sun.

A dive bomber plunging near-vertically toward a cruiser far below, two bombs already falling along the dive line, the ship's tracer fire and a flak burst reaching up around the plane — **The hammer from above.** A dive bomber comes straight down her stacks, stick already falling, while the flak tries to meet it.

And the sea fights through the night. Battles run across kilometres, so when it's dark the warships loft star shells — illumination rounds that climb and burst into drifting flares, casting a pool of light over the water that lifts the enemy hulls out of the black. The AI fires them on its own once night falls, so the fight is always lit enough to lay your guns.

Two star-shell flares hanging in the night sky over the open sea, their light pooling across the water and lifting two warships out of the dark as one fires on the other — **Star shells.** Illumination rounds hang over the night sea, their light pooling across the water so the fleets can fight in the dark.

And the sea keeps secrets. A ship is hidden beyond its spotting range — a destroyer slips far closer than a cruiser before anyone sees it — until it opens fire (the muzzle bloom gives you away), a star shell lights it, or an enemy closes in. And the islands are cover now: terrain breaks the sightline, so a hull tucked behind an island is hidden from anyone on the far side — duck behind one to slip a lock or set an ambush. Caught in the open? Press C to lay a smoke screen and vanish into the bank, shooting from cover while spotters do the seeing. It's the game of ambush and nerve that makes a sea fight a sea fight.

Two warships on opposite sides of a wooded island on the open sea — a destroyer to one side and a cruiser to the other, the island's high ground breaking the line of sight between them — **Island cover.** The island breaks the sightline — the destroyer on the near side has slipped behind it, hidden from the cruiser searching on the far side.

Seen from above, one low rolling bank of grey smoke lying on the blue sea, a destroyer lost inside it while a cruiser stands off shelling it blind — **Smoke & concealment.** A destroyer vanishes into a smoke screen while the cruiser shells its last-known position blind.

From a cruiser's deck, a long low bank of grey smoke lying on the sea, a destroyer steaming into its wall while the cruiser's shells splash short of her — **Into the wall.** The screen lies on the sea as one grey bank — a destroyer steams in bow first and is gone, and a salvo that falls long sinks out of sight behind it.

Your first sortie (new)

The very first time you press TAKE OFF you don't land in the furball. You land in a quiet piece of sky over the Brick Sea — already airborne, already level, already pointed at the fight — with one instruction at a time along the bottom of the screen. Move the mouse. That's the whole first lesson, and it waits until you actually fly rather than until a timer runs out.

Then a bandit shows up. He's called something like Wobbles McGee, he's six hundred metres dead ahead flying flat and slow, and his airframe is tissue paper. Put your crosshair on the gold lead diamond, hold the trigger, and one burst puts him down: FIRST BLOOD. It counts — that kill lands on your real career and unlocks the First Blood paint scheme on the spot. A second bandit follows, and this one runs, jinks and turns, so the lead pip has something to teach.

And the ground forgives you. Everybody flies into a hill on their first flight; in here the hill puts you back in the air, level, with a warning that tells you the recovery rather than just the problem. Nothing shoots you down either — the tracers still crack past, because that's worth learning, but nobody's first ninety seconds should be spent on a respawn card. Down the second bandit and the sky simply becomes the real one: no menu, no loading screen, no going back to the hangar. Thirty-odd pilots, both teams, the Sky Ring turning over the island — and you arrive with a kill already on the books. SKIP TO BATTLE sits under the coach line the whole time for anyone who wants the deep end, and the first sortie only ever happens once.

One line at a time. The trim gauge and the ordnance counter step aside — you haven't been taught them yet — and the coach card carries the single thing that matters right now.

The same first sortie a beat later: a Spitfire wings-level over open water with a greenhorn enemy fighter small in the distance dead ahead, the gold lead diamond sitting on it above the crosshair, and the coach card now reading BANDIT DEAD AHEAD — PUT THE GOLD DIAMOND UNDER YOUR GUNS — **A bandit you can actually hit.** Flat, slow, six hundred metres out and made of tissue paper. The gold diamond is where he *will* be — aim at that, not at him.

The FIRST BLOOD stamp across the middle of the screen in gold, with the line 'your first kill is on the books' beneath it — **It counts.** Not a practice score in a sandbox that evaporates when you close the tab — your career, the real one, with the First Blood livery unlocked from the first minute you ever played.

Pick your ride

Choose your warbird in the hangar, and every card is the real thing: the Spitfire Mk IX turnfighter, the P-51D Mustang boom-and-zoomer, the P-38 Lightning twin-engine heavy, the B-17 Flying Fortress four-engine bomber and the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, joined by the Bf 109 climber, the hard-rolling Fw 190, the rugged shark-mouthed P-40N Warhawk, the rocket-slinging F4U Corsair, the Bf 110 Zerstörer, the gun-nosed A-20 Havoc, the Ju 88 torpedo bomber and the glass-nosed He 111 (see the rest of the hangar) — each a distinct flight model, hull, gun package, and ordnance loadout, and each flying its own factory finish whichever side you join: the Spitfire in dark green and ocean grey, the Mustang in bare metal, the Avenger in Navy blue. Whose side a plane is on rides the tile over its pilot's head, flown in Crimson or Cobalt. The B-17 hauls a 12-bomb bay and exists to flatten flak nests from altitude; the Avenger trades bombs for two ship-killing torpedoes. Make a slow pass over your own carrier's flight deck and the crews patch you up and hand fresh ordnance aboard. Two jets sit locked at the end of the line — the Me 262, earned with 10 career kills, and the F-104 Starfighter at 25 (see below).

The join screen: callsign box and TAKE OFF button front and center, color-coded arm tabs, and the Fw 190 A-8's stat card in the carousel spotlight, walk arrows either side and a dot rail of fifteen beneath — **A calmer hangar.** The join screen leads with your callsign and one gold button; the roster is a carousel — one machine in the spotlight, arrows to walk all fifteen, and every arm of the service wearing its own color.

The original roster flying together over the island: a dark green Spitfire, a bare-metal P-51D Mustang, a twin-boom P-38, a Navy-blue TBF Avenger, a silver F-104, an olive-drab B-17, the yellow Skywriter biplane and the Marquee blimp, each in its own factory paint — **The air force.** Spitfire, Mustang, Lightning, Avenger, Fortress and the F-104 Starfighter, with the Skywriter and the Marquee in company — every class a real airframe, built blocky, in the paint it went to war in.

The five warbird types flying a loose echelon over the island's hills: a Spitfire, a bare-metal Mustang, a twin-boom Lightning, an olive-drab Fortress and a Navy-blue Avenger — **Pick your ride**: the Spitfire, Mustang, P-38, B-17 and Avenger — the originals, five distinct flight models of the fifteen on the line.

Two identical dark green Spitfires crossing in a merge, one under a red tile reading Baron von Brick and one under a blue tile reading Stall Warning Sam, with the rest of the furball strung out behind them as small red and blue tiles over distant planes — **Friend or foe.** Both sides fly the same airplanes in the same paint, so read the tile, not the wings: every pilot's callsign flies in Crimson or Cobalt, and far out, where the airplane itself is a speck, the tile stops shrinking and stays a chip of color you can pick out of the furball.

A vic of B-17 heavy bombers flying through flak bursts at sunset — A vic of B-17s holds course through the flak, escorts riding high cover.

Three B-17 bombers seen from below against a blue sky, each drawing four parallel white contrails, one off every engine, with two Spitfires above them drawing two contrails each — **Count the threads.** Up in the contrail band a Fortress writes four white lines, one off every engine, and a fighter writes two — you know a bomber stream from a sweep long before you can make out an airframe.

A B-17 heavy bomber seen from below dropping a full stick of bombs, black flak puffs hanging in the sky around it and a white flash where a fresh shell just burst — A **B-17** walking its twelve-bomb bay out over the target, flak hunting for the formation.

From the seat (new)

Press C — or VIEW on a phone — and the chase camera gives way to the pilot's seat. The Spitfire, the P-38 Lightning, the B-17 Flying Fortress, the Bf 109, the Fw 190 and the Corsair each have their office built out dial by dial, and your own airframe flies on around you: team-coloured wings off the sills, an engine nacelle just past the Lightning pilot's elbow, the Fortress's four engines out past the side windows. Hold the right mouse button (drag on a phone) to turn your head.

Every fighter among them flies behind a reflector gunsight: a glowing ring projected at infinity on the sight glass, pinned to the sky however you shift in the seat. Its centre pip sits where your burst meets — the harmonization range, 280 m for the Spitfire's Hispanos and .303s and 380 m for the P-38's nose guns — half a degree under the middle of the windscreen, because your guns sit below your eyes and the rounds fall on the way there. Put the pip on the gold lead diamond and the burst goes where the diamond says. The two German fighters' Revi crosses its amber ring with a cross broken round the pip, and the Corsair's Mk 8 sits so low on the coaming that you fly ducked behind it.

And the panel flies with you. The airspeed needle winds round in a dive, the altimeter unwinds, the artificial horizon tips with your bank, the turn needle leans the way the nose swings, and the rev counter and boost climb as you open the throttle. Each airframe reads in its own units: mph and feet for the Spitfire, the P-38 and the B-17, knots for the Corsair, km/h and metres for the German pair. The stick, column, pedals and throttles move under your hands and feet. A hurt engine shakes its needles, and a dead one lets them fall.

The view from a Spitfire's cockpit: the riveted windscreen arch, the black instrument panel below, and on the reflector gunsight's glass an orange ring with a cobalt fighter trailing smoke inside it, banking over the island coast — **The Spitfire's office.** A Mustang breaks right inside the ring; the pip in its middle is where the Hispanos and the .303s meet, and they meet on him.

The view from a P-38 Lightning's cockpit: two engine nacelles either side of the seat, the round-topped gunsight on its tan crash pad with an amber ring, and a stream of cobalt bombers crossing the windscreen trailing smoke — The **P-38**'s office, an engine at each elbow and a Cobalt bomber stream crossing the nose.

The view from a B-17's flight deck: a wide windscreen with heavy frames, a crimson-winged bomber ahead to the right, another trailing black smoke off the left side, flak bursts ahead, and the long instrument panel across the bottom — The **B-17**'s flight deck from the left seat: flying the box, a wingman burning off the port side.

The view from a Bf 109's cockpit: a heavy grey windscreen frame with knee braces in the corners, the Revi gunsight on top of a grey instrument panel with an amber ring and cross on its glass, and a smoking cobalt bomber inside the ring with two more in formation beyond — The **Bf 109**'s office behind its Revi, coming down on a Cobalt bomber box.

The view from an Fw 190's cockpit, banked left over green hills: a dark windscreen frame, a smoking cobalt fighter inside the small amber ring of the gunsight, and the black instrument panel below — The **Fw 190**'s office, far back over the wing: a Cobalt Mustang reefing through the ring.

Looking down at a Spitfire's instrument panel in a steep right-hand diving turn: the airspeed needle wound round past nine o'clock, the artificial horizon's bar tilted hard over, the turn needle leaning right, the rev counter on 30, the throttle lever pushed fully forward and the spade grip pulled back, with the coast and the sea tilted beyond the windscreen — **The panel flies with you.** Airspeed, altimeter, climb, turn, horizon, compass, revs and boost, each read in its own airframe's units, and the stick, pedals and throttle move under your hands and feet.

The view from a Corsair's cockpit low over a blue sea: a round black windscreen arch, a leather crash pad around the top of the instrument panel, the round Mk 8 gunsight with an orange ring and a cobalt bomber inside it, tracers streaking past on the right and a carrier on the horizon to the left — The **Corsair**'s office down past that long nose: a Cobalt Ju 88 skimming the Brick Sea.

From a Bf 109's seat on a slow pass over a carrier's flight deck: the hood's framed glass swung up and over to the right on its hinge and standing open, the carrier's grey island tower with its red-edged gallery beyond it, and the Revi gunsight and instrument panel to the left — **Hood back for the deck.** Ease down a friendly carrier on the rearm pass and the hood comes open, slid aft on its rails or swung over on its hinge, then hauls shut again as you climb away.

The guns they really carried (new)

Every warbird now flies with the guns its real variant carried. The P-51D, the P-40N and the Corsair carry six fifties in the wings. The Spitfire IX pairs two 20 mm Hispanos with four .303s. The P-38 carries four fifties and a 20 mm bunched in the nose. The Bf 109 G fires a 30 mm MK 108 through the propeller hub between two 13 mm MG 131s, and the Fw 190 A-8 carries four 20 mm cannon and two more guns over the cowl. Open 🎯 GUNS in the hangar and the card reads you the whole battery.

Mixed guns fly different arcs. A 30 mm shell leaves the muzzle slow and drops half again as far as a 13 mm round by 300 m. Like the real armorers, the hangar sets each gun's elevation so every round meets at one point at your harmonization range, and the pip in your sight sits right on it. Fire closer than that and the slow rounds ride above the quick ones; fire further and they drop below. Heavier rounds hit harder, so a Spitfire's two cannon do more of its damage than all four .303s together.

And two new premium airframes join the ladder. The Spitfire Mk XVI swaps the .303s for a pair of fifties and unlocks at 5 career kills. The F4U-1C Corsair, the cannon Corsair, carries four 20 mm Hispanos and its rocket rails, and unlocks at 15. Each flies like the real sub-type: the Mk XVI's clipped wing rolls about a fifth faster and its deck-rated Merlin out-runs the Mk IX low down but fades past 900 m, while the cannon Corsair carries the weight of its guns, a touch slower into a roll.

Harmonize your guns (new)

Every fighter leaves the factory with its wing guns toed in to meet at one range, and the real squadrons never left it there: the pilots who closed to spitting distance pulled theirs in for one knockout blow, and the ones who took their shots long pushed them out. Now you can too. Open 🎯 GUNS under the hangar card and dial where your battery converges, anywhere from 150 m to 600 m, one setting per airframe — your Spitfire can fight in a phone box while your Mustang snipes from across the ring.

It is a trade, not an upgrade. At the range you pick, every gun on the wings lands in one fist; inside it the streams straddle the target, and past it they fan apart. The sketch under the dial draws the two streams crossing, and one line tells you what you've bought: a KNIFE FIGHT close in, the CLASSIC BOX in the middle, or LONG REACH for the snap shot. Your gunsight follows the setting — the pip in the cockpit's ring and the cross outside it both sit where the rounds now meet — and FACTORY puts it all back.

The hangar card with the GUNS row open under the Spitfire Mk IX: a slider set to 175 metres, a top-down sketch of two dashed gold tracer lines crossing at a gold ring, the factory 280 metres ghosted behind, and the line KNIFE FIGHT, one fist at 175 m; beside the card a Spitfire pours tracers into a smoking Mustang close ahead — **A knife fight, dialled in.** The Spitfire's Hispanos and .303s pulled in to 175 m, the factory 280 ghosted behind — and outside the hangar, the range it's for.

The rest of the hangar

Behind the originals stand nine more airframes, every one flying its own way. The Bf 109 G climbs like a lift and fires a 30 mm cannon straight down the spinner, with a 13 mm machine gun either side over the cowl. The Fw 190 A-8 rolls faster than any other propeller plane in the sky, with four 20 mm cannon in the wings, two more guns over the cowl and a tough radial up front. The shark-mouthed P-40N Warhawk turns tight and soaks up punishment, and the gull-winged F4U Corsair runs close behind the Mustang with eight rockets under its wings. The Bf 110 G Zerstörer brings a nose full of guns, two 20 mm cannon under four MG 17s; the A-20 Havoc brings six fifties in its gun nose and six bombs at treetop height. The Ju 88 A-4 carries two torpedoes and the engines to run home afterwards, and the glass-nosed He 111 H is the second ride with a bombsight, eight bombs in the bay. At the end of the line wait the airframes you earn: the Spitfire Mk XVI at 5 career kills, the Me 262 Schwalbe — the first jet fighter, 30 mm cannon and rockets — at 10, the cannon-armed F4U-1C Corsair at 15, and the F-104 at the top of the ladder. The bots fly every airframe but the ones you earn, so you'll meet 109s over the ring and Heinkels droning at your flak.

Six warbirds over the open sea: a Bf 109 and an Fw 190 up front, a twin-engine Bf 110 on their wing, a Ju 88 and a glass-nosed He 111 a length behind, and an Me 262 jet slicing past above them — **The new arrivals.** Bf 109, Fw 190 and Bf 110 up front, the Ju 88 and He 111 behind, and the Me 262 on top — earned at 10 kills.

Three Gustavs, three paint jobs. The 109 now flies the Eastern Front's grey mottle and yellow chin from the factory. The paint shop adds two aces' machines for Bf 109 pilots: Hannes Trautloft's Green Heart, field browns under an all-yellow cowl, unlocked at 20 air kills, and Adolf Galland's Special, black spinner and a yellow rudder of red victory bars, at 100.

Two Spitfires over the Brick Sea: the upper one rolled toward the camera, showing big swirls of dark green over grey on its wings with a yellow strip down each leading edge, the lower one flat, with pale 'YQ' and 'P' codes on its flank either side of a gap and a pale band around its tail — **The Spitfire in day-fighter paint.** Every Spitfire now flies Dark Green swirled over Ocean Grey, with a Sky spinner and tail band and yellow down the outer leading edges. At 30 air kills the paint shop adds 616 Squadron's YQ-P for Spitfire pilots, with the squadron's codes down the flanks and the paint worn through to bare metal on the wing roots.

A shark-mouthed P-40N Warhawk leading a Navy-blue F4U Corsair and an olive-drab A-20 Havoc low along a sandy coastline — **Low over the coast**: the Warhawk's shark mouth out front, the Corsair on its wing, the Havoc thundering along behind.

An Me 262 jet diving past the camera into a box of three B-17 bombers, twin contrails behind it and its cannon stream reaching into the lead bomber, the island coast far below — **The Schwalbe's slash.** In from high astern at twice the bombers' speed, one burst of 30 mm into the lead, and gone before the gunners can swing — the jet you earn at 10 kills lives on that one pass.

An Fw 190 rolled over on its back firing both wing cannon at a smoking Spitfire below it, a Bf 109 small on the perch above — The **Fw 190** flicks onto its back and bounces a Spitfire that broke a beat too late, a 109 waiting on the perch.

A Navy-blue F4U Corsair rippling rockets down a highway at an armored column, the rockets' smoke strung back to its rails and the lead tank burning — The **Corsair** ripples its HVARs down the highway — eight to a sortie, and the lead tank already brewing up.

A twin-engine Bf 110 firing its nose cannon head-on into a B-17 whose engine is burning, a second bomber beyond — The **Bf 110** Zerstörer brings the hammer: the nose battery straight down the centreline and into a Fortress's engine.

An olive-drab A-20 Havoc at treetop height over green hills, its gun nose firing on an enemy flak position as the gun's tracer climbs back past it — The **A-20 Havoc** at treetop height on the flak line, six fifties in the nose hosing the gun before it can come round.

Two Ju 88 bombers low over the waves toward a battleship, three torpedo wakes running ahead of them across the sea — Two **Ju 88s** on the wavetops, their fish already running at the battleship — and two engines each for the ride home.

A glass-nosed He 111 seen from ahead and below with its bombs falling away, a second Heinkel behind it and black flak bursts around them over the island — The **He 111**'s glazed nose over the target, the stick falling away — the second ride with a bombsight.

A P-40N Warhawk flying almost straight at the camera low over a beach, its painted shark mouth bared under the propeller, a second Warhawk behind it — **The Warhawk's grin.** Not fast, not fancy — it turns tight, carries six fifties and takes a beating, and it wants you to see the teeth coming.

The F-104 — earned, not issued

At the top of the ladder sits the last career-locked airframe: the F-104 Starfighter, a jet from the war after this one — a needle-nosed pencil with razor wings, tip tanks and a T-tail, honest to its inspiration right down to the nickname: a missile with a man in it. It out-runs everything in the sky and turns like a freight train, so the prop rules don't apply — and neither do its weapons. The wing guns are swapped for a six-barrel 20 mm Vulcan spitting thirty rounds a second, and instead of bombs it carries a pod of fourteen unguided rockets that ripple off the rails nearly flat and burst on whatever they touch. Down 25 enemy planes across your career and the hangar card unlocks for good; until then it sits greyed at the bottom of the picker, counting your kills at you. Bots never fly it. You can take it for a spin in flight school first — the Jet & Rockets drill hands you one over an armored column, no questions asked.

The crimson F-104 early jet climbing hard against the morning sky, afterburner lit, tip tanks and T-tail catching the light, a prop fighter falling far behind — The **F-104** climbing away on the burner — the Spitfire astern is at full throttle and losing.

A rocket pass on an armored column: the F-104 boring in low, its rockets streaking down the lane on burning motors with their smoke hanging back to the rails, the lead tank already a column of black smoke — A **rocket pass**: fourteen to a pod, nearly flat off the rails, the lead tank already brewing up.

The hangar screen with the F-104's stat card greyed out and locked, its badge reading 0 of 25 kills, at the far end of a fifteen-card rail — **Earned, not issued**: the F-104's card sits locked in the hangar until your 25th career kill.

The Early Jets era — the same war, fifteen years later

The first time period: a combined-arms server flying the flag -era jets trades the prop hangar for the early jet age. The F-104 becomes a starter instead of a trophy, and three new airframes join it: the MiG-21, a delta-winged point-defense dart that accelerates like sin and bleeds like it too; the Phantom, a two-engine missile truck with four rails, a bomb load, and a strapped-on gun pod that wobbles exactly the way the real lesson said it would; and the B-52, a stratofortress that carpets a grid square per pass and defends its six with a crewable quad-.50 sting.

The era's signature is the boresight heat-seeker, modeled on the missiles of 1965 — which means modeled on their failures. The seeker only locks looking up a tailpipe: hold an enemy jet inside the ring, in the rear hemisphere, and the lock winds up over a long second before R puts it on its way. In flight it pulls modest G a hard low break defeats, its seeker window loses a target that out-turns it, a fraction of launches simply never guide — and flares (L) lie to it outright. Punch one with the missile in your mirrors and the round chases the burning lie into the dirt. Guns stay the finisher; the missile is the reach.

The ground shoots back in kind: each HQ and port hosts an SA-2-style SAM ring that owns everything above 350 m — your RWR chirps when its beam settles on you, rattles at launch, and the recovery is in the warning: dive below the beam (or bomb the site; its whole salvo dies with the radar). Friendly warships radiate as pickets that stretch the umbrella over the sea. At the quayside, the Osa missile boat carries four sea-skimming ship-killers that launch only at spotted hulls — countered by chaff-laced smoke and by the islands themselves. And your throttle is your infrared signature: a full burner is seen from farther and outshines your own flares; run cold to slip by.

A crimson F-104 banking hard over the coast, afterburner lit, the seeker ring burning solid red with LOCK — R TO LAUNCH under it — **LOCK** — the ring burns red, the tone goes steady, and somebody's about to have a very bad day.

A heat-seeker's thin smoke trail arcing away over the Brick Gulf islands moments after launch — **Fox two**: one rail lighter, the smoke trail already chasing a tailpipe over the Gulf.

A cobalt F-104 breaking hard and punching a stick of decoy flares, each a white-hot point dragging its own thick white smoke trail, while a heat-seeker's long smoke rope reaches in from the left — **Punch the flares.** Every decoy burns white-hot and drags its own plume, and by day the fan of smoke is what you see. The heat-seeker's rope hangs for seconds, billowing and drifting downwind, so everyone in the sky can read who's being chased.

The red B-52 stratofortress cruising over the steppe, long swept wings and four podded engine pairs, 24 bombs aboard — The **B-52** hauls twenty-four bombs and a tail sting — a barn in every axis, a horror over a town zone.

The Osa missile boat under way in the Brick Gulf: four big missile launcher boxes along her deck, a twin gun mount at the stern and a mast over the bridge, an Iowa-class battleship on the horizon beyond — The **Osa**: four ship-killers in boxes bigger than her bridge, 39 metres of boat that can put a battleship under.

Bomber crew

The B-17 is multi-crew. Two defensive gun stations, modeled on its real blister positions, take a second and third player: the tail gunner in the stinger covering the bomber's six, and the top gunner in the full-circle dorsal turret — each working a twin .50 cal that leads its own targets while the pilot flies the plane. Pick BOMBER CREW on the spawn screen and you're seated on the first friendly B-17 with that station free (crewed bombers first, bots welcome). Your aim rides the airframe through every bank, your rounds inherit the bomber's speed, your kills are yours — and the crew shares the bomber's fate: she goes down, everybody goes down. F bails out; the seat choice sticks across respawns, so a crew that dies together re-forms on the next bomber together.

You're crew, not cargo. Hold the look key (right mouse, or a drag on touch) to lift your eyes off the gun and take in the bomber you're riding — forward over the pilot, out at the fight, up at the sky — while a chip along the bottom always names whose plane it is and how to leave. And if no friendly B-17 is airborne when you pick a seat, you don't get quietly handed a fighter: you wait for a bomber, and the moment one climbs out, you're in its tail seat — or grab another unit and fly now.

A crimson B-17 heavy bomber with its tail stinger and dorsal turret both trained aft, twin .50 cal tracer streams converging on a smoking enemy fighter shedding debris behind it — **Don't press a B-17's six.** Tail and top gunners — both player seats — meet a fighter boring in from behind with converging twin .50s. The bandit's already shedding pieces.

First-person from a B-17's tail-gun station, freelooking: the bomber's blue fuselage, wing and twin tail turrets fill the frame over the Brick Sea coastline, with a chip along the bottom reading RIDING Duchess Divebomb's B-17 — hold RMB to look — F to bail — **Along for the ride, not blind.** Freelook lifts the camera off the gun so you can see the bomber you're strapped to; the chip never lets you forget whose it is or how to bail.

Easy to fly, honest underneath

The plane flies on a real six-degree-of-freedom model — lift, drag, stalls, the works — which used to mean fighting a constant sink just to stay level. Now auto-trim holds your altitude for you: take your hands off and the nose stays where you left it, so you can look around, line up a shot, or just cruise. Pull, push, or roll into a turn and it bows out instantly — you always have the plane. The little TRIM strip on the gauges shows it working; tap T to switch it off if you'd rather fly it all yourself.

A fighter cruising hands-off and level over the island at night, the heads-up gauges showing speed, altitude, throttle, a 0.9 G load and the TRIM strip holding a touch of nose-up — **Hands off, nose level.** Same flight model as ever — auto-trim just soaks up the steady back-pressure so cruising and lining up an attack don't cost you a constant pull. A deliberate climb, dive or turn always overrides it.

Battle damage

Hits are localized. Every round that finds you is routed to a component — engine, a wing, the fuel tank, the cockpit, or just the airframe — and you wear it: a scorched engine smokes and loses power, a shot-up wing sheds its tip and drags your roll, a punctured tank streams fuel, a cockpit hit greys the pilot out. So a mauled plane limps home trailing smoke instead of simply falling out of the sky, and you can read an enemy's damage on his airframe and finish the job. And when a burst finally is fatal, the plane doesn't blink out — it sheds a wing and corkscrews all the way down, five real seconds of ruined physics you can watch to the ground.

A bare-metal Mustang shot out of the sky, its right wing torn off at the spar and tumbling clear, the engine torched, corkscrewing down trailing a helix of black smoke and flame against a pale blue sky — **The last ride.** A kill is no longer an instant despawn — the wreck flies the same flight model that killed it, spinning down on its torn-off wing behind a helix of smoke and flame. Your victims become little stories you watch to the dirt; your own death gives you one last plunge before the killcam rolls.

A blocky pilot in a crimson flight suit hanging in the harness of a curved team-red parachute canopy sewn from alternating light and dark silk gores, black shroud lines rising all around the rim to the dome, drifting against a blue sky scattered with clouds — **Nobody has to ride it in.** If the pilot survived the airframe and there's height to jump, he bails out under a canopy and drifts downwind — land on your own side of the line and he's **returned** to the fight for a few team points. Gun a helpless pilot in his chute and the kill feed brands you DISHONORABLE.

A crimson Spitfire high in a clear sky, engine dead and dragging a long banner of black smoke back down its climb, while far below and behind it the pilot's crimson parachute has blossomed and rides him down toward his own coast — **The whole story in one frame.** The airframe zooms off the last of its speed on a dead engine, smoking; below it the silk has already opened. A survivable kill from the outside — the plane is gone, but the pilot might just make it home.

A downed pilot in a small black life raft bobbing at the centre of a pulsing orange dye-marker ring on open blue water, a rescue biplane banking low overhead to scoop him up, a wooded coastline on the horizon — **No one fights alone.** A chute that splashes into the sea becomes a bobbing survivor with a dye-marker ring both teams can see. Fly low and slow over him — or, at sea, con any hull through the marker — and you **fish him out of the drink** for points and a LIFESAVER ribbon. The enemy can reach him first for a smaller prize, so every over-water kill mints a little rescue race in its wake.

A battle-damaged crimson Mustang trailing engine smoke and a pale fuel-vapor streak, listing toward its shot-up wing over the sea at sunset with a carrier on the horizon — **Run home smoking**: dead engine pouring smoke, a punctured tank streaming fuel, listing on a shredded wing — nursing a mauled plane back to the carrier is a fight of its own.

A cobalt Spitfire with a blackened, soot-streaked engine cowl pouring a column of smoke against the open sky — **Engine.** The cowl scorched black, smoke boiling off it, dragging home on what power's left.

A crimson Mustang with its right outer wing torn clean off at the spar, the severed tip tumbling away, rolling onto the stump — **Wing.** Push it far enough and the outer panel tears clean off at the spar — the severed tip tumbling away as the fighter rolls helplessly onto the stump.

A cobalt Spitfire falling nose-heavy with its entire empennage torn away at a charred break, the severed tailplane-and-fin cross tumbling below it — **Tail.** A dead-six saddle chews the empennage — elevators and rudder go soft together, and when it lets go the whole cross tears away and the nose falls through. There's no gauge for it; the stick stops answering, and that's how you know.

Airframe. Flak walked the length of the fuselage — scorch and punched-through holes down the flank. Every burst that connects punches its own scatter of dark voxel bullet holes into the panel that took it, and they stay until a carrier-deck repair scrubs the airframe clean.

A crimson Spitfire nosing down at sunset trailing a long pale streak of vaporizing fuel, with no fire — **Fuel.** No fire — just a pale streak of vaporizing fuel bleeding away as you nose down for the deck before the tank runs dry.

The HUD that teaches

The instruments don't just show numbers — they turn raw state into judgment. Take a hit and the screen flashes the edge you're being shot from, not a whole-screen blink, so you know which way to break. A little stall-margin ribbon by the G-meter shows how much turn you have left before the buffet. And the bomber's sight grows a dispersion ring that tightens to gold when your current bank and G will actually put the bomb on the target — or blooms grey to warn you it'll fall in the sea.

Your body is part of the instrument panel too. Rack into a hard positive-G turn and the world greys out from the edges — a black-out tunnel that narrows as you hang on the G, and clears when you ease off, the way a real pilot's vision does without a G-suit. It's a soft ceiling with teeth: pull too long and you're flying half-blind.

A cockpit HUD view with the entire left edge of the screen washed red — a directional damage flash showing fire coming from the left — over a blocky bomber in a dusk sky — **Hit from the left.** The damage flash paints the quarter the fire came from — a wall of red down the left edge means break right, now. Quiet upgrades that read the fight for you before your hit points even move.

A hard climbing turn seen through a heavy black-out vignette closing in from every edge, the fighter and a smoking target framed in the clear centre, the G-meter reading an amber 5.5 — **Blacking out.** Hold a hard turn and the tunnel closes — grey-out creeping in around 3.5 g and shutting to a near-total black-out by 6.5. The G-meter flags amber; your eyes flag it first.

The top-right feed showing team chat and kill lines in one stream — chat lines carry a soft cyan accent bar and a speech-bubble tag, kill and event lines stay plain — over a two-on-two dogfight around the gold Sky Ring blocks — **One stream for talk and kills.** Chat folds into the kill log to save screen space — comms carry a soft cyan rule and a 💬 tag so they read apart from the combat log at a glance, without a second panel eating the corner.

The round fights back

A match isn't a flat timer counting down — it escalates, and it holds grudges. Keep the same enemy on your tail and the game names him; fall too far behind and it sends a champion to drag you back; let the score stay close to the wire and the final minute becomes a lit-up, no-hiding brawl. The back half of a round should feel more dangerous than the front, and these three systems make sure it does.

A dogfight bathed in hot amber overtime light, a crimson fighter firing on a cobalt one over a coastline, with a tight CRIMSON 612 to 588 COBALT score, a 0:47 clock reading SKY RING: CONTESTED, an OVERTIME chip and banner, and a minimap showing every plane on both teams — **Overtime.** Last minute, scores within a few kills: the match latches OVERTIME — the sky burns amber, the music floors, and the teeth of it, **radar rules drop** so every plane on both sides paints on both minimaps. No hiding out the clock; a close round ends in a crescendo where everyone converges.

A Spitfire closing from astern and firing a tracer stream at a burning Mustang whose blue BLACKJACK nameplate wears a thick orange frame, trailing black smoke over the island's hills — **Nemesis.** Die to the same pilot three times in a round and his callsign burns orange — an orange frame round his nameplate and his blip on your minimap, for you and you alone. Settle the score and the **vengeance bounty** pays double. Grudges don't survive the bell.

A cobalt jet named THE RED BARON knifing across the sky trailing a long glowing gold ribbon that widens behind him, a cobalt fighter's twin contrails curving across the sky above — **The ace.** Fall far enough behind with time on the clock and the trailing team is handed a named ace — a full-skill pilot in a reinforced airframe that drags a glittering **gold ribbon** everywhere and carries a fat bounty. The gold carries its own light, so you can find him at dusk and in the dark. Shoot down the Baron and you're paid for it.

Killcam

Get shot down and the server ships you the last several seconds of the fight, replayed from the killer's high three-quarter — the camera rides off their firing line so their plane holds the edge of the frame while yours, and the tracer stream between you, fills it. At the instant of the kill it lets the killer fly on and settles into a slow orbit of your falling wreck. It plays at full speed, not a fast-forward blur, and a persistent KILLCAM badge names the shooter the whole time, so there's never any doubt who put you in the dirt. The replay is always optional: seen enough, click or tap anywhere to skip — the spawn screen appears at once and TAKE OFF unlocks on the normal short timer, as if there'd been no replay at all.

Fly into a hill and you get the same treatment: a CRASH REPLAY chases your own final seconds into the scenery — then orbits the smoking hole you made — with the coach line spelling out what went wrong. No killer to name, but the same story told the same way, instead of a jump-cut straight to the spawn screen — and just as skippable when you'd rather not relive it.

The killcam: a crimson Spitfire at the frame's edge with guns firing on a cobalt Mustang burning ahead, seen from the killer's high three-quarter, the gold KILLCAM badge naming RED BARON across the top — **Who got you, and how.** The death replay rides the killer's shoulder, off the gun–target line so shooter, tracers and your last seconds share the frame — then orbits the wreckage — with the KILLCAM badge naming the shooter until you respawn.

The crash replay: the player's own plane seen from behind moments before hitting the sea, the gold CRASH REPLAY badge across the top with a coach line reading that the sea is just as hard as the ground — **Crashes get the cinema too.** No killer to frame, so the CRASH REPLAY rides your own six down into the water — and the coach line tells you how not to do it again.

Back in the fight

The killcam runs to the end before anything covers it — only once the replay finishes does the spawn screen appear, so the death cam is never obscured. And there's no separate “you died” card: the killcam already named who got you, so the spawn screen is simply the join screen again, pixel for pixel. The full unit picker — every warbird, the bomber crew seats, the flak and naval mounts, the battleship turret, the ground vehicles — the base-or-carrier launch choice, and today's daily missions with your live progress. Line up your next ride and hit TAKE OFF to drop back in — same button you launched with. A short respawn timer just keeps you from spawning instantly; once it lifts, you go when you're ready, not a moment before.

The spawn screen after a death: identical to the join screen, with the WARBIRDS.IO masthead, the AIRCRAFT/AAA/NAVY/GROUND VEHICLES unit picker, five aircraft stat cards, a BASE or CARRIER DECK launch choice, the callsign and TAKE OFF row, controls help, and today's daily missions — **One screen, join or respawn.** Go down, watch the killcam, and you're back at the exact hangar you launched from — same picker, same launch choice, same daily missions. No death banner; the replay already showed you who to blame.

The fleet

The fleet is built to scale: an Essex-class carrier with 268 metres of flight deck, an Iowa-class battleship whose three triple turrets train and elevate as they fire, and Fletcher-class destroyers. Each team's hulls hold a diamond formation pointed at the enemy: the battleship in the van showing its broadside, the two destroyers screening on the beams, and the carrier at the rear with its bow toward the fight. The two fleets are anchored a deliberate distance apart — just beyond either battleship's direct-fire range, but inside its over-the-horizon reach. So the fleets can't simply trade blows: to land shells on the enemy task force you need a teammate flying over it.

The battleship's three main-battery turrets are crewed by players. Take a BIG GUNS slot from the respawn screen and the minimap becomes a plotting chart: click a target inside the range rings, wait out the ballistic computer's solve, then hold fire to send a salvo on a genuine ten-second arc. A teammate flying over the target spots your shells onto a tight pattern — and past the direct-fire ring, out in the spotter range where the enemy fleet lies, the battery won't even loose until a friendly plane is over the target. The chart only shows enemy ground inside your direct ring or inside a spotter's view bubble, so reaching the enemy's deep installations takes eyes in the sky — watch the fog lift as teammates fly the target area. Flak cracked open by naval gunfire stays suppressed extra long. While down you can also man any free AA gun on your team (F bails out).

Every hull is sinkable. Torpedoes must be dropped low and slow or they break up on entry; a good fish runs straight just under the surface behind a wake everyone can see. One sinks a destroyer; a sunk ship takes its guns and gunners down with it and refloats minutes later.

The fleet runs on supplies too. Supply ships are the convoys' seagoing cousins: 134-metre Liberty ships steaming an open-water lane to the carrier, funnels smoking so you can spot them a long way off. Every one that delivers rebuilds your downed guns faster — so escort your sealift and sink theirs with bombs, rockets, or a fish.

A naval task force in a diamond formation: a battleship leading broadside-on, two destroyer escorts on the beams, and a carrier bringing up the rear, with a fighter overhead — The task force in its **diamond** — the battleship in the van, broadside to the enemy; the destroyers screening on the beams; the carrier at the rear, bow toward the fight. The two fleets sit just out of each other's direct gun range, so reaching the enemy hulls takes a spotter overhead.

A line of supply freighters with smoking funnels steaming across open water toward an aircraft carrier — The sealift arriving — a line of supply ships steaming up their lane to the carrier to deliver, funnels smoking so everyone can see them coming.

The carrier from the bow quarter with aircraft spotted on deck and one off the catapult — The carrier: deck spotted, one off the bow cat. Make a slow pass over her and the crews patch you up and rearm you.

A Spitfire catapulting off the carrier's bow at dusk — Catapult launch at dusk — the carrier is your forward base until somebody sinks her.

A close three-quarter view of a destroyer escort's hull, funnels and turrets on open water — A destroyer escort up close — fast, lightly armored, and the screen that dies first. One good fish sinks her.

A close view of the battleship from the bow quarter, all three main-battery turrets trained out — The battleship from the bow quarter, main battery trained out — the heaviest hull on the Brick Sea, and the hardest to put under.

The battleship's main battery firing a salvo at dusk: a fireball thrown down every bore with a white-hot lance at the muzzle, cordite billowing up behind the turrets, and the shells arcing away — **BIG GUNS**: player-crewed main battery, two-shell salvos on a genuine ten-second arc to somewhere unlucky.

The battleship gunner's plotting table: a full-screen fire-control chart with the direct-fire ring, a wider dashed spotter range, a friendly plane's green view bubble lifting the fog over a cluster of enemy targets, and a solved fire mission ready to fire — From the gunner's seat the chart fills the screen — the inner ring is direct fire, the wider **SPOTTER** ring is over-the-horizon reach, and enemy ground only shows where a teammate's view bubble lifts the fog. Lay a target, wait out the solve, then **FIRE**.

The battleship's main-battery turrets firing a salvo at night, smoke trails arcing away over the water — Pull the trigger and the camera leaves the chart to ride the salvo — muzzle flash, then up and away with the shells on their ten-second arc to the fall of shot.

Two Avenger torpedo bombers wave-top at dawn, torpedo wakes running toward a battleship — Avengers on the deck at first light, two fish in the water. Drop low and slow or they break up on entry.

A torpedo detonating against the battleship's hull in a column of water and fire — A fish finding the belt. Drop it **low and slow** and this is what the battleship gets.

A torpedoed destroyer listing hard and going down by the head, on fire amidships — Every hull is sinkable — a torpedoed destroyer going down by the head, guns and gunners with her.

The ground war

Forward territory hides shore installations — radar stations and fuel depots worth big points and painted on the gunner's chart. Supply convoys roll the base-to-base highway; every truck that survives the run scores and rebuilds your downed guns faster, so strafe theirs and escort yours. Rounds also roll wind with their weather: bombs drift downwind (watch the minimap wind sock), though the battleship's computer corrects automatically. And after dark, searchlights sweep the sky: every gun is half blind at night unless a beam cones the target — a lit plane is visible to everything on the map.

A fuel depot erupting in flame under a P-38 pulling off the target — A fuel depot going up. Forward territory hides shore installations worth big points and painted on the gunner's chart.

A supply convoy on a road through green hills taking strafing fire from a diving fighter, dust kicking up along the column — Supply convoys run the base-to-base road — strafe theirs, escort yours; every truck that gets through rebuilds their guns faster.

A column of supply lorries crossing a long timber trestle bridge over a blue inlet, rails down both sides and bents marching out across the water, a fighter diving on them from astern — Where the road meets the sea it goes out on timber: kilometre-long trestles carry the highway and its convoys over the inlets — nowhere to hide on a bridge, for trucks or for the fighter chasing them.

A heavy tank firing its main gun across the road into an enemy tank brewing up in smoke and flame — Armor on the highway: behind the convoys rolls a column of combat vehicles — here a heavy tank lands an 88 on an enemy hull. Crew one yourself from the spawn screen.

A quad 20 mm anti-aircraft half-track firing a cone of tracers up at a banking, smoking fighter through bursting flak — The quad-20 AA half-track throwing up a wall of mobile flak — strafing the road is never free with one of these in the column.

A scout car leading an armored column up the road, machine gun snapping back at a fighter strafing the convoy — A scout car leading the column under a strafing run, its machine gun snapping back at the diving fighter.

A P-38 strafing a flak emplacement below the barrage balloons near the enemy base — The P-38's day job: under the balloon fence, guns working over the enemy flak line.

A P-38 threading a barrage balloon's cable at dusk — Threading the barrage-balloon fence at dusk — the cables are every bit as lethal as the guns.

A B-17 bomber caught in two searchlight beams at night with heavy flak rising — Coned. After dark the searchlights come out — and a lit plane is visible to every gun on the map.

A flak gun firing up a searchlight beam at a coned bomber under the stars — Man any free gun on your team: a flak crew firing up the beam at a coned night raider.

The world

A charming, blocky world of rolling hills and beaches stretches across the Brick Sea, kept lively by charmingly-named bot pilots that fill empty seats, dogfight for real, run home smoking when shot up, and contest the ring when their team falls behind. Rounds roll random weather — clear skies strung with fat cumulus, a golden haze, or a storm that pulls the fog into knife-fight range — all riding a shared day/night cycle where the moon, stars, and Milky Way come out after dark.

A dark green Spitfire banking toward a towering white cumulus cloud in a clear blue sky, smaller puffy clouds scattered below it over the sea — **Cumulus to hide in.** Fat, flat-bottomed clouds hang over the island at fighting height. Dive into one and the world goes white — and the bandit on your tail sees the very same cloud you do.

A fighter flying past glowing peach-coloured cumulus clouds in a salmon sunset sky, the island dark below — **Lit by the sky they hang in.** Brilliant at noon, slate under the moon — and at sunset the cumulus catch the last of the sun and glow while the island goes dusky below.

Two Spitfires in silhouette crossing a low orange sun in a salmon sunset sky, a wide golden glow spreading along the hazy horizon — **A sun to squint at.** White-hot at noon, it burns down through gold and orange to an ember on the horizon, squashes as it sets, and goes down behind the sea and the ridges — turning anything that crosses it to a silhouette.

A Spitfire chasing a Mustang low over the island hills in a warm dawn haze — Dawn rounds hang a golden haze over the hills all day — one of the random weathers every round rolls.

A Mustang firing point-blank into a Spitfire under a gray storm sky — Storm rounds pull the fog into knife-fight range. 20 mm at twenty meters.

A Flying Fortress droning under the Milky Way at midnight, its star clouds and dark dust lanes arched across a sky of bright and faint stars — **A sky to steer by.** After dark the stars come out brightest first — blue-white, gold and red, a few blazing and thousands faint — and wheel through the night round a pole star low in the north, with the Milky Way's star clouds arched across them.

A pair of Spitfires in silhouette crossing a huge honey-coloured gibbous moon rising in a rose-pink twilight sky, its dark seas and bright craters plain — **Moonrise.** The moon wears its real face — the Sea of Rains, the Sea of Tranquillity, Tycho's bright rays — waxes and wanes over an evening's play, and rises honey-orange out of the haze.

The towns are towns — cottages and barns, brick houses and half-timbered townhouses, shops, apartment blocks, a town hall, and a church steeple in every town to steer by — and the woods are woods: oak and birch groves, spruce and pine blocks, poplars out on the steppe. Out on the islands, poplars line the roads, oaks and birches dot the meadows, and pines climb the hills toward the scree. On a desktop, Settings → High-fidelity graphics lights it all like a diorama: a real sky with the sun in it, burning orange at dusk, sun shadows under planes, roofs and treelines, and a soft glow on tracers, motors, star shells, fire and the sun. It applies on reload; phones keep the classic look they were tuned for.

A tank nosed out from the edge of an oak wood in late-afternoon light, the trees throwing long shadows across the grass of the steppe — **High-fidelity graphics.** Late sun, long shadows, and an Abrams waiting where the oaks end — the same world, lit like a diorama. Switch it on in Settings on a desktop.

A crimson Spitfire skimming the island hills above a country road lined with tall poplars, a broad oak throwing its shadow across the meadow in the foreground and two umbrella-crowned pines on the hilltop behind — **The island's trees.** Poplars along the road, a lone oak shading the meadow, pines up on the crest — country worth flying low through.

The ground is smooth country: rolling hills, ridges, valleys and beaches instead of stepped blocks, and the ground you see is exactly the ground a shell bursts on and a tank drives over. Hulls pitch up the grades and roll across the slopes; an Abrams backed off behind a crest really is hull-down. With High-fidelity graphics on, it's painted as well — meadow and sun-bleached steppe, packed earth, scree on the steep slopes, snow on the peaks, and the roads winding over it all.

A crimson fighter banking low over rolling green hills, a paved road winding across them to a sandy beach, a timber bridge running out over the sea to a battleship at anchor — **Smooth country.** The island's hills roll into sandy beaches, and the highway follows every ridge down to the bridge.

A tank climbing a smooth grassy rise on the steppe, tufts of tall grass and half-buried boulders on the slope, bare earth and stone on the crest above — **Every rise is a position.** An Abrams grinding up the slope, the hull pitched to the grade — whatever waits past that crest can't see it yet.

And the sea has a bottom. Beaches shelve into clear shallows — sand, then turquoise, then teal, then the deep blue — so you can read the coast from the colour of the water, and a line of surf rolls in on every shore while the steppe's lakes lap quietly at theirs. A light swell runs with the round's wind and catches the light: a glint off every ripple by day, a road of glitter toward the sun at golden hour, the moon's trail after dark. Out toward the horizon the sea takes the colour of the sky.

A fighter skimming low along a sandy beach, the water beneath it shading from pale turquoise at the shore to deep blue offshore, with a line of white surf along the sand — **The sea finds its depth.** A Spitfire skims the surf line, the shallows shading from sand to turquoise to deep blue beneath it — the island's shelf, readable from the air.

A grey destroyer in silhouette on a glittering path of sunlight across a rippled sea, a round low sun above the horizon between two green islands — **The sun's road.** Golden hour on the Brick Sea: a Fletcher steams across the glitter the low sun lays over the swell.

A tan tank parked on a sandy lakeshore beside pine woods, clear pale-blue water in the foreground and a second lake beyond — **Steppe lakes.** Clear over the mud and lapping, not breaking — an Abrams halted at the water's edge.

The island is a place

The war isn't the only thing on the island. Fishing boats putter neutral lanes, a striped lighthouse sweeps its beam over the black water at night, gulls burst off the shore when you buzz them, and a whale rolls once in a rare while. None of it shoots or scores — it just makes low, slow flying worth doing. And your home field is a proper station: a graded apron with a marked runway, arched hangars wearing the team band, barracks, quonset huts, a water tower, an ammunition bunker and pillboxes, ground crew that scatter when you buzz the strip, a windsock showing the round's real wind, a control tower that lights up at dusk, and the enemy's parked reserve fighters dug into earth revetments — worth a low, dangerous strafing pass through their flak.

A striped red-and-white coastal lighthouse at night, its lantern lit and a pale beam sweeping out over the dark water under a field of stars — **The lighthouse.** A striped tower on the highest coastal point, its beam raking out over the sea after dark. It never targets anything — it just turns, a landmark that lives whether or not the war notices it. Every client sees the sweep at the same instant, computed from the shared clock with zero network traffic.

The striped coastal lighthouse by day with a whole flock of gulls wheeling around it over the shore — **The coast is alive.** Skim the shoreline at speed and the gull flocks burst off the water and wheel — here around the lighthouse by day. Grey fishing boats work the lanes offshore, and a rare surfacing whale is the same on every screen at once: a shared "did you see that?!" computed from the clock, no network traffic.

An airfield at dusk: a control tower, two arched hangars, barracks and quonset huts along a marked runway, three fighters parked in earth revetments facing the strip — **Living airbase.** A graded apron with a marked runway, hangars, barracks, huts and a water tower. The control tower's cab lights up at dusk with a slow red beacon blinking on top, a windsock streams the round's actual wind, and the ground crew bolt for cover when a fighter howls over the strip.

Parked reserve fighters in their earth revetments beside a team's home field, an enemy fighter rolling in on them with a stream of tracer — **The flightline.** Each base parks a row of non-flyable reserve fighters in earth revetments, noses to the strip. They don't fly and they don't fight — but they burn for points, so there's a reason to make a low, dangerous pass right through the enemy's flak ring.

A cream-and-gold biplane towing a cloth banner reading EAT AT BRICK'S — THE BRICK SEA'S FINEST CHOW over the sea, a silver ad zeppelin with a light-ringed sign board on its flank holding station beyond — **The flying billboards.** Barnstormer Bess drags the sponsor's cloth past the Sky Ring while the Marquee hangs its message over the sea. They fly for no flag, tour the landmarks, and anyone may pop one for a token bounty — the sponsors always send another, and every round the copy changes.

Close on the ad zeppelin's flank after dark: a timber sign board with a gold rim, reading TONIGHT ONLY — THE FLYING BRICK CIRCUS, ringed by big warm-white bulbs with a running light chasing around the frame — **Lights on the Marquee.** The zeppelin doesn't paint its copy on the gasbag — it hangs a proper theater marquee off each flank, a gold-rimmed board with a ring of bulbs chasing round the frame and washing the poster so it still reads long after sunset. One bulb always flickers. Nobody has ever fixed it.

Billowing white smoke capitals reading FLY WARBIRDS.IO laid flat across a deep blue sky, seen from below looking up past the cloud deck, the writer biplane rolling off the end of its final pass — **Skywriting.** Every round the Skywriter does what it's called, and it does it before the first merge: three kilometres up, above both cloud decks, a five-nozzle smoke rake lays the sponsor's headline flat across the sky in billowing capitals a hundred metres tall — one straight sweep, all five rows of dots at once, then a run back the other way to fill anything the rollout missed. Inside a minute the line snaps into words, and it hangs there for the rest of the round. Read it from the deck, or glance straight up from the furball. Shoot it down mid-sentence and the replacement picks the word back up.

The battlefield remembers

Nothing that happens on the ground gets swept away. Bomb strikes leave dark craters pocking the fields, a crash site keeps a charred skeleton and a smoke column burning for the rest of the round, and a sunk ship leaves an oil slick drifting on the sea. Fly the front line at round-end and the ground itself reads like a story of everything that happened on it — and it all sits on top of the terrain, which never changes, so what you fly over is exactly what the server collides against.

A grassy ridge pocked with a scatter of bomb craters — dark scorched bowls ringed with raised dirt — and a couple of burning crash sites, seen from above in bright afternoon light — **Scorched earth.** A field worked over by bombs and downed planes: crater after crater ringed in raised dirt, crash sites still smoking. The map carries the round's history to the bell.

On your phone

The whole war fits in two thumbs. Your left thumb is a dynamic stick — press anywhere on the left half and it anchors under your thumb, steering the same aim cursor mouse players fly with. A flight instructor rides along: haul the stick all the way over and it commands the plane's best sustained turn instead of snapping you into a stall, so full deflection finally means “turn as hard as you safely can.” The right half is look; the left-edge slider is throttle with full and idle detents; let the stick go and the instructor eases you back to straight-and-level on its own — hold off a moment longer and the autopilot latches to keep it there hands-free, until you grab the stick again. A PULL UP warning flashes before the ground does, off-screen bandit markers hug the edges pointing at the fight you can't see, and a first-flight coach labels every control the first time you spawn.

Crew a tank or a warship and the thumbs split the job the way every tank game taught them to. The stick becomes a tiller: it draws as a sideways rail and turns the hull like A/D, a small push for a correction, all the way over for the hardest turn your tracks or rudder can manage. A drag on the right half lays the gun: the sight follows your thumb and stops where it stops, so you can lift it for FIRE and keep the aim. The left-edge lever still drives, and on a tank its bottom quarter is reverse.

The mobile HUD in flight: the gold virtual stick anchored under the left thumb, a THR 100 throttle slider, the flight-data gauges, the kill feed tucked under the minimap, the white gunsight alone in the centre of the screen, the FIRE and BOMB buttons, and blue off-screen enemy markers hugging the screen edges pointing at bandits out of view — **Two thumbs, the whole war.** Left thumb steers through the instructor — full deflection is the plane's best turn, not a stall — the slider sets throttle, and off-screen **bandit markers** point you at the fight beyond the edge of a phone's narrow view. The centre of the screen belongs to the fight: one white gunsight, no extra cursors or buttons.

A first-flight spawn on touch with three ghosted coach labels over the live control zones: STEER with a curved thumb-arc glyph on the left, DRAG TO LOOK on the right, and THROTTLE beside the left-edge slider — **First flight, coached.** Spawn for the first time and the controls name themselves — **STEER**, **DRAG TO LOOK**, **THROTTLE** — each label fading the moment you use that control. Die twice early and Flight School taps you on the shoulder.

An Abrams tank on the Brick Steppe seen on a phone in landscape, its hull swinging to the right while the gun holds its aim down the sight line; under the left thumb the stick is drawn as a sideways rail with arrows at each end and the gold knob pushed out toward the right arrow; the THR lever on the left edge, the crew chips on the left rail, and BAIL, ZOOM and FIRE buttons bottom-right — **Left thumb steers, right thumb shoots.** At the helm of a tank or a warship the stick is a **tiller** on a sideways rail, and a drag on the right lays the gun. Here an Abrams swings hard to starboard while its stabilized gun holds the aim.

Hall of fame

Every kill, win, sunk ship and cleared mission is tallied against your callsign for good, and the best of all time hang in the Hall of Fame — now its own page at /leaderboard, not a pop-up you crack open on the join screen. Seven boards, best first: top aces, most wins, ship killers, siege masters, night aces, mission masters and the longest daily streaks — each pilot's most prestigious career medal riding beside their name. Bots never have a token, so they never appear; the only names on the wall are ones earned in the live game.

Wear your career

Your record used to be invisible — a 500-kill veteran flew a plane that looked exactly like a first-timer's. Not anymore. The hangar has a PAINT SHOP of earnable schemes, unlocked by the same career counters that hand out medals: sand Duneworn for siege work, near-black Midnight Reaper for night kills, victory stripes at 50. As you rack up kills in a round, kill-mark stencils stack up under your cockpit, so a pilot on a tear visibly wears the streak. And a career ace flies marked: a gold spinner cap, a fin pennant, and the ACE title under the callsign — but only up close, so it's a reward you notice after the merge, never a beacon before it. No paint says which side you fly for; the Crimson or Cobalt tile over your callsign does, so friend-or-foe reads at any range whatever you've earned.

A Spitfire repainted nose to tail in a sand Duneworn scheme with pale trim bands, a row of twelve dark kill-mark stencils stacked under the cockpit, a gold spinner cap, a white and gold pennant on the fin, and a two-line floating nameplate on a crimson tile reading IRON ANNIE with the title ACE beneath it — **Nose art & kill marks.** Sand Duneworn paint from nose to tail, a dozen kills stencilled under the cockpit this round, the gold spinner cap and fin pennant of an ace, and the ACE title: the whole career, worn on the airframe. The Crimson tile over the callsign is what tells a bandit whose side you're on.

The hangar PAINT row: a label reading PAINT beside six colour swatches — the first (factory grey) selected with a gold border, the other five padlocked in their scheme colours (sand, near-black, dark navy, striped, olive) — **The paint shop.** Six schemes under the unit picker; locked ones show a padlock and the counter they gate on (*15 night kills*, *5 ships*, *50 kills*…). Equip one and your plane repaints instantly, in your world and everyone else's. The medal case finally has something to spend itself on.

Fly under a unit insignia (new)

The fliers of the 1930s and 40s painted squadron badges on their cowlings and tails, and now you can fly under one. Tap the shield beside your callsign in the hangar and pick from forty unit insignia, each with a name and a motto: the Rampant Wolf rearing under its zig-zag chief, the Diving Pig (pigs do fly, straight down), the Sea Fox with a ship in its jaws, the Ace of Spades, Lucky 13, the Cloud Ogre rising out of the white. No locks: every badge is yours from the first sortie. It flies in front of your name everywhere it appears: the nameplate over your plane, the kill feed, chat, the scoreboard, the killcam's shot down by, the round's TOP GUNS, the Hall of Fame, and your pilot page, where it sits big above your callsign like the patch on a service record. Swap it mid-sortie and everyone's view of you changes on the spot. The bots fly under badges that suit them: Cumulus Carl comes out of the clouds, and Duchess Divebomb, of course, flies the pig.

All forty unit insignia in a grid on the dark hangar slab, each with its name: dive-bomber shields with zig-zag chiefs, snarling beasts, cartoon mascots, playing cards and heraldic arms — **Forty badges.** Dive-bomber shields under zig-zag chiefs, beasts, mascots, cards and arms, redrawn bold and flat so they read at a glance across a busy sky.

The hangar card with the callsign IRON ANNIE in the name box, a Rampant Wolf on the badge button beside it, and the unit insignia grid open underneath with the wolf picked and its motto read out — **The shield beside your name.** Tap it for the grid; pick a badge and it's on your callsign before you take off. The motto line tells you what you're signing up for.

A crimson Spitfire under the Rampant Wolf badge firing on a smoking cobalt Mustang whose nameplate reads Old Scratch beside a Red Devil, a Diving Pig wingman above, and the kill feed telling the fight in badges — **Know them by their badge.** The nameplate leads with the patch, and so does every line of the kill feed: you'll spot the Red Devil scoring again before you've read the name.

The scoreboard with both squadrons' ledgers, every pilot's badge beside the callsign, over a dogfight — **The whole squadron, under its colours.** Crimson and Cobalt's ledgers side by side, every pilot and every bot wearing their badge.

Every callsign gets a page

Your career finally has a home you can link to. Every pilot has a shareable page at warbirds.io/pilot/<callsign> — the thing you paste in chat after a good night. It lays out the whole record: the medal case with progress bars ticking toward the ribbons you haven't earned yet, K/D/W and best-round and best-streak tiles, your leaderboard ranks, your favourite mount (the plane you've scored the most kills in), and a kill heatmap showing where on the island you actually hunt. Click any name on the Hall of Fame to open theirs. It's all built from the public ledger — no private identity token ever appears in a URL or on the page.

The pilot card. Medals with progress, career tiles, leaderboard ranks, favourite mount, and a heatmap of where you hunt — one page that makes a callsign feel owned. Fully crawlable, publicly shareable, and token-free.

Big J: a battleship you can walk

A separate, standalone game at /battleship: the USS New Jersey, Iowa-class, rebuilt in voxels at 1:1 scale — 270 meters of her, and you're aboard on foot. Climb from the engine room to the Mk 38 director, and fight her: pick up the enemy squadron on the SG radar in CIC, track from the director, take rangefinder cuts, and work the Mk 8 rangekeeper in plot until the solution is yours — the full designate → track → rates → ready → fire → spot state machine, driving nine real 16-inch ballistic arcs over the horizon. Sailors walk her passageways, repair parties run to casualties, armor shrugs what it historically shrugged, and a magazine fire is exactly the emergency it sounds like.

Nine guns, one word — a full broadside at 17 km, cordite rolling over the fo'c'sle.

Standing on the forecastle under turret one's 16-inch rifles, the salvo's brown cordite cloud hanging over the gunhouse — **1:1 scale means the guns are upstairs** — on deck under turret I, inside the salvo's own smoke.

The SG radar PPI scope in CIC: green phosphor sweep, range rings, three enemy blips and the contact list — **CIC**: the SG radar's PPI scope — sweep, phosphor blips, three skunks in the contact list. F designates one to the main battery.

The Mk 38 director view at 12x: binocular vignette on the horizon with the coincidence rangefinder panel below — The **Mk 38 director** atop the tower: 12× optics slaved to the track, and the coincidence rangefinder — cut when the images kiss.

The Mk 8 rangekeeper manned: a time-range plot with observed radar dots diverging from the generated pen line and bending back after a rate correction, a salvo mark and a splash group, and rate-control dials showing estimated target course and speed — **Main battery plot**, deep under the armor deck: the Mk 8's time-range plotter. Green dots are what the radar sees; the gold pen is what your estimate predicts. Make them agree and the solution is yours.

Blocky sailors in dungarees among the mess tables on the second deck while fire-control messages tick by — The crew lives aboard — mess deck at general quarters. Repair parties will physically run from here to whatever's burning.

The DC status board in Damage Control Central listing burning compartments with fire and flooding bars and repair parties en route — **DC Central**: every casualty on one board — fires, flooding, list, counterflooding, and the one button you hope you never need: FLOOD THE MAGAZINE.

The deck plans overlay: a labeled top-down plan of the main deck with rooms, gold ladder marks, crew dots and the player marker — Ship's plans on M — every deck from the hold to the bridge, ladders in gold, crew as drifting dots, you as the gold ring.

Big J: her real wars

The Big J now opens on a mission select: alongside the what-if 1944 gun duel are the New Jersey's actual shooting wars, all fought against the shore. Siege of Wonsan (Korea, May 1951) is her first war back from mothballs and the longest naval siege of the century — rail lines and gun caves above the harbor, and the Kalmagak batteries that really hit her on 21 May, the only combat casualties she ever took. The Gunline (Vietnam, 1969) puts you on naval gunfire support off the DMZ — an ANGLICO spotter calls fire missions over the net, the targets plot on the CIC scope as gold diamonds, and the coastal guns at Cap Mui Lay shoot back, as they really did. Beirut Station (February 1984) sends 16-inch fire into artillery positions 900 meters up the Shouf — the fire control solves the shell's angle of fall to drop rounds on mountaintops, and with the city under your gun-target line, three rounds astray relieve you of command. The land is an analytic heightfield shared by the terrain mesh, the radar's landmass paint and the shell impacts — so the burst you see through the director's optics is exactly where the ballistics put it. Getting around got honest too: ladders are now visible brass rails-and-rungs (they used to be climbable but invisible — voxel-mesher fine print), a gold objective beacon marks every order through the steel, and T teleports you straight to any battle station — or any compartment — when you'd rather fight than commute.

The battleship title screen with four mission cards: Surface Action 1944, Siege of Wonsan Korea 1951, The Gunline Vietnam 1969, and Beirut Station Lebanon 1984 — **Five ways to fight her** — two invented (one of them in the dark), three straight out of the deck logs.

The voxel New Jersey off Wonsan harbor, the bare brown Kalma ridges rising beyond the anchorage — **Wonsan, May 1951** — the siege guns traded every day here. Kalmagak has been registering on the anchorage for weeks, and it opens up the moment you commit to a fire mission.

The voxel New Jersey firing a main battery salvo toward the Vietnamese coast, muzzle smoke rolling over the forward turrets — **The gunline, 1969** — answering a call for fire off the DMZ, the coast on the horizon and the tasking checklist keeping score.

Sixteen-inch shell bursts walking across an NVA artillery battery, one gun pit erupting in flame, the log reading TARGET DESTROYED — **End of mission.** The spotter walks your salvos on with ADD and DROP, then reads back the battle damage: guns silent, pits burning.

The PPI scope painting the coastline as a green landmass with four gold diamond fire-mission plots labeled TGT A through D — **CIC off Beirut**: the scope paints the coast from the same heightfield the shells hit; called fire missions plot as gold diamonds.

The New Jersey on station off Beirut, the city shelf and hazy Shouf mountains beyond — **Beirut Station, February 1984** — the city on its shelf, the Shouf in the haze above it, and rules of engagement that make every solution matter.

From the quarterdeck spawn: two brass ladders flanking the aft deckhouse door, and a gold beacon column marking the navigation bridge objective with a chip reading NAV BRIDGE — 65 m — **Follow the gold** — brass ladders you can finally see, and the objective beacon shining through the steel with a name and a range. Press T to skip the commute entirely.

Big J: rate control — the solution is yours now

The rangekeeper used to solve itself: designate a target and a percentage crawled to READY on its own. That's not how a Mk 8 worked, and it wasn't much of a game either. Now the plot runs on rate control, the real method: the rangekeeper dead-reckons the target from your estimated target course and speed, and shows you generated-versus-observed on a live time-range plotter and a pair of needle-matching rate meters. Only one course/speed combination makes both rates agree — find it and that's the solution, in the doctrine's own words. Guess wrong and the shells physically go where your estimate says: a 15-knot rate error at a 40-second time of flight is a 300-meter miss. The fire-control team works the knobs on their own if you stay topside — but a human on the rangekeeper is faster and sharper, which is exactly how the Navy saw it too. Getting there stopped being the hard part: T now lists every battle station and every compartment, by deck, one key each. And the two views that used to stare into steel — the turret periscope and the plot desk — got real sightlines: the periscope eye now rides the turret roof, and plot faces its own glowing plotting board on the bulkhead.

Two more pieces close the gunnery loop. V rides the salvo out: a chase camera on your own 16-inch round, time compressing through the cruise so the 40-second arc stays watchable, ending on the burst before it puts you back aboard. And when you're in the director as the salvo lands, the correction is your call, not the air spotter's: the splashes come up as pips on the Mk 8 spot scope (crisp with the radar in, scattered without it), you park the gold bug on the group — U/J add/drop, H/K left/right, in hundreds, the traditional deflection-then-range order — and C sends it to plot. A good call cancels the miss almost entirely; sit on your hands and the weaker air-spot correction goes in when the window passes. The plot even holds its rate corrections while a salvo is being observed, because pyramiding spots is exactly the sin the gunnery manuals warn about.

Standing in main battery plot: the time-range plotting board glowing green on the forward bulkhead above the rangekeeper table, the fire-control switchboard with its meter row to the right — **The board on the bulkhead is live** — the same canvas the station UI blows up, drawn into the 3D room like the CIC scope.

The teleport menu: battle stations listed by number on the left, and every compartment grouped by deck with a letter key on the right — **The whole ship on one card** — stations by number, compartments by letter, decks in order. Nobody gets lost on their own ship.

The turret II periscope view at 8x: open horizon with enemy funnel smoke, and the gun captain's panel showing train, elevation and gun state — **Turret II's periscope, un-blinded** — the eye rides the gunhouse roof now, between the barrels, instead of staring at the turret's rear plate.

The salvo camera at the end of its ride: a 16-inch burst erupting on the Wonsan rail junction, seen close from the round's chase position, the log reading TARGET DESTROYED — **V rides the salvo out** — chase cam on your own round from muzzle to burst, then back aboard.

The Mk 8 spot scope in the director: green splash pips clustered right of the target hairline, the gold spot bug parked on them, and YOUR SPOT reading DROP 600 — **The spot is your call now.** Splash pips on the Mk 8 spot scope, gold bug keyed onto the group — DROP 600, send it, and the next salvo walks aboard.

Big J: night quarters

NIGHT ACTION is the fifth mission card and the reason the SG radar exists: a cruiser-destroyer force coming down The Slot in the dark, the sky a starfield, the sea black, and the enemy nothing but gun flashes until you do something about it. That something is I — 5-inch star shells, burst deliberately beyond the target so the hull silhouettes, exactly per doctrine. Radar tracks in the dark; the director's optics don't — no illumination, no optical designation, no rangefinder cuts, no spotting bonus. Meanwhile the destroyers do what destroyers do at night: press inside 7 km and put a spread of Long Lance torpedoes in the water. The lookouts call the wakes inside 2,500 m, and after that it's rudder work — turn into the spread and comb the tracks, or learn how good the torpedo defense system is (sometimes it holds; mostly it's major flooding and a long night in DC Central). Torpedo runs happen in the day actions too.

The ship also found her voice — without a single synthesized word. Walk up to a sailor and he says something in text, over his head, with a little sound-powered-phone murmur underneath: mess-deck gossip, engine-room pride, and genuinely useful hints ("plot's begging for rates, sir"). The 1MC runs the ship's day between actions — sweepers, mail call, the smoking lamp — and when it calls chow, the crew actually files to the mess deck. And every mission now ends with a gunnery grade: accuracy, dispatch, and the state you brought her home in, scored against the ship's records kept in your browser. The Battle Efficiency "E" is something to defend.

The battleship darkened at night, a black silhouette on black water under a voxel starfield — **Darken ship.** The what-if the Iowas actually drilled for: a radar-guided gun action in the dark.

A star shell flare burning under the starfield with its smoke wisp above, an enemy cruiser silhouette lit on the black water below — **Star shell burning** — burst beyond the target, silhouette the hull. Thirty seconds of noon, then the dark comes back.

Four white torpedo wake lines running across the water toward the battleship in the distance — **Torpedo water.** Four wakes with your name on them. Turn into the spread and thread it — the tracks don't wait.

A voxel sailor by the deckhouse door with a floating speech chip reading 'Mind the knee-knockers, sir.' — **The crew talks now** — in text, the honest way, with a murmur of sound-powered phone under it. No robot voices aboard this ship.

Big J: in a pocket

The battleship's title card used to end with a shrug — “a desktop game; grab a mouse” — and now it doesn't, because the whole ship fights from a phone. The design rule was gestures over furniture: a joystick fades in wherever your left thumb lands and walks the deck in true analog, the right thumb drags to look, and the binoculars are a pinch — the one gesture every phone hand tries first. The contextual gold prompt is the only action button aboard: tap it to man a station, hold it to fight a fire or take a ladder down. Every manned console — helm, CIC, plot, director, turret, DC Central — rows its keyboard as real buttons wired into the same handlers, the director slews under your finger, and every 16-inch salvo is a haptic thump in your palm. Starting a mission goes fullscreen and locks landscape; the Big J fights broadside-on.

Phone landscape view down the battleship's weather deck: virtual joystick under the left thumb, chip strip along the top, jump button lower right, gold waypoint chip pointing to the nav bridge — **Underway, one hand.** The joystick lives wherever the thumb lands; six chips up top are the entire HUD tax.

The helm console on a phone: course, speed, rudder and telegraph dials above a row of touch buttons — rudder left and right, midships, bells, fire, secure — **The nav bridge on glass.** Same handlers as the keyboard — the buttons just draw the keys.

Controls

MOUSE steers your plane (V toggles) CLICK/SPACE fire B drop bomb / torpedo RIGHT MOUSE look around

W/S pitch — I, or Inverted elevator in Settings, flies it like a stick instead: pull back to climb, mouse and keys alike A/D roll Q/E rudder SHIFT/CTRL throttle

T auto-trim — holds your altitude hands-off, on by default (a deliberate climb, dive or turn always overrides it) P autopilot — flies straight & level C cockpit / chase view

1–5 switch plane while down TAB scoreboard ENTER chat M mute F bail from a gun

Battleship turret: click the chart to plot a target, hold FIRE once the solve completes.

On touch devices: left thumb steers, right drag looks around, on-screen FIRE/BOMB buttons, VIEW for the cockpit, left slider sets throttle. At sea, ZOOM raises the gunsight and the conning chips (shell, repair, boost, damage control) are tap targets.

Aboard the Big J on a phone: left thumb walks, right thumb looks, pinch for binoculars, tap the gold prompt to man a station — each console shows its controls as buttons.

Gamepads & HOTAS sticks are supported — just plug in and move an axis. Aboard a tank or a warship the left stick lays the gun and the right stick is the helm: steer and work the throttle on it, ring the throttle with RB/LB, or drive the d-pad like W/A/S/D. A HOTAS steers a hull on its twist.

Prefer your own layout? Every desktop flight control is rebindable from Settings > Keybindings (the join screen’s footer) — click a key, press the one you want. It saves to your device and the help above changes to match.

The Settings > Keybindings screen: a keycap for every aircraft control grouped into Flight, Throttle and Weapons, with the Pitch up / climb cap pulsing gold and reading 'press…' as it waits for a new key — **Your keys, your stick.** Bind pitch, roll, rudder, throttle, guns and every pilot toggle to whatever keys your hands want. A key can only do one flight thing at a time, so a rebind takes the key from whoever held it — and the on-screen help always shows *your* bindings, never ours.

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