Hold over

October 1, 2026 · land combat

Until today, every tank on the Brick Steppe had a gunner's mate you never met. Lay the crosshair on an enemy two kilometres off and the gun quietly cranked itself up for the range, so the round came down exactly where you pointed. Convenient. Also the most interesting part of tank gunnery, done for you. Now it's yours.

Through a MUTT's iron-ring gunsight: the crosshair held high in the sky over a brick market town, and the ladder of range marks hanging under it, labelled 2.5 to 25, with the 15 mark laid on the town — A MUTT gunner holding over on a hull 1,500 m out: crosshair in the sky, the 15 mark on the target.

Your round drops

Fire an Abrams' gun, a MUTT's recoilless or a Bradley's 25 mm and the round leaves straight down your sight line, then falls. The Abrams' dart is fast: it sags about two metres over a kilometre, and a little over eight at two. The MUTT's recoilless round is not fast. At a kilometre it has fallen twenty metres, about eight times the height of a tank, so a MUTT gunner laying dead on a hull that far off puts the round into the dirt well short of her.

So you hold over: aim above the target by as much as the round will fall on the way there.

The range marks

You don't have to guess how much. Hanging under the crosshair is a short ladder of marks, labelled in hundreds of metres the way a tank sight's range scale reads: 5 is 500 metres, 10 a kilometre, 20 two. Each mark sits exactly where your round will be when it has flown that far.

Shooting is three steps:

Range her. Put the crosshair on the target. The rangefinder at the top of the gunsight reads her distance: RNG 1240 m.
Hold over. Raise the gun until the mark for that range sits on her. Between two marks, split the difference.
Fire.

The marks are in the chase view as well as the gunsight (Z), but the gunsight is where you'll want them. On an Abrams the whole ladder is a few mils tall and reads best magnified. A MUTT's ladder is long and plain to see from anywhere, because its gunner needs every bit of it.

What it changes

The first shot is a skill. A good gunner who reads the range and holds over cleanly still hits first time. One who rushes it sees the tracer land short, and has one reload to fix it.
Watch your tracer. If the round lands under her, hold higher. Walking the fall of shot onto a target is back in the game.
Range is armor. Out past two kilometres a moving tank is a hard target again, and a MUTT across the steppe has to judge its shot instead of just pointing.
The ring is gone on land. It used to show where your round would land. Now that you aim the shot yourself, it would only lie to you, so the warships keep it and the tanks don't.
Your missile doesn't care. The Bradley's wire-guided missile still flies wherever the crosshair points, all the way in.

The AI tank crews always laid their own guns and still do. Now you do too.