How to Shell Drill Camp

Have you ever wanted to shell the Union drill camp from the artillery range? No? Suspensions? Well let's ignore that and figure it out anyway.

Update 170

- Added artillery teamkill ban support. Firing a poorly aimed shot that ends up killing a bunch of friendlies will not get you immediately banned. The player pulling the lanyard will get notified of each teamkill committed. A popup warning will also be displayed to the player pulling the lanyard when the teamkill limit is getting close to the ban threshold.


Long story short: pubs can't be trusted with guns, organized event arty has a harder time. The update also added a feature where on drill camp, if you do enough damage to someone to overkill them, they can die.

You also can't be temp banned on drill camp for team damage.
The Parrot rifle also has extremely accurate long range capabilities.
Let's have some fun.

Positioning

Behind the 10lb limber is a small patch of grass. Position the Parrot so the drill camp marker, the patch and the gun are in a (relative) straight axis. Then, push the gun up so the muzzle is just above the outer edge of grass.

The Axis:

Take time to get this correct. Too much either way and you'll hit a tree, or the haystack behind the range. Not moving the gun to at least the grass patch means the barn will block the shot.

The Patch & Muzzle Position:

Traverse

As a general rule, you always want to set traverse before elevation. Moving the trail spike after setting the elevation screw will change the range setting slightly. When setting the traverse, line the knot at the back of the breech with the right line of the camp marker. While on the elevation screw, this will put the sight blade in line with the mouthpiece of the bugle icon.

Tilt your camera up with mouse to see over the Parrot's ass:

Ordinance

So why shell and not case? There's a slight trajectory difference between the 2. Normally this isn't even worth mentioning, but we're targeting at EXTREME range here so it adds up. Shell also has a higher chance of bouncing than case. This will be expanded on later.

Oddly enough, when case bounces it goes higher.

The 3-inch & Parrot ammunition is interchangable:

Elevation & Fuse Length

The meat of the task at hand. Set the elevation to exactly 1.30 degrees. No more, no less. Then, set the fuse length to exactly 4.36 seconds. With this, the shell will bounce off of the west section tents and land square in between the parade flags. We tried not bouncing, but 0.01 degrees at that range will change the trajectory by close to 10 yards.



With the correct elevation, extending the fuse by less than a tenth of a second will extend the shell impact by a few yards. The range of this varies depending on the fuse length added.

Impact Visible:

A clear impact cloud at roughly where command staff takes position. You can see where the shell bounced too.

Tiny Changes:

An example of what 1 hundredth of a setting can do. We cut the fuse short and tried increasing elevation. If the fuse wasn't cut short, this would have missed entirely.

Results

You Will Be Executed:

3 Year Anniversary Update

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of artillery going live. As many of you are aware, the icons in camp were changed a few months after this guide was written. They also removed teamkill messages from drill camp but that's not important. What is important is how do you adjust traverse with the changes? Well I found 2 ways.

Option 1, Using Compass:

In the original guide, I notices there were 5 tick marks on the compass between each letter. Each one represents 15 degrees, with each letter being a multiple of 90. When the gun was aligned with the old icons, the barrel pointed between the 1st & 2nd tick mark to the right of East. Bearing 113 exactly. I also found out the camera is offset to the left to simulate right eye dominance. What this means is you have to hop off the gun, stand directly behind it, align the top of the barrel and check the compass heading. This is made worse by the compass being harder to read from updates lowering the resolution on it. Not ideal but it made do until I found the second option.

From this picture, the gun is aligned correctly with the old icons. The camera is slightly offset due having to move your head to line up things correctly. The compass center is offset accordingly as a result. If you center the camera to the top of the barrel here, the center of the compass will be between the 105 & 120 tick marks.

Option 2, Back to Icons:

While I was trying to find a workaround, I noticed something about the icons. Here are the elevation screw views with both icons.



They're both shield icons, with the bottom point being the zero. So how does this help us? Well the Parrot's model has slightly flat edges while on the elevation screw. In the first picture, the bottom point almost clears the aft edge. Looking through it, you can just make out the fore edge. In the second picture, the point is almost center with the fore edge. Comparing both pictures, it points to the exact same spot on the aft edge. There you go.

Now about teamkill messages being removed. An option was added to drill camp to turn on teamkills for regimental drills. As a result, red messages about it were removed due to the kills being legitimate. Shrapnel from rounds isn't recognized by the game as being a bullet. An example of this is I air burst case rounds 2 feet in front of targets and no hits registered. This means you can get a direct hit on someone with a shell and it will do nothing if teamkills are off. However shrapnel can ignore this setting and still kill, due to it not being recognized as bullets.
Enjoy pranking parades.

[We@ponized Virginity]

It is when the parrot has the largest breech in the game.

[Pizzaguy]

the parrot's ass, may I ask, is that a technical term?

[Imsellingmycat]

yes