The Anti-Air Update

Yesterday the AA turret learned to fire real missiles. Today it gets a little brother with a very bad temper, both move into their own stamp tab, and a batch of fixes lands from the latest play-through.

The CIWS

Stamps › Anti-air › CIWS turret

The close-in weapon system is a rotary gun under an armoured dome. Any round that comes within 110 m draws bursts of small shells - ten at a time, fourteen a second, sixty in the drum - aimed at the intercept point with just enough scatter to bracket you.

The CIWS turret firing: tracer glows streaming up from the dome toward an incoming round Tracers on the way up. Every shell is a real round.

Each shell is a real round, built from pixels at your shot's own detail: an Alloy case, a Vitrane tip, a Blastite charge, a Glowmark tracer tail, and a battery, proximity fuze and detonator wired as a working circuit. The fuze bursts the shell 1.4 m from whatever it's chasing; the blast kicks your round and the shards chew the pixels facing the burst. Sustained fire shreds a round to pieces - and flak into a live charge sets it off then and there.

A CIWS shell bursting alongside the incoming round, debris flying "CIWS flak tore 88 px off the round at 28.4 m."

• Flares and chaff mean nothing to it - it's not a heat seeker. Fly low, fly fast, or come in from outside its arc.
• Shells that miss self-destruct in the air, so the sky cleans itself up.
• Shoot the gun off its mount to silence it. The drum runs dry at sixty.

AA missiles aim true

Stamps › Anti-air › AA turret

The AA turret's heat-seeking missiles now steer at the true intercept point - where you'll actually be when the missile arrives. Before, a fast round coming head-on was led far behind the turret, and the missile would climb off after a point it could never reach. A rocket doing 230 m/s straight at the launcher now gets met on the way in.

A new home for the sky guns

The AA turret and the CIWS turret have moved out of Forts into their own Anti-air tab, in both the Map Designer's stamp panel and the Sandbox Build tool. More to come.

Fixed

• Buildings keep their rooms. Placing a dummy or a stamp near a generated building no longer wipes its furnished rooms - the wallpaper, kitchens and bookshelves stay through every Sandbox edit, and its lamps stay lit.

A furnished apartment block with a dummy placed inside it on an upper floor Build inside it all you like - the rooms stay.

• No more bare strips. Rooms too narrow to furnish (a partition hard against a column) used to show sky straight through the building. They're cupboards now. Some have a coat on a hook.
• Rain respects floors. Water pouring off a roof - or through a hole in one - lands on the floor below, not in the dirt under the building.
• Dummies stand where you point. The placement ghost now stands on a building's floors, not just the ground under it.
• The servo ghost sits on its hinge. In the Round Designer, the swung-open preview of a servo flap drew away from the round at some window sizes. It rotates about its own pivot everywhere now.
• Staff: Let go of Larry.

Mind the drop. See you on the range.