This is the view through your day-sight, the TSh2B-32P. Along the top are the range-scales for your four main-gun munitions and the coaxial machine-gun, which the game automatically follows when you adjust your range and change ammo. In the centre is your point of aim and in the lower-right is a stadiametric rangefinder scaled for targets standing 2.7 metres tall (which fits nicely on the M60 tank from the bottom of its tracks to the roof of its turret, excluding the commander's cupola). This you probably have already learned from Radian Simulations' own Gunnery Guide found here[gunnerheatpc.com].

But wait, there's more! Order now and you'll receive a full suite of lead indicators for tracking moving targets or compensating for cross-winds (not currently in the game, mercifully), absolutely free! On either side of the central chevron there are a series of short and long dashes and smaller chevrons a regular intervals. These correspond to milliradians (mils, for short), which represent discrete measurements of angle and can be plugged into a formula to obtain a distance between you and the target, if you know the width of the object in metres. Between any two adjacent marks is a measurement of 2 mils, between a chevron and long line is 4 mils, between two chevrons is 8 and so on.


Why is this necessary, for you, in a video game? You might have noticed that the stadia in the lower-right begins at what is nominally the point-blank range (labelled 'ПВ') for the armoured-piercing high explosive (BR-412D) at 1220 metres. In theory you should never need to know the range of anything closer than that, yet experimentation in-game will show that your point-blank for APHE and HEAT in GHPC is closer to 800m. You will also learn the hard way that pulling your sight up and to the left to use the scale, acquire a good fit, dial in the range, and then reacquire a lay on target is slow, imprecise and may get you killed. It would be more convenient if you could just point at the target, know its range intuitively, dial and fire as quickly as possible...

PS. When the Soviet T-62 is added to the game, it will feature a reticle almost identical to this and the same techniques should apply.

If you know the width of the object in metres and measure its apparent width in mils, you can obtain its distance algebraically.

Width in Metres x 1000 / Width in Mils = Distance in Metres.

In the example from this East German tanker's manual, a Leopard tank or something 3 metres wide is bracketed at 2 mils, from which a distance of 1500 m is obtained.

But does this work in Gunner HEAT PC? Yes! More or less. There may be minor rounding errors, but the in-game models are meticulously built from photo-scans and implemented to scale, the gun sight is likewise scaled correctly and since you can only adjust range in 100m increments, and your targets are pretty large, the margins of error take care of themselves, although at extreme ranges your ability to observe the enemy precisely will be hampered by the gradation of the scale (2 mil increments). As it so happens, the T-72's reticle has single-mil markings which are more useful, but the laser rangefinder negates the need to use them.

In this example from the game, I've placed an M1 Abrams at 1700 m almost exactly and observe that the hull fills about 4.5 mils in my sight. If I take the real-world length of the vehicle (7.93 m) and put it into the formula, I get 1762 m. That's close but not perfect. If I rounded up to 1800 and fired a shot, will I score a hit? Yes with APFSDS, but maybe not with HEAT. If I had measured the length as 4.66 mils, I would get the real range more accurately, but the sight does not provide that level of fidelity (and my eyes aren't that keen).

Regardless, to use this formula, you need to know the dimensions of every enemy vehicle:
M1 Abrams - length 7.93 m, width 3.66 m
M60 "Patton" - length 6.946 m, width 3.631 m
M2 Bradley - length 6.45 m, width 3.20 m
M113/M901 - length 4.863 m, width 2.686 m

"What if the ground isn't even, or the tank is turned at a random angle?" Improvise, overcome, and win!... or die.

"Hang on, you said this would be faster!" I hear you say. "Doing math in my head ain't fast."

You're right, so here's a table for you to memorise just like your multiplication tables. You did memorise your times tables, didn't you? These measurements were taken in-game at confirmed ranges, not derived from the formula, so they should be more immediately useful to you, the player. Where you see a question mark, the measurement changed so subtly from the previous range I could not confidently give a new figure.

These Steam guides don't support really wide tables, so here's an image of the table instead of formatted text. I think it's easier to read this way anyhow.

However, if we work backwards to derive the mils from the known distances and widths formulaically, we get more precise values and the discrepancies with the table above are negligible.


Fun fact: the gap between the main chevron and centre line is equal in height to the 1400m mark on the stadia rangefinder. With this fact alone you might save a lot of time and headache in estimating ranges.


Pop quiz, hotshot! What is this vehicle, how many mils can you read, and how far away is it?
Answer: M60, 5 mils, 1400 m.

Okay, okay, that's still a lot of information to take in. Perhaps some visual aids would be more useful?

Ahh, but what about the infamous night-sight, the TPN-1-22-11? It too can be used to estimate ranges, although the limited range of your infrared spotlight means you won't be engaging much past 800m. You have only two deflection markers, each 8 mils from the centre line or 16 from end to end.

In real life, the sight has four fixed points of aim (the top and bottom of the upper line, the tip of the chevron, and the top of the lower line) which are coaxial to the main-gun. You don't dial in any range and changing your day sight's range won't affect the night-sight's position. You just estimate, point and shoot. In Gunner HEAT PC, it works the same way, although the developers have placed the reticle too high on screen, so that the highest point of aim does not work correctly for any of the ammo types and all the other values are off slightly. The historical ranges from top to bottom were 300, 500, 700 and 1100 m, but instead you should familiarise yourself with their in-game behaviour.

By a careful comparison of the day- and night-sight in low light, I have worked out the following values:
Your instinct to use the chevron at any range may see your sabot flying over the target.

One of the most deadly enemies you'll face as a T-55A crew is the tripod-mounted BGM-71 TOW launcher, which packs all the same punch as the Bradley or M901 missile carrier, with roughly a quarter of the visible area to see and shoot, and are always attacking you from ambushes. Luckily they can be destroyed easily or scared away from their weapons with a near miss, provided you can zero in the range in time.

Since they are so small, not very square, and always turning left and right to scan their lanes of fire, the mil-measuring method is not easy to apply to this target, but there is a trick you can learn to speed up your target acquisition. Their height is almost exactly half that of the M60 tank. This means that you can fall back on the stadia rangefinder. Bracket the TOW operator in and then divide whatever number you read by half and that is his distance.
In the example, both the M60 and TOW are at 1200 m and spaced out so that they fit the stadia simultaneously. The converted values are given in white.

In the earlier chapters I mentioned the concept of a "maximum point blank" or "battlesight range" but did not explain what it is or how it works. In the real world, tank units work out emergency ranges and ammunition choices according to what they expect to encounter in an engagement, and can use it as a convenient fallback for immediate fire on a close threat. The range chosen is usually dictated by the maximum point blank, or the section of a shell's trajectory where it is reasonably flat flying out of the barrel and does not require super-elevation to hit a target. This will vary from one type of ammo to the next, and also by rights should vary from one target to the next, as a taller target is more forgiving than a short one in trying to land a hit in this fashion.

You can see this principle it action easily with the ballistic sights or auxiliary sights on the NATO vehicles. In this example, a T-72 sits at 500m away and when the aux sight is laid over it, both the cross for boresighting (essentially marking 0m) and the circle marking 1200m fit over the silhouette of the target at the same time. If I fire, I will hit the T-72 somewhere between those two points and guarantee a hit. However, with the 1200m circle laid on the centre of mass, the shot will go high and hit the turret. As a general rule of thumb, if you know the target is closer than your battlesight range, aim just a little lower than usual for a better hit. However, any hit is better than a miss!

On the T-55, you do not have a ballistic sight with a "ladder" of markings in the middle, but you can use the range scales along the top of the sight to check how much leeway or headroom your target is affording you. With this M60 placed again at 500m distance, we can see that its silhouette overlaps the range markings from 0 to 1000m for BR-412D (or 900m if we ignore the cupola). I'll spare you a trigonometry lesson, but you can push the sight out to 800m and still reasonably point and shoot and score a hit without too much compensation, so 800 ought to be your "battlesight zero" for HE-Frag, APHE and HEAT. Sabot on the other hand has a much flatter trajectory and is more forgiving. The same tank at the same distance now fills the markings from 0 to 2000m, and you might find 1200 or 1400 to be comfortable battlesight zeroes for your sabot rounds.

Case in point, when the M60 tank is placed at 1000m on the range, it's silhouette still fills the 0-1200 range. Beyond that, you will need to start using the other gunnery techniques discussed in this guide.

The Soviet rifleman was taught to almost always keep his AK74 rifle on its "П" setting, corresponding to a 440m zero, and aim at the belt buckle. For most real engagements, his rounds would fly high and hit the upper torso with reasonable consistency and with speed. Battlesight gunnery for tanks is no different. Dial the point blank in advance, hold a little low, and let'er rip. Unlike your infantry counterpart, however, you will be expected to engage enemies beyond your point blank range, and that will require finding the range the hard way.