Iron Nest Mission 9: Dead Reckoning - Solutions
Deploy tear-gas shells to force camouflaged hostile garrison units to expose their positions before executing heavy destructive bombardment.
Mission Summary & Rapid Solution TL;DR EXECUTION
Do not waste high explosive shells on empty sectors. Deploy TGAS tear-gas shells first across suspicious sectors (A1, A2, A3) to expose hidden positions, then follow up with HCHE.
- ✓ Deploy TGAS tear-gas shells across Sectors A1, A2, and A3
- ✓ Wait for teleprinter to confirm target displacement
- ✓ Execute heavy HCHE barrage on revealed bunkers
- ✓ Avoid wasteful requisition expenditures before verification
Worked example: Bearing, range, charge and elevation figures below come from a sample playthrough. Enemy spawns and your Iron Nest’s position vary each run — always measure on the map and follow the in-game ballistic calculator.
Mission Critical Strategy: Reconnaissance by Gas
Dead Reckoning hands you three candidate sectors and refuses to tell you which one holds the garrison. Firing high explosive into all three is the intuitive answer and the wrong one — the enemy sits in subterranean revetments, so H and HCHE shells burst on empty ground and leave the defenders untouched.
The mission’s actual currency is information, and the cheapest instrument for buying it is the TGAS (Tear Gas) shell.
Gas does almost no structural damage. What it does is make a concealed position uninhabitable. Troops in a revetment have two choices: stay and be incapacitated, or come up into the trenches. When they come up, the teleprinter confirms it — and now you know exactly which grid square matters.
Why the order is non-negotiable
| Order | Shells spent before you know the target | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Gas first | 3 × TGAS | You learn the garrison’s grid, then destroy it with one HCHE |
| HE first | 3 × HCHE | Three craters, no casualties, and you still don’t know where they are |
The mission is a classic economy problem, not an aiming problem. Operators who treat it as a shooting exercise burn their requisition on the first two sectors and then cannot afford the shell that matters.
What “wait for the teleprinter” actually means
After each gas shell, stop. Do not queue a follow-up shot. The teleprinter needs a beat to process the report, and firing HCHE into a sector before the confirmation has arrived is exactly the waste the mission is testing for. One gas shell, one report, one decision.
Pre-Calculated Firing Solutions
All three gas shots sit in the 10–15 km band — 3 charge bags, multiplier 4.0.
| Target | Target Grid | Turret Bearing | Target Range | Powder Charges | Elevation (θ) | Ammunition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sector A1 — Gas Flush | Grid A1 3.0 | 335.0° | 12.80 km | 3 Charges | 51.20° | TGAS (Tear Gas) |
| Sector A2 — Gas Flush | Grid A2 5.5 | 342.5° | 13.50 km | 3 Charges | 54.00° | TGAS (Tear Gas) |
| Sector A3 — Gas Flush | Grid A3 7.8 | 350.0° | 14.60 km | 3 Charges | 58.40° | TGAS (Tear Gas) |
| Revealed Bunker — Annihilation | (same grid as the confirmed sector) | 342.5° | 13.50 km | 3 Charges | 54.00° | HCHE |
[!NOTE] The final row uses
A2as an example. In your run it will be whichever sector the teleprinter confirms — copy that sector’s bearing, range, charge count and elevation verbatim into the HCHE shot. Do not re-solve from scratch; you already have a shell that landed there.
Step-by-Step Operator Routine
Phase 1: Requisition (No Timer)
- Buy 3 TGAS shells, 4 HCHE shells, and 14 powder charge bags.
- Resist the urge to buy more HCHE. You need one, possibly two, per confirmed sector — the rest of the budget belongs to charges.
- Plot all three sectors (
A1,A2,A3) on the map board before firing anything.
Phase 2: The Gas Sweep (No Timer)
- Load Left Gun: 1 TGAS + 3 charge bags of powder. Set elevation
51.20°. - Traverse to
335.0°, fire into A1. Stop. - Read the teleprinter. No confirmation? Move on.
- Traverse to
342.5°, re-lay to54.00°, fire into A2. Stop. - Read the teleprinter.
- Traverse to
350.0°, re-lay to58.40°, fire into A3. Stop. - Read the teleprinter. One of the three will report the garrison displaced into above-ground trenches.
Phase 3: Annihilation (No Timer)
- Note the confirmed sector — for the worked example,
A2at13.50 km. - Load HCHE with the identical solution:
342.5°, 3 charge bags,54.00°. - Fire. The gas has already forced the garrison into the open; the HCHE now does what it could not do in Phase 2.
- If the teleprinter reports survivors, repeat step 2 once — then stop. A third HCHE on the same grid is usually wasted.
Phase 4: Conserve (No Timer)
- Check your remaining requisition. A common outcome is 2–3 HCHE shells and a comfortable charge reserve.
- Do not pre-emptively bombard the two empty sectors “just in case”. They are confirmed empty by their teleprinter silence.
[!IMPORTANT] Operator Rule: A gas shell that produces no teleprinter confirmation is a success, not a failure — it has just proven a sector is empty for the price of one cheap shell. Read every silence as an answer.
>Frequently Encountered Tactical Problems
Q1Why did my H shells do no damage initially?
The enemy garrison is concealed in subterranean revetments. You must drop TGAS tear gas first to force troops into above-ground positions.
Q2How do I know which sector actually contains the garrison?
You do not — and that is the point. Fire TGAS into all three candidate sectors first. Only the sector that produces a teleprinter confirmation contains troops. The other two are empty, and you have spent one cheap gas shell each instead of one expensive HCHE shell each.
Q3Can I just skip the gas and saturate all three sectors with HCHE?
You can, but requisition in this mission is tight. Three speculative HCHE shells cost roughly three times what three TGAS shells cost, and against subterranean revetments the HCHE does little until the garrison is flushed anyway.