Iron Nest Mission 13: Blind Fire - Solutions

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: Accuracy You Cannot Use

Blind Fire is the mission that asks a simple question: what do you do when precision is unavailable and you still have to deliver fire?

A severe electrical storm sits over the battlefield for the entire engagement. It does three things at once:

• It corrupts the radio telemetry feeding you target coordinates, so the grids you receive arrive fragmented and arrive wrong by roughly ±50 m.
• It knocks out acoustic ranging, so you cannot back-compute a position from the sound of enemy activity.
• It degrades the rangefinder returns you would normally use to sanity-check the numbers you were given.

The instinct is to work harder on the maths. That instinct is wrong here, and the mission is designed to punish it.

The correct mental shift: stop solving, start covering

If your coordinate is only good to ±50 m, then no amount of careful elevation work will produce a hit — the error is in the input, not the calculation. What you can do instead is choose an ammunition whose lethal area is larger than your error.

That is the entire doctrine of Blind Fire, and it is why HCHE is the mission’s primary round rather than a specialist option:

Shell	Effective radius (reference)	Versus ±50 m uncertainty
H (High Explosive)	tight, direct-hit oriented	Precision you cannot exploit — a 50 m error is a clean miss
HCHE	wide blast tolerance (~0.3 km)	Error is inside the lethal area — the target is neutralised without a direct hit

The rule that follows is simple: as long as the uncertainty is ±50 m, HCHE. H only once a secondary report tightens the position.

Reading fragmented telemetry

Fragmented reports do not mean “unknown”. They mean partially known, and partial information is still information:

• A report with bearing and sector but no range still tells you which way to point.
• A report with a range but a garbled bearing still lets you place the target on the correct ring of the map.
• Two fragments from the same transmission frequently resolve each other — compare them before discarding either.

Log every fragment you receive on the map board. In this mission the map itself becomes your correction instrument, because the radio cannot be trusted to do it for you.

Pre-Calculated Firing Solutions

Note that all three targets sit in different charge bands — 16.40 km and 18.20 km take 4 bags (multiplier 3.0), while 21.30 km crosses into the 20–25 km band and takes 5 bags (multiplier 2.4).

Target	Target Grid	Turret Bearing	Target Range	Powder Charges	Elevation (θ)	Ammunition
Suspected Trench Line G1	Grid G1 4.2	025.0°	16.40 km	4 Charges	49.20°	HCHE
Suspected Strongpoint G2	Grid G2 7.6	032.8°	18.20 km	4 Charges	54.60°	HCHE
Suspected Reserve Position G3	Grid G3 2.9	040.0°	21.30 km	5 Charges	51.12°	HCHE

[!WARNING] The third target crosses the 20 km charge boundary — 5 bags, multiplier 2.4. If you re-lay G3 with the 4-bag solution used for G1 and G2, the shell falls short of the position entirely.

Step-by-Step Operator Routine

Phase 1: Map Work Before Gun Work (No Timer)

1. Requisition 6 HCHE shells, 2 H shells, and 18 powder charge bags. The charge reserve matters more than the shell count here.
2. Before loading, mark all three suspected positions on the map board and draw the ±50 m uncertainty circle around each one. This is the visual reminder that the mission is about area, not points.
3. Number the targets G1, G2, G3 in the order you intend to engage them.

Phase 2: First Volley — G1 (No Timer)

1. Load Left Gun: 1 HCHE + 4 charge bags. Set elevation 49.20°.
2. Traverse to 025.0° and fire.
3. Do not evaluate the result from the burst alone — in this weather you will not see it clearly. Wait for the secondary acoustic report.
4. If the report confirms detonation on or near the trench line, the position is neutralised. Move to G2.

Phase 3: Second Volley — G2 (No Timer)

1. Re-charge to 4 bags and re-lay to 54.60°, bearing 032.8°.
2. Fire HCHE.
3. Again, wait for the acoustic confirmation. A report of no secondary detonation usually means the shell fell into dead ground — re-fire once with a +0.3° bearing bias rather than re-solving the whole problem.

Phase 4: Third Volley — G3, Across the Band Boundary (No Timer)

1. Re-charge to 5 bags before anything else. 21.30 km sits in the 20–25 km band with multiplier 2.4.
2. Set elevation 51.12°, bearing 040.0°. Fire HCHE.
3. Wait for the acoustic report.
4. Once a position is confirmed and the report places it within a tight radius, you may switch to the 2 reserved H shells for a finishing shot on the strongest remaining position.

Phase 5: Confirm and Stand Down (No Timer)

1. Cross-check your three acoustic reports against the map board before declaring the sector clear.
2. If any position returns a partially confirmed report, fire one more HCHE rather than an H — the uncertainty has not been retired yet.

[!IMPORTANT] Operator Rule: In Blind Fire, never spend a shell trying to prove your maths was right. Spend it proving the target is dead. If a report is ambiguous, the correct response is another wide-radius shell, not a more careful calculation.