Visual zeroing overlay

I am pleased to write to you about visual range-finding with the long-range scope for the Mosin 9130.

In a nutshell, a player's size shrinks in an inverse linear relationship between target distance and size in the scope. From 100 meters to 200 meters, a player appears half a size smaller in the reticle, but appears only 1/6th smaller from 200-300 meters.

The pattern is simple: relative to a player's size at 100 meters, a player's size is 1/2th at 200 meters, 1/3rd at 300 meters, 1/4th at 400 meters, 1/5th at 500 meters, 1/6th at 600 meters, 1/7th at 700 meters, 1/8th at 800 meters and so on.

What this means is that if you calibrate your field of view (FOV) such that the known height of a player at 100 meters or so extends from the tip of the thick bar in the upper half of the duplex reticle to the centre, you will be able to deduce a player's distance by interpreting their height as a fraction.

Def's DayZ Scope Overlay

This is immensely helpful for all those situations in which you do not have sufficient time to determine an exact range from a map and for me, significantly supplants the need for map ranging.

Try adjusting your FOV value in your playername.DayZProfile file to 1 (You can find this file in My Documents\DayZ). Note the position of the slider in the in-game FOV setting. It should be exactly on the right edge of the "d" in "Field".

A player should then be at around 100 meters as in the above image of the overlay. Note that when you decrease your field of view to the minimum, you double the magnification from 1 to 0.5. This means a player at 1/3rd size is now at 600 meters as opposed to 300.

Flanking basics

With 3 or more people it may be feasible to flank an enemy position with one member of the team whilst the others keep this enemy force decisively engaged.

Decisively engaged implies that neither force can remove themselves without one side being defeated. It is important not to have all your units decisively engaged unless at a climatic moment in the overall battle, as it directly reduces your freedom of action and can paralyse your units from taking any further actions.

With that in mind, it may be one of the safest and surest ways of knocking out an enemy force by enacting a flanking manoeuvre with a team member that is in reserve.

With regards to reserves, it can be useful to keep at least one or more team members in central rear positions within a formation so that they may be able to readily flank an enemy encounter whilst the forward positions are decisively engaged.

Clock orientation

It takes practise but clock directions are a good and relatively quick way of describing the relative direction of an object using the analogy of a 12-hour clock. Just imagine the clock-face around you with 12 o'clock to your front, 3 o'clock to your right, and so on.

Left and right orientation

I find that people sometimes like to say "to your right" or "to your left" and there often being confusion about how much someone should rotate in these directions.

Allow me to set a standard by making left and right 90° angles and adding finer rotation with "by left" and "by right" to mean 30° rotations, equivalent to an hour's rotation on the clock face.

You could describe 5 o'clock as "behind by left". Though it may be simpler to only use "by left" and "by right" as adjustments to a "left" or "right" call, or as a refinement to the clock method.

Compass orientation

The two major ways in which we can orient ourselves are in terms of compass directions and clock directions.

A compass has 4 major "cardinal points" at 90° to each other; north, south, east and west. This can be further divided by the "half cardinal points" north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west.

We sometimes want to be even more specific. The division of the half cardinal points are known as the "false points", otherwise known as "three letter points", as they take a major cardinal direction + a half cardinal direction for example ESE orients east by south-east. The 8 false points are NNE, ENE, ESE, SSE, SSW, WSW, WNW and NNW.

The last refinement I will describe are the "by points". These are the points dividing the false points and so there are 16 of them on a compass rose. For example, north by east is between north and north-north-east.

It can be handy to visually divide a battlefield into segments that can be quickly described to help pin-point an object of interest to your team. A rectangular area can be cut into 4 as the north-west segment, the north-east segment and so on.

Squad formation basics

As an overture to formations I thought I would highlight one of the most important things to remember when running as a group and that is on distancing.

The interval between squad members in a formation is normally around 10 meters. Apart from this, the formation should expand and contract depending on the terrain being traversed.

When rough terrain, poor visibility, or other factors make control of the formation difficult such as trees or an urban area, the squad contracts. At all times each squad member should see each other.

When moving in less rugged terrain such as open fields where control is easier, expand the formation.