Reference
Mils, degrees & bearings
The Iron Nest's traverse is read in degrees, but artillery the world over works in mils because they're finer. Here's the conversion, a live calculator, and how bearings are measured.
Type mils above or drag the degree slider. One full circle is 360° = 6400 mils, so 1° ≈ 17.78 mils.
Click a direction to set the converter.
| Direction | Degrees | Mils |
|---|---|---|
| Degrees | Mils (NATO) |
|---|---|
| 1° | 18 |
| 5° | 89 |
| 10° | 178 |
| 15° | 267 |
| 30° | 533 |
| 45° | 800 |
| 90° | 1,600 |
| 180° | 3,200 |
| Mils (NATO) | Degrees |
|---|---|
| 50 | 2.81° |
| 100 | 5.63° |
| 250 | 14.06° |
| 400 | 22.5° |
| 800 | 45° |
| 1,600 | 90° |
| 3,200 | 180° |
| 6,400 | 360° |
One degree is 17.7778 NATO mils, and one mil is 0.0563°. West — a bearing of 270° — is 4800 mils.
How bearings are measured
A bearing is an angle measured clockwise from north, where north is straight up the map. North is 0° (or 360°), east is 90°, south is 180°, west is 270°. The Iron Nest always references true north, so a spotter's bearing and your traverse use the same zero — you can read their call straight onto the gun without correcting for where the spotter is facing.
Why mils, not degrees
A mil is a much smaller slice of the circle than a degree — 6400 of them versus 360 — so it lets a gunner lay the tube far more precisely. The handy field rule is that one mil subtends roughly one meter at 1,000 meters, which makes range-and-deflection corrections quick mental math. That precision is exactly why several players have asked for a mils readout in-game; until then, the converter above turns the Nest's degrees into mils.
A note on the standard
There are a few mil definitions in real use (NATO 6400, Soviet 6000, true 6283). This page uses the NATO 6400-mil circle, the most common in modern gunnery. If the game ever exposes its own mil scale we'll match it here.
Putting a bearing into a full firing solution? The firing solution planner reads degrees and mils straight from a spotter report.