Talk:Explosive/@comment-76.113.157.242-20111126164227/@comment-75.185.190.98-20120510003624

High spread is bad unless your weapon has a high degree of splash damage. The rangefinder makes splash go down by automatically calculating the area in which a mortar shell has to land in order to damage or destroy the intended target.

Picture the enemy's defense platforms during a base raid. Without finding the range, your mortar crews on your ships kind of have to basically drop a shell down the tube and hope it hits something in the general area your ship's captain is aiming for. Using a rangefinder gives them the ability to set elevation of the tube, azimuth, windage, etc., in order to group the shells in more tightly to the target.

Not using a rangefinder is kind of like having a shotgun to do a headshot from 1000 meters. You want something to make your buckshot or birdshot stay in a tighter group for the kill (though with a shotgun, a 1000m killshot is virtually impossible, LOL). If you've ever heard the terms POI and AOE, it's more understandable. POI is Point Of Impact, and AOE is Area Of Effect. POI is the "bullseye" you're aiming for, and AOE is the damage (splash) around the POI.

Mortars "lob" shells into the air, as opposed to firing more directly at the target itself. Paint a bullseye on your lawn and toss rocks as high into the air as you can, and try to hit the bullseye every time, and you get the idea how a mortar works. So you use a rangefinder to set the tube into a firing position where your chances of a more accurate hit on target INCREASE instead of decrease. Rangefinders lower spread by calculating range, as their name implies, so now you have a good angle to fire at for your mortars, so you increase the possibility of actually hitting the target.

In Battle Pirates, theory would suggest that simply reducing spread of your mortars would kill defense platforms faster, because you're concentrating all the damage in a smaller area around the platforms you're firing at. This used to be true, until they mucked up the game and added in all of the chaos factors that are present in real combat. Yes, concentrating fire in a more accurate way does help kill things faster in general, but with the bombard rockets and anti-mortar weapons on ships, you're still slow enough to make raiding and fighting a chore instead of enjoyable. Just my opinion, of course.