[SBW] NPC Squads

Helicopters

• New "Heli Crew" preset with an airframe selector, the same way the tank preset picks a model — and the airframe decides the crew with it.
• Mi-28 gunship: pilot plus a turret gunner. Holds a standoff hover 20 blocks off its target, nose on, while the gunner works the 30mm; AP or HE chosen by what it is shooting at. Orders: Attack / Defend / Move.
• AH-6 transport: pilot plus three machine gunners on the bench seats. Carries the squad when the objective is far enough to be worth flying to, waits for them to board, picks a landing zone on ground that can actually be stood on, and never lets anyone out in the air. Under Defend it patrols the area low and relays what it sees to the whole faction. Orders: Defend / Move.
• Flight is flown from the server through SBW's own controls — collective, cyclic and pedals — with the wings trimmed level and the engine shut down on the pad so a parked aircraft stops draining its battery.
• A replacement gunner can take over a vacant turret on a landed gunship.
• A helicopter whose pilot is killed gives the crew five seconds to take the controls. If nobody does, it comes down and detonates where it lands.

Mortars

• New Barrage order: walks fire around a 40-block area instead of stacking every shell on one point. The existing per-shell scatter and the friendlies-near-the-impact check still apply.

Infantry and vehicles

• NPCs no longer fire into vehicles standing on their line, no longer take up firing positions behind one, and no longer end up standing on the roof.
• Vehicles are now obstacles to pathfinding as well, so squads walk around them instead of into them.
• Machine gunners carry an RPG with two rockets and bring it out for anything riding a live vehicle — a tank's crew and a helicopter's pilot alike. The standard seven-man squad has one such gunner, the large squad two.
• The reserve grenade every fighter carries is finally used: to flush a target that has stayed behind cover, and to answer fire that has the squad pinned. Rationed per squad, so an ambush draws an answer rather than a volley.
• Squads no longer bunch up when contact is made — firing positions are claimed, and two shooters will not take the same patch of ground.

Awareness

• NPCs now spot things in a 150° arc rather than in every direction at once, so flanking works. Being shot at, a contact relayed by the rest of the faction, and an order to focus on something all still reach them from any direction.

Barracks

• Opens on your own faction, and asks for the one-time faction pick if you have not made it yet.

Performance

• NPC weapons stop being drawn past 32 blocks. Measured in a real fight, this took the cost of an NPC on screen from 0.36 ms per frame to 0.011 ms — 140 NPCs in view went from 14 fps to 48.

Other

• Orders offered are now the ones a squad can actually carry out — one shared list behind the command screen, the quick-command HUD and the server's own validation.
• ./gradlew buildDevelop builds with trace logging and debug markers on; plain build leaves them off.