Meh, it was too long and I am not going to rewrite all of that. The outcome is that the pipper has to be placed 2.83° above the center of view in order to show where the estimated impact point is. Also the calculations are very easy for a computer, the hardest part would be the square root when calculating the time to impact, but even that is no problem. You can run large formulas in a script with several square roots without degrading performance noticeably.

Also here is a nice paint sketch:

Basically you can really forget about drag and just calculate with altitude, airspeed, angle of attack and gravitation. I've read that's also how real attack aircrafts calculate the impact point.

First you calculate the current vertical velocity (Vy) by multiplying airspeed with the sine of the current angle of attack and multiply the outcome by (-1), if AoA is below 0°, as the outcome would otherwise be negative when flying downwards (below 0° AoA) and we want flying downwards to result in a positive value, just like flying upwards. Flying level at 0° AoA results in 0 vertical velocity at all airspeeds.

As an example I'll take 450 m/s (~1006 MPH) airspeed at -30° AoA, which results in 225 m/s vertical velocity.

Now we also need the height and vertical acceleration to calculate the time the projectile needs to hit the ground. In the first calculation we can only use the actual altitude of the aircraft, in further calculation we can use the height deviation between the aircraft and the ground height on the previous impact point for better accuracy (if the game engine allows reading out the ground height at any point of the map). Vertical acceleration is always 9.81 m/s².
Based on the angle of attack we need to use the right formula.

For 0° AoA it's just the square root of 2 x height divided by vertical acceleration.

This is for negative AoA

This is for positive AoA

In the example that would be ~5 seconds at 1000 m altitude.

With the time we can estimate the impact point distance after calculating the horizontal velocity (Vx) of the aircraft by just multiplying the airspeed by the cosine of the angle of attack. At 450 m/s and -30° AoA that is 389.7 m/s horizontal velocity.

In 5 seconds the projectile would travel 1948.5 m, so the impact point is 1000 m below us and 1948.5 m ahead of us. You could now just put a marker on the ground there, but I would rather like a pipper on the HUD, so we also need the angle between the line from the aircraft to impact point and the direction the aircraft is facing to. The angle between height and distance of 90° gives us a right angled triangle together with the line between aircraft and impact point. For that we first have to know the angle of the line between aircraft and impact point compared to a straight l

Great idea. Would simplify the bombing missions. No telling how many times I had to retry the timed target mission.

On the A-10 the HUD can show you a constantly computed impact point (CCIP) on the ground or a constantly computed release point (CCRP) in the air when you have locked a target. They did this with tech from the 70s, so it should be an extremely low load for modern CPUs, even mobile ones. The problem would be to make it work with all plane configurations, detach forces and different distances between cockpit and bombs. It doesn't have to take all variables into calculation though, as it only needs to estimate the impact point. 100% accuracy is not really needed. The minimum variables required would be airspeed, angle of attack, altitude above the ground, drag and weight of the bomb (to calculate the rate at which the bomb loses horizontal speed) and the vertical acceleration caused by gravitation (9.81m/s²) - drag. I don't have a formula at hand though and maybe drag can be left out of the calculation as it is pretty low. WarThunder also shows you a big circle on the ground when you have bombs equipped, showing you an estimated impact point depending on your airspeed, altitude and angle of attack.

just dive bomb...

@BeryllCorp oh yes i forgot about that.. we must think about mobile user too..

@baallzebub a fixed marker is not accurate because the plane's speed and altitude changes all the time.. An active marker on the other hand must calculate the plane's speed, altitude, the bomb's drag, deceleration when dropped, weight, the terrain, and lots of other factors that would make it accurate.... Which is okay if you think of SP as a Pc exclusive game... Unfortunately, SP has a mobile version

@Umbreon maybe dev can make it as marker only.. just like gun crosshair.. make it balance between arcade and simulation

add a cam on your planes belly that should help you

This would make the game too easy