[NonWonderDog]

That's normal view, gunsight view, and leaned all the way in with 6DoF. Without 6DoF you can get occasional glimpses of the entire reticle from the cockpit shake, but you can't use the whole thing. Is this better than having the reticle projected anywhere on the glass? I tend to think so, but I use 6DoF.

It looks better, but for those that use the method of applying gunnery with mill gunsight in accordance with the gunnery manuals(*), it will foul their aim. It's also not realistic, as the reticle (in real life) will stay the same size as projected on "infinity" (or the horizon) and shrink relative to the gunsight, when leaning closer to the gunsight.

* "How to get hits with the illuminated sight"

No, the reticle is the same angular size in all three pictures. The center ring is 50 mils radius in all three (I forgot to turn the auto-zoom off for the third picture, so it's at a smaller field of view -- EDIT: I put up new pictures with auto-zoom off). What I've done in those pictures is change the spot size to be more realistic. It is perfectly impossible for a collimated image to be projected larger than the lens, since rays of collimated light are by definition parallel. The total visible reticle area (in steradians) will be equal to the apparent area of the lens as seen through the reflector, even though the reticle itself won't change in size as you move closer. It's hard to find a video of this (although this one comes close, about 30 seconds in), but it's necessarily true.

I'm not quite sure on what I've got, though, for a few reasons. First, it doesn't fade out when you're off-axis (I tried adding bits of mask at right angles, but it had no effect). It looks pretty silly seeing just the outer third of the reticle when you lean to the side. There's also a sharp edge on the projection, which looks very video-gamey and fake. Finally, it's a departure from pretty much every other gunsight, which has the entire reflector glass show the reticle; if I wanted to make them all consistent it would take a LONG time.

It also turns out in IL2 that the reticle isn't actually projected at infinity; it's projected about 10 meters in front of you. I had to move the reticle in the Corsair closer to the camera in order to keep it from clipping behind the nose of the plane, too, so it's now much more inaccurate off-axis. I think I'll have to use the smaller mask just to hide that. (The sight isn't really any less accurate within the spot in those pictures--about a 5-7 mil error at the extremes--and you won't notice any loss in accuracy at all if you don't use 6DoF.)

EDIT AGAIN: It turns out that I just hadn't made the second layer of the mask big enough (I thought 200% would be enough, but nope). The reticle masks are very, very confusing, but I've managed to move the reticle back to where it's supposed to be and still keep it from clipping. Hopefully I can fix the way the reticles in the P-47 razorbacks are drawn behind the canopy frame, too.