IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator | Ep. 1 – Today’s Forecast: Heavy Shelling With a Chance of Paperwork

💥 Today’s Forecast: Heavy Shelling With a Chance of Paperwork

A slight change of plan sent us somewhere rather different this evening. Bayonetta Origins was originally on the schedule, but instead we climbed inside a colossal dieselpunk artillery platform for the first episode of IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator.

I’d picked this one up during the week and had already discovered that it is loads of fun. Apparently, firing enormous guns isn’t complicated enough on its own, so IRON NEST also expects you to plot coordinates, calculate ranges, select ammunition, wrestle with machinery and presumably explain any unfortunate collateral damage to High Command afterwards.

So naturally, we got straight to work.

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⚙️ About IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator

IRON NEST puts you inside a hulking war machine where artillery is less “point cannon, make boom” and more “do your maths correctly or make the wrong thing go boom.”

Targets need to be plotted from coordinates and spotter reports. Bearings and distances have to be calculated, shells and powder charges loaded, and the enormous turret physically cranked into position before you finally get the satisfying thunder of a shot disappearing downrange.

Inside the Nest there’s everything from plotting equipment and ammunition systems to living quarters, a record player, coffee machine and, critically, Captain Cheese — a cat with an extraordinary ability to sit directly on whichever part of the map you’re trying to use.

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🗺️ Where We Are in the Journey

This is Episode 1 of the series, although technically I wasn’t starting from a completely fresh save.

IRON NEST doesn’t currently let us create a separate save or simply restart from scratch, and I’d already progressed a little further while playing offline. Instead, I replayed the available tutorial and introductory missions so everyone could see how the Nest works before we moved into something less structured.

That made this episode our guided tour of the machinery — complete with calculations, explosions and several demonstrations of what perhaps not to do when entrusted with heavy artillery.

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🔥 What Happens in This Episode

The evening actually began with a slight change of orders. Bayonetta Origins had originally been planned for the stream, but I’d been playing IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator during the week and enjoying it far too much not to bring it onto the channel. There was only one slight complication: I’d already made some progress offline, and the game doesn’t currently give us the option to start a separate save.

So rather than pretending we were beginning completely fresh, I took everyone back through the tutorial and introductory missions for a proper guided tour of the Iron Nest. That meant exploring the inside of this enormous mobile artillery platform, looking over its various consoles and getting acquainted with the plotting table, ammunition systems, engine room, living quarters, coffee machine and record player.

And, of course, Captain Cheese.

Captain Cheese is the resident cat and apparently an essential part of military operations, mostly because he has developed an uncanny ability to sit directly on whichever part of the plotting table is currently important.

Once the tour was over, it was time to demonstrate how this enormous contraption actually works. IRON NEST doesn’t simply hand you a crosshair and tell you to shoot. We had to locate targets on the map, calculate the range, work out the correct bearing, load the appropriate ammunition and powder charges, set the elevation and physically crank the enormous turret around into position.

There’s something wonderfully satisfying about the whole process. You spend several minutes staring at maps and numbers, wondering whether you’ve just made a catastrophic mathematical error, before finally pulling the trigger and waiting to discover what you’ve actually hit.

Our first target was successfully destroyed.

A hospital may also have been slightly destroyed.

Obviously, this was less a military disaster and more an unfortunate administrative complication. Any casualties were quickly reclassified as sacrifices, the paperwork was presumably filed somewhere extremely secure, and we moved swiftly onwards.

The second tutorial made things considerably more interesting by introducing spotters. Instead of simply being shown where the enemy was hiding, we were given bearings from different observation points and had to plot those lines across the map to find the intersection. Suddenly the stream had settled into a very particular rhythm: numbers being called out, lines drawn across maps, calculations checked, enormous handles cranked into position… followed by somebody several kilometres away having an extremely bad day.

Captain Cheese continued contributing to the war effort by wandering across the map at inconvenient moments and occasionally needing to be physically relocated. Chat, displaying its usual commitment to responsible military decision-making, naturally suggested that we bomb the cat.

Captain Cheese survived.

Somewhere during all this I also discovered a horn inside the Nest. There was absolutely no tactical reason to pull it, which naturally meant that it had to be pulled immediately. Meanwhile, whenever coordinates became questionable, the wrong button was pressed or something generally suspicious happened, #blamegary proved to be an invaluable part of the command structure.

As the missions progressed, reconnaissance aircraft and additional ammunition types started giving us more options. When we encountered a group of infantry, I sent up a scout plane to verify their position and discovered that my original calculations weren’t quite pointing where the enemy actually was. With the corrected reconnaissance information plotted, however, we suddenly had a much more promising firing solution.

Then came the important tactical discussion: what exactly should we fire at them?

Chat became our unofficial artillery crew. Spiffymango1274 brought some War Thunder knowledge into proceedings, suggesting high explosive for infantry and armour-piercing rounds for tanks and armoured targets, while Gary helped with coordinates and corrections. Somewhere amongst the increasingly enthusiastic tactical advice came perhaps the most concise explanation of artillery doctrine imaginable:

HIGH EXPLOSIVE = Big Kaboom.

There were also slightly less restrained suggestions involving nuking the target.

For the infantry, however, we eventually settled on incendiary ammunition. The shell went downrange, the strike landed beautifully and the fire spread across the target area, eliminating four of the five infantry positions.

Thus began the production of what could only reasonably be described as crispy critters.

Another shot landed almost perfectly on a separate position, and those moments really showed why I’ve been enjoying IRON NEST so much. There’s a tremendous payoff to spending all that time measuring, plotting, selecting ammunition, loading charges and wrestling the machinery into position, only to hear the gun thunder and wait for confirmation that your calculations were actually correct.

The stream wasn’t entirely consumed by artillery warfare, either. The channel’s side games managed to produce their own casualty list. Spiffymango1274 attempted a Pokémon contract against a Flapple and failed, before entering the Hunger Games and promptly dying there as well.

I, meanwhile, won the Hunger Games.

Naturally this was immediately declared #rigged, while Spiffy quite reasonably argued that perhaps things would have gone differently if he’d been given a tank.

Later, FlyingFox21 entered battle against a Torchic armed with a Naughty Nightstick, managed to land multiple hits and still failed the contract. Apparently calculating long-range artillery trajectories inside a gigantic dieselpunk war machine was becoming considerably easier than dealing with Pokémon.

Away from all of that, another enemy had been steadily advancing throughout the evening: the heat.

The office was getting brutally warm, tea remained an essential survival resource — including Asmith501 returning to ceremoniously distribute virtual cuppas — and the jukebox gave us Washington’s Dream, complete with its wonderfully baffled approach to American measurements and the excellent advice not to even attempt understanding Fahrenheit.

Given the temperature in the room, Fahrenheit felt particularly personal.

We also discovered that Twitch notifications were apparently operating according to their own military timetable, with viewers arriving after Twitch had only just decided to inform them that the stream had started.

Eventually, after working our way through the first two tutorial missions, we reached and completed the first proper level, where we finally had access to both turrets and reclaimed the royal city. That was a good point to consider continuing into another substantial mission, but by then the heatwave had become oppressive enough that committing ourselves to a lengthy operation seemed like a terrible idea.

Instead, we switched over to the game’s continuous open skirmish mode — or “chill mode,” as the game rather optimistically calls it.

There wasn’t much chilling happening in the room.

With orders arriving continuously, the skirmish gave us a chance to experiment more freely with reconnaissance, multiple targets and different ammunition. At one point I was even making a genuine effort to avoid civilian buildings while lining up separate armour-piercing and high-explosive shots against different targets.

Both targets were successfully destroyed, while chat’s increasingly appropriate “you sunk my battleship” jokes accompanied coordinates being called across the grid.

But there was still one final experiment waiting for us.

I’d discovered a high-capacity high-explosive shell that I hadn’t fired before.

Obviously, this situation could not be allowed to continue.

So we plotted another target, worked through the firing solution, cranked the machinery into position and prepared our unnecessarily enormous new toy. There was, naturally, another obligatory attempt to establish in advance that anything suspicious was probably Gary’s fault.

Then the shell went downrange.

The explosion was enormous.

The blast radius was considerably larger than what we’d been throwing around previously, the impact left a massive crater behind, and we were forced to conclude that we’d effectively created a hole in the world.

There was really nowhere sensible to go after that.

With both tutorials completed, the first proper mission finished, the royal city reclaimed and several more unfortunate targets erased from existence in skirmish mode, we finally surrendered to the one opponent the Iron Nest couldn’t bombard: the temperature in the office.

We wrapped things up for the evening and finished the stream by raiding into OurChickenLife, sending the crew onwards for the night.

There is, however, already something rather ominous waiting for us when we return. The next proper mission introduces enemy return fire. Once the Iron Nest fires and reveals its position, the opposition can start shooting back, which means we’ll need to calculate and prepare several shots in advance rather than leisurely solving each firing problem one at a time.

Considering how the first evening went, I’m sure this will result in calm, disciplined and entirely professional artillery operations.

For now, though, the calculations were complete, the royal city was back in friendly hands, Captain Cheese had survived his repeated occupation of the plotting table, Gary had accepted absolutely no responsibility whatsoever, and we’d left a sufficiently large hole in the landscape to consider Operation Big Kaboom a success.

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🎥 Watch the Episode

If artillery mathematics, enormous machinery, Captain Cheese and entirely defensible levels of collateral damage sound like your kind of evening, you can watch the full episode here:

Watch IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator Episode 1

You can follow the whole campaign through the IRON NEST series playlist, and don’t forget to visit the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel to like, comment and subscribe if you enjoyed the chaos.

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🔴 Join the Adventure Live

The best part of these expeditions is never quite knowing what the evening is going to become. Sometimes there’s a carefully planned game. Sometimes the plan changes and we’re suddenly calculating artillery trajectories while a cat occupies the command table.

Come aboard live on Twitch or join us over on YouTube. Between chat becoming the artillery crew, side-game disasters and raids like our visit to OurChickenLife, the livestream is where the wonderfully unpredictable bits happen.

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🌐 Community & Links

The Iron Nest might be built for a small crew, but there’s always room for another operator. If you’d like to stick around between streams, here’s where the wider Dr Ravenholm network can be found.

When the warning sirens sound, this is where we go live.
Twitch | YouTube

For conversation between missions, join the crew in the community.
Discord

Signals also escape across the wider social network.
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

If you’d like to help keep the machinery running, support options are here.
Merchandise | Streamlabs

Beyond the bunker, there are more projects to explore.
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | Learn More About Me | Blog

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🌅 Until the Next Barrage

For now, the guns are quiet, Captain Cheese remains inexplicably alive, and the paperwork concerning that hospital is presumably lost somewhere on Gary’s desk.

Next time, the enemy starts shooting back.

Until then — stay safe, keep the kettle on, and I’ll see you in the next one.

— Dr Ravenholm