A single heavy HE artillery shot is fired at the target location, with a few meters of spread. Any enemy tank within a few meters of the blast radius will be destroyed, and the explosion can even destroy Czech Hedgehogs (and other engi structures) through walls within the blast radius. The fragmentation for the shot would be low in damage, amount, and maximum distance. The shot itself can penetrate most roofs before exploding.
During the delay before it fires, players on both sides can see on the map where it will land and enemy players are able to directly see the estimated landing zone.
The artillery can be called in on the grey zone, but will not damage players in the grey zone or tanks that have yet to fire.
The call-in can be used alongside normal arty or bombing runs, but its cooldown per-player is shared with the other cooldowns.
The intended purpose of this is to force grey-zoning tanks to reposition without directly interfering with other players attempting to destroy it like smoke would. It can also be used to clear out heavily fortified positions.
Pure fantasy.
For reality see Artillery and Mortar Tactics of WW2 - Steven's Balagan
For excruciating detail of that reality see https://nigelef.tripod.com/maindoc.htm
A lot of the game is unrealistic. For example, rocket launchers and AT grenades in this game are far more reliable than they are in real life because they ignore impact angle
This is intended to be a heavy artillery strike from not far off the active battlefield (think something like the Soviet B-4, which was also used for this EXACT purpose to similar effect). At only a few kilometers, the inaccuracy would still be within a few meters. This isn’t some massive coastal gun being fired at the battlefield, it’s a towed heavy artillery piece.
The first source does not go against my claim, and the second one triggered my antivirus.
While firing a single accurate artillery shot for most countries was against their standard doctrine, they had the heavy artillery and most of the practices necessary to do so. In reality most of the countries also didn’t have to worry about jets blowing up their artillery in a few seconds, and they also didn’t kill soldiers attempting to flank around a building and blow up an enemy tank. Arguing doctrine in a game that isn’t about doctrine, strategy, or historical accuracy isn’t really going to help the gameplay.