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Together with NAS this should greatly expand the number of attachments possible(and necessary)in 1.13.

Do you plan to expand the dynamic aim levels calculation to include stances,weather,dynamic click costs?

• Variable states for items.
  As mentioned above, we could have scopes that change their magnification factor. A 4x scope - click the button - it's a 7x scope. All other properties are the same, possibly even the item's image. Except the mag factor, which is increased. The transformation takes a scant few APs. We also set up the "return journey" - the new item (the 7x scope) also shows a "Gear" button, which when clicked transforms the item back to its original form (a 4x scope). You can keep clicking as long as you have APs.
  This can be used to make true folding stocks, flashlights that can be turned on and off, god knows what else.
• Thrown explosives.
  The main problem with explosives is that the only way to arm them is to set them on a tile. With the help of the "gear" button, we could "ARM" the explosive manually, turning it into a similarly-powerful grenade (with the same item image). The grenade is then thrown to create the same explosion as the normal bomb. This could even be used to bypass the JA2 bomb arming mechanism and create explosives that can be set to radio channels or time delay without being placed down.
  And suing the two-state idea above - we can have the Gear button on the new item transform it back to a regular bomb.
• Merged item separation.
  One of the oldest problems in JA2: items that you merge cannot be unmerged. A button may solve that - assuming it is accompanied by a "MergeSeparations.XML" that tells the game what items to create instead of the separated one.
• Bayonette?
  We CAN have guns merging with knives to create a new melee item - but then what turns it back? The gear button, of course. It unmerges the gun and the bayonette, turning the gun back into a firearm.

unscrewing a mount is not exactly rocket science, is that really necessary?

As far as scopes go, and all the different bonuses and penalties involved, I'm a little worried that knowing which scope to choose, or figuring out where to shoot from depending on what scope you have, will be fairly difficult without a reasonably informative and intuitive feedback mechanism. Maybe [F] could display minimum non-penalized gun scope range(in tiles), along with the currently displayed bullet range. Actually that would probably be good enough(along with the same tile-distance displayed in the description box maybe); not that hard really. Is that a possibility? I assume each magnification level is a set number of tiles, which should make generating the tile ranges trivial.

Also, if switching scopes will become a more frequent necessity, will the UDB display any info on minimum mech skills required to change scopes without damage? Or is that fairly close to zero anyway?

And I asked about this before but maybe you missed it: Do you know if backpacks have different stats (movement penalties, open/drop ap costs) and if so could those be displayed in the UDB? No is a perfectly reasonable answer.

The only problem i see in relation to scopes is that in case of "zoom" optics (say 3-9x) we'd need either some sort of a slider (and linear scaling between 3x and 9x stats), or multiple state points (e.g. 3x, 4x, 5x etc).

With the help of the "gear" button, we could "ARM" the explosive manually, turning it into a similarly-powerful grenade (with the same item image). The grenade is then thrown to create the same explosion as the normal bomb.

Is it possible to create a hotkey that, as you take aim you could use to adjust the scope to "optimal magnification"?

If you really wanted to set the level of magnification without an enemy around you could click on the ground and adjust the magnification according to that distance.

As long as I am remembering correctly, low magnification combat scopes such as the 4x SUSAT, and ACOG if if I remember correctly are fixed magnification. The 1.5x scopes used on the AUG's certainly are fixed magnification.

UC-1.13 beta testers earlier today brought up a few scope/sighting issues that I was hoping to resolve with NCTH. Though I should get some details for the planning work out of the way: the scope magnifications, integers or can I have 1.5x and 3.5x?

Are non-magnifying sights covered in this system?

I also vote for automatic scope ajustment and I think an extra aimlevel for those scopes might be a good downside representing the extra time needed to ajust the scope.

...automatic scope ajustment ...

MTB20, the way I read it is that with NCTH, there won't have to be separate modifiers for aiming at the head/legs, because each of the different bodyparts has it's own size already predefined in the .JSD files (I think).

Which begs another question: How are built-in attachments done now that NAS is in the XML? I mean, in the "normal" attachment system, the properties are placed directly into the weapon's Items.XML entry. In NAS there's really no reason to do that - there's plenty of room for attachments to be added normally, no?

Do they get this bonus also when walking i.e. 4 tiles to get around the corner?[...]

Even with NAS on some guns do not have stock attachments, presumably as they are part of the weapon. Now seeing I am not playing without AIM, I am not sure which is a 1.13 weapon and which not, but an example are the (steyr) AUG weapons. You may want to see how this is handled for your dilemma on that matter.

I think it would make the penalty more realistic in general since it seems like it would be quite a bit easier to follow something that is 20 yards away than something moving around 50 yards away.