Safety Distance Zones (SDZ) for live-fire planning

A Safety Distance Zone (SDZ) is the ground area that must be kept clear around a firing position, because a round can reach it — directly, or after a ricochet. map.army can draw one for you from a saved weapon type and keep it attached to the symbol that represents the firing position.

Hint: What this is called on your screen. Doctrine calls this area a surface danger zone, and that is the term most range regulations use. The application labels the control Safety Distance Zone, and this page uses the shipped label throughout so that what you read matches what you see.

What an SDZ is, and what this tool is not

Range rings answer how far can this weapon reach. A safety distance zone answers a harder question: which ground do I have to clear. The two are not the same shape, because a danger zone accounts for rounds that do not stop where they were aimed — a ricochet area extends the hazard well beyond the impact area, and a vertical hazard defines how high the danger extends.

Hint: This is a planning aid, not a range safety certificate. The built-in values are generic figures for a weapon class. Real range safety depends on your national regulations, the ammunition actually in use, the terrain, backstops and the firing tables in force. Use the drawn zone to plan and to communicate intent; never use it as the authority for opening a range.

Switching the zone on

The SDZ controls are not a separate panel. They live inside the Point List — the View and edit graphic’s coordinates panel — so a zone is always tied to one symbol on the map.

Until you tick Safety Distance Zone, that is the only SDZ control the panel shows:

'Safety Distance Zone' unticked in the map.army Point List, the only zone control shown
Hint: An empty section almost always means the zone is switched off. Every parameter, the type list and the export and import actions appear only once the box is ticked. The second reason for an empty section is that you selected a multi-point graphic — a line, an area or a corridor — because a zone can only attach to a single-point symbol.

The built-in Saved Types

map.army ships five weapon types in the Saved Type list, plus a Custom… entry that is selected whenever the current values match none of them:

The 'Saved Type' list open in map.army, showing 'Custom...' and the five built-in weapon types
Saved TypeMax distanceRicochet distanceVertical hazard
M4 (5.56 mm)3437 m2029 m325 m
M27 (5.56 mm)3437 m2029 m325 m
AK-47 (7.62 mm)4100 m4073 m706 m
M240 (7.62 mm)4100 m4073 m706 m
M2 (.50 caliber)6500 m5211 m901 m

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. The ricochet distance for the 7.62 mm types is almost the full maximum distance — 4073 m against a 4100 m maximum. And the vertical hazard grows faster than the ground distance as calibre increases: the .50 calibre type reaches 901 m of altitude. If you are planning anything that flies, that number matters more than the footprint on the map.

Hint: These five names are not translated — they read the same in every interface language, because they are data rather than interface text.

Drawing a zone

  1. Place the symbol that represents the firing position, or select one that is already there.
  2. Open the Point List from the main window. See The Point List for the panel itself.
  3. Tick Safety Distance Zone.
  4. Pick a Saved Type, or leave Custom… and enter your own values.
The Safety Distance Zone controls in the map.army Point List, with 'Angle', 'Distance' and 'Vertical Hazard'

Every value is editable: Angle (°), Distance (m), Fill Color, Line Color, Ricochet Area and Vertical Hazard (m). A new zone starts at an angle of 12°, a distance of 1000 m and a vertical hazard of 300 m.

Ricochet Area is a tick box, not a value. Its own settings — length, area, start angle and end angle — appear only once it is ticked, which is what gives the drawn zone its fan shape rather than a plain circle.

The zone is drawn as a decoration on the map rather than as an ordinary tactical graphic, so it follows the symbol it belongs to.

Saving and sharing your own Saved Types

The five built-in types are a starting point, not a fixed list. Under Edit Saved Types: you can add the current zone to the list, remove one from it, export the saved types to a file, and import a set back. That is how a unit distributes an agreed set of weapon parameters to everyone planning on the same exercise.

Use it when your national figures differ from the generic ones above — agree the values once, export them, and hand the file out, rather than having every planner retype ballistic data.

Hint: Each name has to be unique. Adding a type whose name is already in the list is refused with Type “…” already exists in the Saved Types: make a unique name. If a file is only partly readable, map.army reports Could not read all Zones from “…” and still imports the entries it could parse — so check the list afterwards rather than assuming the whole file arrived.

What is not carried

A zone is a map decoration attached to a symbol. It is not MilX symbology, so do not assume it survives every route out of the application the way a tactical graphic does — check the result when you export or share, and see What survives a save or a share.

If the zone has to reach someone who is not using map.army, the reliable route is a PDF or image export, where it is drawn into the output like the rest of the map.

Where to go next