Nothing like a pin in the buttocks to get a wonderer off his fanny and start doing something that might prove usefull. Thrown into something new, it often takes some thrashing around to get the problem defined, and something vaguely akin to wondering is lining up various options for tackling the problem, and doing a basic cost/benefits analysis to find a good way to go (but that quite often doesn't work out the way you thought it would, and figuring out why gives you another problem to work on).

Wolfgang slightly underestimated the deflection caused by Coriolis force on a projectile, but time of flight (from projectile speed) and distance and direction of shot have considerable influence, so therre are circumstances where he could be right on.

A master stratagist would have manouvered the enemy to about 10 km north of the equator and then gone 10 km south of it to fire off, in order to cancel the Coriolis deflection in the two hemispheres.