Feature Suggestion: Rampstsart times adjustable
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Hi,
the idea for this question/request ist not a new one, but may be important/interesting enough, to be discussed.
The option to decide how much time there is for the rampstart would help a lot to improve the ways we handle the aircraft and follow procedures. Often enough the current timeslot of 20 minutes is not applicable, wheter to long or to short.To determine how long the timeslot for a rampstart should be, a lot of factors have to be considered.
Type of F-16 block, squadrons SOP, loadouts, taxitimes, type of mission, type of day, weather and I’m sure, there is more.
At the moment, a flight cannot be planned without problems, if the required time to be ready for departure exceeds 20 minutes. Else the timeslot a flight needs may be much smaller, then the flight has to wait a good amount of time, before taxi and take off clearences are granted from ATC.
As the ATC in BMS is a AI asset, it’s normally rather inflexible to account for changes in timeplans. That is totally ok, no offense in any way, but I need to call out this fact to explain my point.
Given by the fact, that ATC depends on the planned take off times and asks you to abeit the plan, the TO times are fixed. Therefore a flight needs to be planned around this time to make ATC and ground ops work properly.
On this point the problems mentioned above start to arise. In the current BMS version, in a lot of cases it is impossible to do a proper preflight and rampstart if you don’t want to be late. More time needed could also hinder flights which are scheduled after your take off time.An example:
TO: 1200z
AB: Osan, active RWY 27L
The flight is parked at C-Diamond, flight lead plans to be at hold short 2 minutes prior TO to be able to line up early enough, which makes it 1158z. At the EOR the flight performs the neccessary before TO checks according to checklist, which takes about 3 minutes to complete for a normal mission without special loadouts (Mavericks, TFR etc.) - 1155z. Taxi time from the C-Diamond to EOR 27L are 3:10 minutes with 20kn taxi speed, so the flight needs to start taxi 115150z at the latest. To incorperate communication with GROUND, flight lead briefs taxi for 1151z.
To consider different pc and hardware setups from the flight members and therefore different join times from 2D to 3D calculate at least a minute, now its 1141z and the flight has only 10 minutes left to do the preflight, UHF check in, engine start and system startup. This may be enough for a slick jet but in any other case, there will not be enough time to do a proper and coordinated rampstart with a 4-ship when the flight uses a SOP and the complete checklist. If you now start to add another minute to taxing and 2 more for the EOR because of a TFR equipped jet, you are now left with only 7 minutes before taxi with a even more demanding rampstart due to the TFR.That concludes my little suggestion to maybe change the rampstart time from a fixed value to a editable.
Maybe it is possible to add this setting to the STPT editorpage of STPT 1 of a flight in the TE Editor. Just like you could modify a holding time for a holding point the T/O steerpoint could have a editable time for the rampstart as well, with a preset time, which is editable in the falcon bms.cfg and set to 20 minutes in the release version.
What do you think?
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@korbi It’s already a thing you can edit in the cfg file. I’ve set 15min step to ramp before. You can always manually cheat it shorter by simply committing after the normal time. That way you can have some 30 min and some 15 for example.
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Please do not spawn in ramp below 15min…
Bad things will happen
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@frederf Can you tell me where?
Not in the falcon bms.cfgIn the end it doesn’t solve the issue, as you only can set the time globally. Anytime you want to change it, you have to edit in the config for all participating pilots. Thats not the point, I made.
And it’s the same time for all flights then, also not what I suggested. -
@korbi said in Feature Suggestion: Rampstsart times adjustable:
@frederf Can you tell me where?
Not in the falcon bms.cfgTry
set g_nRampMinutes n
where n is the amount of minutes for the ramp start.
Source: Docs/BMS-Technical-Manual.pdf pp. 163.
AFAIK the server setting overrides clients’ settings.
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Just for reference, it will take exactly 25 minutes for a Viper equipped with LANTIRN pods and -65’s, from canopy close to take off roll. That time includes all known -here procedures, plus some extra like TFR BIT, FLIR BIT / Boresight, TGP BIT, -65 Boresight. I would expect a couple more minutes for L16 and secure comms.
For certain, the 20 minutes default ramp start period is just not enough to perform all the described above, but there is also lack of some of the above functionalities atm.
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@raptor Thats nice input!
Is there any reference you can point us too?
Would like to know a lot more about this topic -
@johku Thank you.
I will try that, but in the end, its not, what I wanted to express with my suggestion -
@korbi said in Feature Suggestion: Rampstsart times adjustable:
@frederf Can you tell me where?
Not in the falcon bms.cfgIn the end it doesn’t solve the issue, as you only can set the time globally. Anytime you want to change it, you have to edit in the config for all participating pilots. Thats not the point, I made.
And it’s the same time for all flights then, also not what I suggested.Just join later? If you have 40 minute setting then you have “up to” 40 minutes. You can always use less.