Fallon-Nevada Theater discussion
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Toonces - once you have the basic "starter " area, how easy would it be to expand it outwards? There is some awesome natural scenery in that area, with good satellite imagery. How does porting satellite imagery work in Falcon, in FSX, its pretty easy, you just need loads of space, I am a bit unclear how the Falcon system operates. Once you have the basic area and some objectives and destructable objects, most of the fun can be had by building air to air TE’s etc and using the practice ranges… I guess building a complex winnable campaign, while rewarding would be very time consuming.
To me, the primary excitement of this, is new terrain - it will make a world of difference. Final question is how do you / can you make the terrain mesh more detailed…or is that not really doable easily without major coding work?
Sorry for all the questions, I have little knowledge of the inner workings of Falcon. I used to make photoscenery for FSX though…
Thanks for your work on this !
Cheers, Mark
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Mark,
I actually don’t know the answers to your questions. I agree that having a new area with super-realistic scenery would be great but I also know that anytime we go outside the box we exponentially increase development time.Right now I am more focused on gameplay than doing anything extraordinary with the terrain like Demer is doing with Guam. I like what Polak has so far…I think that will work very well for what I want to accomplish.
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@Polak,
Ted, I looked up some stuff online just now (http://skyvector.com/ …awesome website!). It is about 258nm from Nellis to Fallon; 111nm from Tonopah to Fallon.I wonder if you would humor me on this. Fallon is really the area I’d like to model, with Fallon in the NW corner and working east and south. Would you consider doing a 16 segment theater instead of 32 segments? Is that possible in Falcon?
My goal is to build a pre-AMRAAM campaign. 100nm is more than enough space between airfields, I think. I’m looking at the chart for Nellis to Fallon and it is more room than I need by a factor of 4 at least. If we have Fallon and Tonopah, I can add a couple of “Red Air” airfields and really that will be sufficient. I think a terrain that small will give you a lot of opportunity to do neat things, without it being overwhelmingly large to build, tile, and populate.
What do you think?
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Let me really quickly sketch a campaign idea out for you. I haven’t put this on paper yet, but you’ll get the gist of my thinking.
We have a 16x16 segment theater with Fallon in the NW corner. The terrain encompasses the training areas SE of Fallon as depicted in the first page of this thread:
You have two countries- Greenland and Orangeland, as depicted in the map. Fallon is your “master base”; think of this as where the player as a Blueforce pilot will be “stationed” for his training/exercise. Since we can’t put Red Air on the same base, we will create fictional “Red Air” airbases. These aren’t real airbases as in “real world” but fictional training bases from which the adversaries are supposedly flying from. For game-world purposes we will put the adversaries there.
Perhaps we create our six countries as: Greenland, Orangeland, Blue Air, Blue Ground, Red Air, Red Ground.
We have Blue Air (you, the player) flying from the Greenland airbase Fallon. Red Air (the adversary) is flying from Orangeland airbase Red Air Airbase 1. At campaign start, Red Air is hostile, Orangeland/Greenland are neutral.
Ground forces are placed as Blue Ground/Red Ground so that we can manipulate their at-war status as we desire, depending on our campaign objectives.
The campaign objectives might look like this:
Day 1, Blue forces: Orangeland- neutral; Red Air- hostile; Red Ground- neutral; objective: air superiority.
Player has 24h to attrite Red Air/gain air superiority.Day 2, Blue forces: Orangeland- hostile; Red Air- hostile; Red Ground- neutral; objective: hit POL/conduct OCA.
Player has 24h to attrite airbases/POL/CCC sites.Day 3, Blue forces: Orangeland- hostile; Red Air- hostile; Red Ground- hostile; objective: reduce ground forces in preparation for Blue ground offensive.
Player has 24h to attrite Red Ground forces.Day 4, Blue Ground arrives as reinforcements. Ground offensive begins; campaign now runs until victory conditions are achieved (maybe capture Red Capital 1, or something like that).
This would be a low unit density fight. You write the campaign, script the changing hostility levels in the trigger file either based on attrition levels or on day. This will keep the AI focused on the task you want them focused on. So, for example, on Day 1 you are focusing strictly on air-air missions; Day 2 your first priority might be to hit the now-hostile Orangeland airbase with OCA strikes (and then you will have to figure out how to keep it out of commission); and so on.
Instead of 1000 ground units, maybe you have 30 or some reasonable number on each side. You have maybe 3 objectives between starting positions and victory conditions. Everything is taking place in the training areas…as the Blue forces player you are taking off and landing at Fallon, flying into the training range, conducting your mission, then RTB to Fallon for beers at the o’club.
That’s sort of idea for a campaign. I’d build it like I just described and then we play test it, figure out what changes need to be made for “fun” and adjust. You could build 3 campaigns easily just around this idea by manipulating force flow, hostility levels, etc with trigger files.
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So the terrain will be 16x16 segments and 256 x256 kms with Fallon in left upper corner with approx 50 miles buffer to the west and north. This will be truly unorthodox and I do not know how such a small size of terrain is going to work, but I’ll try to whip something.
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Need to make additional choice. The map of range whas ben resized , rescaled and overlayed onto the TPC pertaining to this area.
A
This is arrangement of 16x16 (red bounding square) where both Fallon and Tonopah are present (red dots)
However the NAS Fallon Range map is then cut off from the top.
B
2nd arrangement the bounding box is moved north and Range is encopassed in the entirety at the cost of loosing Tonopah
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Ted,
B is perfect. I don’t know if it will work, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t. I say we go for it. -
It is darn small. I would like to hear others opinion on the matter, however at the same token I suspect, that most , if not everyone would say … go for that, even while thinking in the back of the head…it is too small.
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I’d really like to try a very small theater. Nobody has ever tried it. I just flew an OCA mission in Panama. My target was 50nm away. Total flight time was less than 40 minutes real life, including flying the approach to landing with 9 other aircraft in the pattern. That’s exactly the kind of missions I want to see in this theater. A 3-4 day campaign with 30-60 minute missions…max; something you can fly, complete in a weekend, and then experiment with.
Beyond just being fun, I think we can learn a lot about how the campaign engine works by having a very small theater in which we can run controlled experiments.
Please, just trust me on this. It’s not too small.
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Since this is just a discussion thread, it’s ok to spam it a little.
This was a concept you might remember I was working on a long time ago in the ODS theater. I don’t know that anybody but me ever played it, but it was a fun little idea.
I checked on google maps and from Riyadh to Manama, Bahrain is 460km, so it’s a bit smaller than what we’re looking at with Fallon. The principle is the same, though. I think I had to use 460km because there were only a handful of airports to choose from. I do remember that, even at that small, I had trouble getting the AI to focus on the areas I wanted it to focus on- sending BARCAPs to uninteresting areas, hitting ground targets away from the main fight, etc. I’d like to see if we can focus things a bit tighter in Fallon.
Same basic campaign ideas here…
_Most people know about Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. However, most folks do not consider all of the training that took place prior to the outbreak of hostilities between Iraq, Kuwait, and the Allied Coalition.
Bright Star '90 is an exercise that took place in preparation for, but prior to, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.
The country of the People’s Republic of Cobalt has claimed that a vast oil field adjacent to their border with the Confederation of Independent Scarlet is actually their rightful property. After years of rhetoric and posturing, the PRC has seized this area using military force. The CIS has requested Allied intervention to help restore their sovereign territory, as well as destroy the PRC’s ability to conduct future offensive operations.
Victory conditions:
CIS (bluefor) reduces PRC (opfor) to less than 80% supply.
CIS reduces PRC ground forces to less than 50% of PRC ground forces level.
CIS captures BS Victory (won’t happen, ground movement doesn’t occur (probably due to tiling problems)).I think that’s it. So, if your campaign suddenly freezes (the movies might or might not play- they’re just the Korea movies for now), then you achieved a campaign victory condition. Good for you!
Some other info:
Opfor (PRC) starts out as USN and USMC Adversaries- A-4s, F-5s, F-16s. There is one squadron of Ukranian Air Force SU-27s as well. After 4 hours, reinforcements should show up as French Mirage F-1s, and Canadian F-18s.
Bluefor (CIS) starts out as a carrier battle group’s worth of USN aircraft- F-14As, A-6Es, A-7Es, F-18As, E-2Cs. After 4 hours, reinforcements show up as F-15As, F-15Es (probably need to DB edit out their AIM-120s still), Brit Tornado GR4s, and an E-3 squadron.
Opfor air defenses consist of a mix of Hawk, Patriot, SA-2, -3, -6, plus the usual AAA and Manpads._
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toonces,
I did try your Bright Star 90 with FF 5 when you posted it. It was a cool little theater, great for short missions like you said. I was certain I had PMed you some feedback on it back then, but it might be my old memory. Anyway, it was fun, I do remember that. -
Hey Pilgrim-
Thank you very much for the kind feedback. You very well may have said that before, but it’s always nice to hear again!If somebody would like to assist in this project (assuming it does get beyond planning stage) I would like to solicit a kinner to work on a VF-43/Adversary Kfir skin for the Mirage 2000EGM HAF (I’m pretty sure that’s the designation).
The Kfir doesn’t seem to work in BMS- it crashes when I put it in in Tacedit. The Mirage 2000 is “close enough”. Also, since we have the outstanding cockpit for this jet it will make a flyable adversary for folks that want to go on the red team.
There are two excellent variants:
The right way to do this is to make sure we get the appropriate permissions from the original BMS authors and then figure out how much of the existing skins- if any- we can use as a template.
If you have any interest, please let me know; if any of the BMS folks happen to read this, please let me know who I need to contact for the permissions to use the existing Mirage 2000 HAF as a template for modification.
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Mirage 2000 HAF as a template for modification.
Which version of the 2000 in the DB are you talking about??
There are the 2000-5(Topolo skin)/2000C(Topolo skin)/2000D(?)/2000EGM(?)/2000N(?)
RAM22
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The 2000EGM I think, simply because I don’t envision using the Greek Mirage in any of the campaigns. I’m flexible, though, if someone has a better suggestion.
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Why dont use the Mirage IIIE model of KTO?
I think it is the best option to simulate kfir with exist work… Anyone using it.
You have it with a Spanish unreal white skin in TacRef of KTO
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Why dont use the Mirage IIIE model of KTO?
I think it is the best option to simulate kfir with exist work… Anyone using it.
Agree, I believe that is a more comparable aircraft.
RAM22
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If you see it, maybe you can use the M2000 template to repaint it too… with a little modifications.
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Cool! F-21’s!
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No, really:
From Wiki, so it HAS to be true:
Twenty-five modified Kfir C.1s were leased to the US Navy and the US Marine Corps from 1985 to 1989, to act as adversary aircraft in dissimilar air combat training (DACT). These aircraft, designated F-21A Kfir, had narrow-span canard foreplanes and a single small rectangular strake on either side of the nose which considerably improved the aircraft’s maneuverability and handling at low speeds.
The 12 F-21 aircraft leased to the US Navy, painted in a three-tone blue-gray “ghost” scheme, were operated by VF-43, based at NAS Oceana. In 1988 they were returned and replaced by the F-16N. The 13 aircraft leased to the United States Marine Corps were operated by VMFT-401 at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma. In addition to the blue-gray painted aircraft, the USMC also had some F-21s painted in Israeli colors and desert “flogger” schemes. These aircraft were replaced by F-5Es when the F-21s were returned in 1989.
I still saw them there a couple years ago.