More tankers?
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@Snake122 said in More tankers?:
Definitely. I do remember either listening to a podcast or reading something that did talk about a planned FAARP in either ODS/OIR for a USAF flight and we can do that with alternate field landings in BMS.
Absolutely. One catch with FAARPs in BMS is that if you land on them with a full load of ordinance you need quite a lot of runway due to the brakes vs the gross weight. So most strips can be too short, proper airbases can work
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@JTnero said in More tankers?:
I’ve been fragging a tanker to cover when my mission will be. Not sure how the AI treats this one but I’ve never had a queue for it.
Interesting, you may have that all to yourself. The AI should be able to use that as well, but the engine may not be aware of it ?
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@JTnero said in More tankers?:
I’ve been fragging a tanker to cover when my mission will be. Not sure how the AI treats this one but I’ve never had a queue for it.
Thanks, that answers one of my questions. Are you doing this with with BMS UI or Mission Commander?
@jayb said in More tankers?:
@Snake122 said in More tankers?:
Definitely. I do remember either listening to a podcast or reading something that did talk about a planned FAARP in either ODS/OIR for a USAF flight and we can do that with alternate field landings in BMS.
Absolutely. One catch with FAARPs in BMS is that if you land on them with a full load of ordinance you need quite a lot of runway due to the brakes vs the gross weight. So most strips can be too short, proper airbases can work
Yes, definitely if using an airstrip style base. Not super familiar with Mideast to know how many are out there and if you are going to use a regular base anyway.
@jayb said in More tankers?:
@JTnero said in More tankers?:
I’ve been fragging a tanker to cover when my mission will be. Not sure how the AI treats this one but I’ve never had a queue for it.
Interesting, you may have that all to yourself. The AI should be able to use that as well, but the engine may not be aware of it ?
That doesn’t surprise me because in Mideast 128, BMS is doing a decent job of automatically fragging in a refuel point for longer missions if you fly by the tanker track, this is where I saw the 40+ stack (it just needs more tankers). This is different than most KTO missions because they are actually in your steerpoint flow with a steerpoint assigned to refuel, not a random point outside of your flightpath like most of the time tracks are in KTO for emergencies. So the BMS engine is sending them all to the tanker fragged within its ATO. You would manually have to edit refuel steerpoints of other flights for them to use it would be my guess. Maybe if there is emergency refuel planes will get sent to that manually fragged tanker if closer, but I don’t even know if AI planes do that. Or if your manually fragged tanker is still flying when the BMS fragged tanker is done, maybe BMS ATO engine starts using that tanker.
But this brings a couple of other questions:
- Does this mess up that tanker squadron’s ATO and now they aren’t doing a later fragged mission?
- If you get close enough to the other tanker track in 3d and deagg it our of the bubble, are you causing that traffic jam again? I was doing a package mission and I know others in it were supposed to tank there too. It’s all well and good if I get my gas but if I’m not supporting/getting supported by the rest of the package, it makes things much more difficult.
- How is a BMS KC-135/KC10/etc. maximum fuel offload amount modeled?
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@Snake122 within the UI, I don’t add it as part of my package but as a separate package in itself. They’re normally on station for 4 hours if I remember correctly so it’s easy to have a tanker available on your way in/out of target if you need it.
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Just to update this, it looks like the AI does use any fragged tankers. I came to “my” tanker today and found 2 Mirage’s there.
First time it’s happened so they must prefer the AI fragged ones but they’ll use human fragged tankers also.
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@JTnero cool, thanks for the update! Have you flown long enough into a campaign to see if your tasking the extra flight causes a gap in the automatically fragged tankers?
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New tanker in Mideast
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@Snake122 working through a campaign now and haven’t seen any issues. The AI does still look to stack at the AI fragged tankers but I’ve also seen them use mine.
I guess when the AI is putting together the ATO it places the tankers and gets the fragged flights to them. The ones I frag are then from the spare tankers and get used if the AI needs to outside of their standing tanking.
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@JTnero Good, thanks for the update! Have you seen what I did with 40 planes in the AI ATOed Tanker stack with your own fragged one also in the air? It would be nice if it balanced the load a little. Not only does that probably make the TOTs way late of all those packages, it also brought my computer to it’s knees with the frame rate. It sounds like it is balancing them at least some but I could see how ATO AI assigns them it may only use the original tanker for assigned usage and the manually made one for emergency fuel.
Have you made it deep enough into the campaign to see if it makes it short on tankers later?
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Guys, just saw your, well a bit old thread, … I think I can help a little that I know.
In Campaign dir there’s a file falcon4.aii , there under [ATM] section you’ll see these lines:
MinimumBDAPriority = 900 MinimumAWACSDistance = 90 MaximumAWACSDistance = 120 MinimumJSTARDistance = 70 MaximumJSTARDistance = 110 MinimumTankerDistance = 70 MaximumTankerDistance = 110 MinimumECMDistance = 30 MaximumECMDistance = 70
You might be interested in lines for tanker distance, … from my understanding these lines control distance from tanker packages - min - max. !! BUT , it could be distance from FLOT also - I’m not sure unfortunately.
You could ask for more help from someone “older” in BMS (like @Mav-jp ) , and there still a question is this still used, as those stuff are “relic” from original Falcon4.
But, that could help with with fraqging tanker packages., not how much I’m afraid, but how close one to the other.
Or, you can test , edit Min - Max values to something smaller, like Min = 50 Max = 70 (nm) and fast forward in campaign watching support/tanker mission frag.
Cheers
- p.s. @SpbGoro , you can actually control tanker fragging even from missiondat.xml for the campaign , look: