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ufff…
/me going back to RTFM :mrgreen:
But seriously speaking, yes I can understand exactly why L-16 is needed, it’s so much better to manage AIM-120 shots for example when you know which targets already fired upon by your flight…
Well no, that isnt needed. IIRC the AIM-120C is designed to auto sort itself into formations. For formations that are outside a single radar resolution cell, you should have been able to see which contact your flight members had bugged just using the IDM.
Not that Im suggesting we shouldn’t have Link-16…! In honesty Im currently thinking through what it would look like if implemented the way I would like to see it - what UI screens would be needed, how would AI need to react to unknown contacts, etc…
Interesting thought experiment
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@Red:
That’s not a bad idea at all. and you could even push that further a bit, like display aircraft labels in UI (or Awacs screen only for those having the stuff enabled on the CNI page
That’s what I also mentioned here. Just having M3 in sharedmem for ATC (F4Awacs) would already be very nice feature and I think not major PITA for devs since it’s already in eye candy on the DED.
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Just having M3 in sharedmem for ATC (F4Awacs) would already be very nice feature and I think not major PITA for devs since it’s already in eye candy on the DED.
Comm frequencies first, please. I can’t believe these aren’t already in there.
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Many ppl are requesting L16 implementation, but most of them do even not know how to share a mark point with their wingmen with current IDM
And most of them do only Df’s so BMS should remove other features?
Features are there so ppl to use them if and whenever they want.
If they don’t know how or they don’t have the will it’s their problem.
I believe BMS mission is to simulate the “thing” the best way they can.
And u do a fine job on this. -
Comm frequencies first, please. I can’t believe these aren’t already in there.
Why would you want that?? ATC doesn’t know either on what freq the airplanes are?
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Why would you want that?? ATC doesn’t know either on what freq the airplanes are?
Because currently there’s no way to read it out of the game?
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Because currently there’s no way to read it out of the game?
Again, why would you need that? It’s on the DED and that can be extracted, if it’s for the pit. ATC doesn’t know airborne assets currently tuned freq either IRL, so useless for that purpose either. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what for it could be useful to have that?
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Again, why would you need that? It’s on the DED and that can be extracted, if it’s for the pit. ATC doesn’t know airborne assets currently tuned freq either IRL, so useless for that purpose either. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what for it could be useful to have that?
Lots of reasons if you have some imagination.
The problem with extracting off the DED is, what happens when the DED screen swaps?
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Lots of reasons if you have some imagination.
Please share some, I seem to lack imagination at this point…
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Again, why would you need that? It’s on the DED and that can be extracted, if it’s for the pit. ATC doesn’t know airborne assets currently tuned freq either IRL, so useless for that purpose either. Otherwise I wouldn’t know what for it could be useful to have that?
Actually as long as we are discussing link 16, if the tower can read J series messages on the subnet they CAN tell what voice frequency airborne assets are on.
Please share some, I seem to lack imagination at this point…
Hypothetically speaking if you wanted to add any kind of radio mod, knowing what frequency is tuned would be a must right there….
of course IVC is so perfect that no one would ever want to mess around with making their own radio mod, right?
…yeah, I couldnt keep a straight face either! XD
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Please share some, I seem to lack imagination at this point…
People in the know, know why I want it. That’s good enough for me.
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People in the know, know why I want it. That’s good enough for me.
Come on dude, that’s lame
First publicly stating it’s understandable a feature is not there, but unable to publicly share at least one utilisation of that missing feature?Only thing remotely related to freqs I can think of is the status of the set manual freq on the uhf backup panel. However, that is not comm freq in shared mem as you mentioned but only a state of 5 rotary switches that can differ from the actual current comm freq the pilot is on.
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Pointless, just use guard 243.00 and lead them to a common frequency
Counter argument to Asharpe. pilots must also need to change frequency without anyone knowing about it.
smart pilots listen to both the active freq and guard, so if they need to be dragged to a common freq for whatever reason guard is the answer (not preset called guard, the real guard) -
@Red:
Pointless, just use guard 243.00 and lead them to a common frequency
Counter argument to Asharpe. pilots must also need to change frequency without anyone knowing about it.
smart pilots listen to both the active freq and guard, so if they need to be dragged to a common freq for whatever reason guard is the answer (not preset called guard, the real guard)whats pointless?? Im lost….
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People in the know, know why I want it. That’s good enough for me.
that
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This stuff about having frequencies in the SharedMem appears to be more Top Secret than the systems installed on the new stealth Air Force One?
Anyways, that means we have to do what we all always do when it comes to secret stuff: speculate.
I think one valid reason where it would be useful to see which frequency a pilot is tuned to, would be a new guy who is suddenly “lost” after a comm switch. But that’s what Guard is for, or why you never switch both radios at the same time, or still have Teamspeak running in the background.What other things can you come up with?
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@Eagle-Eye: replacing IVC. Wanting to create a UHF LRU compatible with BMS which can be drop-in for cockpit builders. Simulating Link-16 as a third party Add-on.
A few things.
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Coming back to the Thread Topic, I do think IFF is much much easier to implement versus Link 16.
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You could write a short book on that topic good sir…
But I guess flying with labels on covers a good portion of it.
The short version is that its a datalink which craps on the IDM and has a heap of features for integrating aircraft, ships and ground positions on one network. You can classify tracks according to the level of ROE they have satisfied, so a fighter could look at an air track and see that its passed through MRR without complying for example, just from tags on the track. You can vector aircraft onto a target with their radar off.
Lots of things.
There is more to it than that, and less. In a L16 network, each player, IE: Ground Unit (the moving kind), Fighter, AWACS, Ground Station, etc… that has a terminal only gets to transmit every so often, the network is set up in time slots and each transmitter only gets a small window to transmit certain messages on each cycle. In theory, there are hundreds of message types which can be sent across the network, ranging from simple stuff like weather and airport notams, to more complex things like targeting information, Bandit/Hostile declarations, radar tracks, and plenty more. Not every message includes position reporting either (Realistically it’s fast enough to nullify the lack of constant position reporting, for the most part). In reality… there is very little of this capability actually used, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being its hard to design a network that allows a lot of players to work together and share the limited transmit slots, and do so in a manner that will be beneficial to the most number of players on the network. (I used to do this in the AF) Additionally, all the nice things like MRR and ROE resolution is done by AWACS (Or another C2 platform) and pushed to the players via tracks. It does however have limited IFF M4 integration, sort of, but that wouldn’t do much until the IFF piece got added to the game anyways. It’s certainly more advanced than the IDM, but it comes at a cost, and the advantages that it really brings wouldn’t do much to enhance the Falcon experience all that much. Truth be told a lot of the pilots I’ve spoken with about it over the years tend to say the best part of L16 is the private voice channel you get with your flight, which likely wouldn’t be implemented anyway… The system provides a lot of useful features, but to truly integrate all of them into Falcon would be a nightmare no doubt. I know first hand how the L16 system is designed and how it works, and to do it with the level of realism that BMS tends to shoot for, would be a monstrous task indeed.
(I need to save this reply somewhere, I’m definitely going to use it again )
For a functionning IFF, we would also need to implement IFF failures, what happens when you come back in your lines with a bent IFF, safe passage lines, ROEs for AI, creating new radio messages, get rid of “hack” like asking your wingman to engage, etc. Then debug all this, especially since it has a high potential of creating huge bugs like AI never firing or AI firing on friendly too often.
I think a lot of people want IFF just to have a magic button telling them Friendly/Enemy. IRL, that is not the case at all and requires a lot of work in the pit, and in mission preparation. Even IFF Mode 4 might be turned off in enemy space, if needed.
All in all, a lot of other basic stuff more important are missing, like simply having a correct system of frequencies for contacting flight/AWACS/FAC/TAnker, instead of the original F4 one which is kind of a mess.
And before somebody ask : same deal for the L-16.
I think most people fail to realize with the exception of Mode 4/5 IFF is simply used for ATC. Mode 1 and Mode 2, for the most part, can’t be read by anyone other than AWACS and really only provides package information to reference against the ATO (Which you don’t fly with so you wouldn’t know if it was a valid reply or not), so that’s useless for the most part, and Mode 3/a/c are only altitude/position indicators with a number attached to them (Think of other flight sims when they tell you to change your squawk) Mode 4/5 is encrypted, but it’s very pilot intensive for small aircraft, and not automated like most people think. When you as a pilot send an IFF interrogation (Which you have to do manually when you bug a target), the other pilot gets an indicator that they are being interrogated, IF and ONLY IF they have the same codes loaded. When they get the indication, their transponder may or may not respond based on the mode its in (You can always manually respond, there is a reason the HOTAS buttons are called IFF IN/IFF OUT), as L3Crusader mentioned it’s not always a good thing to have random RF leaving the airplane in some areas.
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There is more to it than that, and less. In a L16 network, each player, IE: Ground Unit (the moving kind), Fighter, AWACS, Ground Station, etc… that has a terminal only gets to transmit every so often, the network is set up in time slots and each transmitter only gets a small window to transmit certain messages on each cycle.
Yes, hence TDMA.
In theory, there are hundreds of message types which can be sent across the network, ranging from simple stuff like weather and airport notams, to more complex things like targeting information, Bandit/Hostile declarations, radar tracks, and plenty more. Not every message includes position reporting either (Realistically it’s fast enough to nullify the lack of constant position reporting, for the most part).
J2.X and J3.X messages carry position reporting. For an F-16, J2.2 (Air PPLI’s), J3.0 (reference points) and J3.2 (air tracks) are the main ones expected. PPLIs every 12 seconds typically? tracks up to 20 second spacing?
In reality… there is very little of this capability actually used, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being its hard to design a network that allows a lot of players to work together and share the limited transmit slots, and do so in a manner that will be beneficial to the most number of players on the network. (I used to do this in the AF) Additionally, all the nice things like MRR and ROE resolution is done by AWACS (Or another C2 platform) and pushed to the players via tracks. It does however have limited IFF M4 integration, sort of, but that wouldn’t do much until the IFF piece got added to the game anyways. It’s certainly more advanced than the IDM, but it comes at a cost, and the advantages that it really brings wouldn’t do much to enhance the Falcon experience all that much. Truth be told a lot of the pilots I’ve spoken with about it over the years tend to say the best part of L16 is the private voice channel you get with your flight, which likely wouldn’t be implemented anyway… The system provides a lot of useful features, but to truly integrate all of them into Falcon would be a nightmare no doubt. I know first hand how the L16 system is designed and how it works, and to do it with the level of realism that BMS tends to shoot for, would be a monstrous task indeed.
I was under the impression that the IFF integration was also something the C2 player had to correlate themself?
Id just like the ability to send commit/engage instructions to F-16 players digitally, instead of over IVC. Things like that would enhance the experience substantially. I think we can agree that it would be a pretty massive task to implement it down to the level of tracking messages sent though. The coding to implement it would need to be a lot more simple than the way L16 actually works, but it could do that and still appear to the players of the sim exactly the same as L16 in operation.
If this was part of your job you could probably assist the devs quite a bit with this topic, if you were so inclined.
I think most people fail to realize with the exception of Mode 4/5 IFF is simply used for ATC. Mode 1 and Mode 2, for the most part, can’t be read by anyone other than AWACS and really only provides package information to reference against the ATO (Which you don’t fly with so you wouldn’t know if it was a valid reply or not), so that’s useless for the most part, and Mode 3/a/c are only altitude/position indicators with a number attached to them (Think of other flight sims when they tell you to change your squawk) Mode 4/5 is encrypted, but it’s very pilot intensive for small aircraft, and not automated like most people think. When you as a pilot send an IFF interrogation (Which you have to do manually when you bug a target), the other pilot gets an indicator that they are being interrogated, IF and ONLY IF they have the same codes loaded. When they get the indication, their transponder may or may not respond based on the mode its in (You can always manually respond, there is a reason the HOTAS buttons are called IFF IN/IFF OUT), as L3Crusader mentioned it’s not always a good thing to have random RF leaving the airplane in some areas.
Im still not clear why its called that actually. Doesnt the comms switch control declutter on the FCR and HSD formats? IFF interogator uses the TMS hat… so why is the comms switch labeled with IFF IN/OUT?