Darn, that A-6 cockpit would be very cool to have! Hopefully someday
Posts made by CCIP
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RE: Vietnam Theater
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RE: One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
CCIP, sorry, but the question concerns 2D. Itās smooth. I suppose you accelerated the footage in addition of the 32x in the UI.
Yep, thatās correct! Sorry for the odd look - yes, the effective acceleration in the video is 768x (64 x 12). Thatās why I called it a timelapse - itās just meant to be a quick snapshot
Falcon comes from an era when just having primitive 8-directional sprites (as opposed to vectors) was common on 2D maps. Not much that can be done about that (although I think itād be neat if someone made a mod to replace the aircraft silhouettes with NTIDS symbols!) -
RE: One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
Did you accelerate the footage as well?
I did, thatās why no sound - sorry about that, kind of a lazy way of capturing video
Itās 4x accelerated in game plus 4x sped up in video - the real mission was 2 hours long (which wouldāve still been 30 minutes of video without the speed-up!)
Iāll try to do a better video demo when I have some time!Carriers in Vnam are all very functional. I have never seen this many carriers working in one theater.
there are at least 17 working carriers to choose from in TE_NEW.
watching this video with all the planes spawning and taking off is awesome! I couldnāt help but notice that RC-5 on deck! One of my favorite new toys from ccc.I love the Vigie as well! Yeah, itās an impressive sight - it was actually somewhat more impressive earlier, when I ran the full Alpha Strike launch in just 10 minutes. Unfortunately, I then realized that a few planes would āspawnā wrong and fall off the deck/explode - so to keep it safe, I extended the launch period to 20 minutes instead of 10.
And actually, that reminds me - while the carriers in the mission seem to be working perfectly, I did have a problem earlier where the carriers didnāt seem to want to appear in certain combination (for example, the USS Constellation can be added as a carrier, but when I had it along with the two other carriers in the scenario, I would not be able to choose it as a base for some reason.) Itās not a big issue - but might be worth checking into, I suspect thereās some sort of overlapping ID. Thatās why the scenario has Independence in place of the historical Connie at the moment.
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RE: One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
Thank you CCIPā¦
The position update of the units on the 2D map is very frequent. Is there any setting about this?
Do you mean in the video? Thatās running at 12x64x speed (so, 768x in total!), so if it looks a bit too fast thatās because it is
If you mean something in game - I didnāt notice it. The only thing I can think of is the fact you see all the enemy ground units at first, but they disappear from view after just a couple of minutes.
Great job.
and thanks for exploring the possibility of vnam mod.BTW thanks for checking Dragon Jaw issueā¦ we really need this objective!
Glad to hear
Yes, the Paul Doumer bridge was a sort of āsecond Dragonās Jawā, and arguably more strategically important. It wasnāt quite as tough, but still over-engineered and had one upside - a lot more spans, which individually were easier to repair. But this particular strike was damaging enough that it was never fully repaired.
Pretty different from the Thanh Hoa Bridge - but still a very juicy (but hard) target! -
RE: One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
And just for fun - another timelapse, this time in 3D view!
2 flight hours squeezed into just 8 minutes (with no sound, as intended)
This one is from an A-7E, flying as part of the first Alpha Strike against Haiphong in the morning.(I didnāt actually pilot it - it was 100% flown by the AI ācombat autopilotā for testing. I also set the con layer to 10,000 ft to help make the other flights in the package a little easier to see in the video.)
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RE: One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
Documentation:
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MISSION DOCUMENT: (work in progress)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FzTC2mYDvfSogMgAQUijYZ_CmOfBE6eOou_BV0wbh1U/edit?usp=sharing
Background, briefing information -
SCANNED EXCERPTS: (from Ethell & Price (1989) āOne Day in a Long Warā)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dxe04ePfL4mN6jWSjokt8MK6igDWT0glmK8j-CyzuWw/edit?usp=sharing
Historical details about the first day of Operation Linebacker
US Strike ATO map showing all the sorties over North Vietnam (not including the Red force, of course!) -
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One Day in a Long War (large historical TE)
One Day in a Long War: May 10, 1972
Following another breakdown of talks in Paris and no ceasefire in sight for the communist offensive in South Vietnam, President Nixon authorizes the first major strikes against North Vietnam in 4 years. Operation Linebacker is about to begin, with both USAF and US Navy aircraft poised to deliver the first attacks.
Well, thatās basically all there is to this TE - allowing for a few minor changes (type and weapon substitutions, minor game-oriented tweaks), this is essentially a faithful recreation of the action that day, based largely on the book of the same title by J.L. Ethell & A. Price (1989). The scenario is meant to be played from the US perspective, with a total an ATO containing 348 USN and USAF sorties - with mission rosters, loadouts, times and even altitudes based on historical documents from that day. The only objectives at the moment are primary ground targets for all strikes - for a maximum of 100 points (with a score somewhere in the 70s being average for an AI-only run-through).
A few compromises that had to be made include some of the targets - they are in the right areas, but sometimes had to be substituted for other objectives. For example, the most prized target of the day was the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, which was successfully taken down by an early all-PGM (LGB/EOGB) raid - unfortunately, there is no bridge there in the theater at the momentā¦ but there is a factory in basically the exact same location, so I improvised Likewise, the fact that thereās no EKA-3B (only an EA-3B) on the Navy roster, and buddy refueling on the nearest equivalent (EA-6D) doesnāt seem to be working correctly meant that some KC-135s had to be recruited to help the USN. A few other minor type swaps were made, and a couple of missions streamlined to avoid extra confusion. In some cases, flight plans had to be padded out a little to stick to historical T/O and TOT; other timing tweaks included making carrier launch windows for strikes longer than in reality in order to avoid aircraft failing to āspawnā or falling off the deck.
These are long missions - averaging about 2 hours long for most of the USN strike and fighter flights, and about 3 hours for the Air Force sorties (requiring at least 2 refuelings). With the Navy and Air Force following different doctrines and attacking different target areas, both offer different challenges. I built it specifically as an educational tool to explore the dynamics of that dayās action - in a way only Falcon 4 can do (what other sim can handle this scale?)
You can take a look at a timelapse of the mission playing out in 2D (in just a couple of minutes) here:
I am still working on tweaks to the mission, and would be grateful for any input!
Documentation is a work-in-progress as well - see next post for the documents - with more to be added laterā¦
Thanks if you decide to check it out
DOWNLOAD LINK: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jmdSy1N3NgCRrfGS6GfZuPYqTEKWud2u
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RE: Vietnam theater v1.0 - BMS
where you n SP campaign or MP campaign?
That was in SP campaign. Seems to happen pretty consistently - at least in both the default (and my own modified) '65 campaign.
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RE: Vietnam theater v1.0 - BMS
On another note: I found what may be a bit of a bug!
After midnight on Day 2, the campaign (at least for Rolling Thunder) starts throwing up ānews updatesā every 5 minutes which read āNOT IN GAMEā. It makes the screen flash - and also crashes the game if you start running it at a high time compression.
Is it possible to remove those news reports? It will loop infinitely otherwise, or so it seems.
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RE: Vietnam theater v1.0 - BMS
Very good start indeed! Seriously, Iāve been waiting for this for a very long time - and just as I started getting back into BMS, there it is I really hope this is something that can be built on. Thanks again for all your work on that, I know this is not an easy thing to put together!
Meanwhile, hereās my contribution!
Realistic 1960s Start (campaign+save)
As promised, this is just my quick take on a relatively realistic OOB (as in, real air units, but with a non-specific timeframe), a reworking of territory control, and a North Vietnamese air force with a purely defensive stance (which you can change if you wish). It doesnāt represent a specific point in the campaign, and doesnāt quite fit with 1965 - but itās a pretty good representation of typical operations between late 1966 and early 1968, more or less. Could be a good Tet Offensive stand-in!
The download contains a new āsave2.camā (Rolling Thunder campaign file) and a safe file called ā(realistic 1960s start).camā, both of which must be copied to your Falcom BMS 4.33/Data/Add-on Vietnam/Campaign/ folder. Overwrite the existing save2.cam - donāt worry, if you want to go back to the original campaign, thereās a clean backup in my zip file that you can just copy over it anytime!
For technical reasons (mostly my own limited knowledge of campaign editing), you should NOT start the campaign the usual way (selecting from the 3 choices). Instead, please load the provided ā(realistic 1960s start)ā save file to start campaign - just pick your squadron there and you can then play as normal. Yes, starting the campaign the ānormalā way will work, but a bunch of Blue air units will be wildly misplaced at wrong bases and the red sideās ATO will not be defensive, so I donāt recommend it.
I designed this mainly with a Blue player in mind and have no idea how it would do the other way!
For Blue, the campaign might be a bit easy if youāre an avid SAM hunter and airfield bomber. For extra challenge, though, I recommend turning off airfields in target priorities (as airfields were indeed off-limits for much, though not all, of Rolling Thunder).Note:
More realistic doesnāt necessarily mean better or more fun! But this might be pretty appealing to certain kinds of players, of which I am one.
If you donāt want the North Vietnamese air force to be purely defensive, you can of course go and change its PAKs and Mission Priority by hand.See readme for more details!
DOWNLOAD: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1igfUj1Pw9Y4mjmlHXY3WCDdL_bvuWnC6
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RE: Vietnam theater v1.0 - BMS
Hi CCIP,
List 'm and mail 'm if youāve got 'em. We are bringing in new campaigns an iterative additional content. And with regards to the red base; well we went āas accurate as possibleā but it is still BMS so campaign balance was also needed. Hope you donāt mind & enjoy the theater.I hear you I noticed this yesterday, when I ārebuiltā the save2.cam (the Rolling Thunder campaign) a bit and realized that, well, a purely realistic take on it would be a little unbalanced if played as a classic BMS campaign. For one, the fact that you can count offensive missions by the VPAF before 1975 on one hand kind of covers that!
Iāll do some last touches on it after work tonight and put out up - I think itād take someone with a bit more Falcon campaign editing skills to take it further, but if thereās anything you like about it, youāre welcome to use them by all means! And Iāll be glad to do things like dig up mostly-realistic OOBs for things like squadrons and bases.
A couple of general suggestions on the campaign structure:
-I really recommend against making China āat warā with the blue side by default. China should start out hostile or even neutral at the start of all the campaigns - and it would be neat if there could be an event where China enters the war if blue forces advance into North Vietnamās heartland.
-Laos and Cambodia should not be hostile in the campaigns, particularly the early ones. Laos should be āFriendlyā throughout - albeit with large portions of its north and east occupied by North Vietnam and China. Laos should not have SA-2 SAMs. Laos should be hostile to or even at war with North Vietnam, and neutral to China. It could be neutral in 1975.
-Cambodia should be neutral in the Rolling Thunder campaign (with much of its border with Vietnam occupied by the North Vietnamese). It should be friendly in the Linebacker campaign. In 1975 - depends on the concept! It could be modeled as friendly and under assault by Red team (Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge 2 weeks before Saigon), or it could be hostile but disengaged from the conflict.
-It might be interesting to have Thailand become neutral in 1975 (with the US still retaining some bases). By the 70s, Thailand became increasingly unwilling to cooperate with the US.
-China and North Vietnam should be allies, but China should not be an active belligerent (unless Blue forces invade far into North Vietnam), and be at worst hostile or even neutral by default. (China did make a guarantee to defend North Vietnam, but was absolutely horrified at the prospect of actually being dragged into this war, and actively tried to hold North Vietnamese offensive plans in check, even going as far as occupying part of northern Laos to keep the North Vietnamese from taking it). China should definitely be neutral to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia in particular.
-Iām not sure having Burma occupied by China is a good idea - Iād suggest making the west side of the map neutral territory if possible.Some suggestions on air defenses:
-As mentioned, Laos should not have SA-2s. AA guns at most.
-Iāve not seen any information about Nike batteries in the theater. I would instead put in Hawk batteries (which were indeed deployed), in larger numbers, for defending Blue assets.
-In North Vietnam, I would suggest thinning out the SAM density outside of the lower Red River valley (i.e. Hanoi-Haiphong), and especially down south close to the DMZ.
-On the flip side, I would recommend greatly increasing AAA defenses. I notice the North Vietnamese order of battle doesnāt have any KS-19 batteries, even though historically those were there and in quite large numbers, too. AAA should be a more persistent threat over NVN than SAMs as such - the main role of SAMs is to force aircraft down into deadly flak range.
-Itās also worth adding lots of lighter AAA (S-60 batteries will do) to occupied areas of Laos. Historically, these were mostly radar-less but deadly and often unexpected within visual range.
-Iād also suggest thinning out the SAM coverage in the northwest of North Vietnam for routing reasons - right now I notice that USAF flights from Thailand like to go out over water and then inland to Hanoi, when in reality they ingressed over Laos. I have a hunch that reducing the SAM coverage in that area will make the ATO frag these packages much betterā¦Some suggestions for units:
-F-105Fs should be turned into a Wild Weasel platform - right now if added into the campaign, they have an odd habit of doing CAP and other irrelevant duties. Hopefully an easy change!
-O-1Eās and OV-10Aās role should be overwhelmingly tasked as FAC aircraft, which they were historically.A few suggested airfields:
-In Laos, there should be air bases at Vientiane (Wattay), Xiengkhouang (red-occupied) and Savannakhet - plus airfields at least at Pakse, Seno, Long Tieng, Na Khang, and Luang Prabang. I bring up these specifically because they were used extensively by friendly forces (though only covertly by US units), and would make handy divert airfields.
-In Cambodia, at least Phnom Penh should be added as an airbase (again, used extensively by US units, albeit mostly non-combat).
-In South Vietnam, it would be great to have some historical airstrips north of Da Nang. I particularly recommend Phu Bai airbase, and airfields at Khe Sanh, Quang Tri, Dong Ha. The Hue citadel airstrip would be neat as well, if you could cram it into being surrounded by the city somehow!
-One very notable omission in North Vietnam - Yen Hai airbase. It was an important MiG base throughout the war - hopefully an easy addition!A couple of notes on graphics:
-I would suggest using a bit more forest/jungle/mountain tiles versus farmland, outside of totally flat areas away from the coasts - the theater, and particularly the highland areas of it, look far more āwildā and desolate in real life than in game!
-The coast tiles seem to have this weird grid overlay on them. Is that possible to fix?Just my two cents
Iāll be happy to put up my alternate Save2.cam once Iāve had a chance to do a last check! -
RE: Vietnam theater v1.0 - BMS
Great work, Iām impressed with the level of detail youāve put into this map!
Iāve got a few (well, a LOT) of suggestions on OOB for campaigns however - thereās a few odd choices in there, historically-speaking (like Nakhon Phanom being a Red base in 1965ā¦ hmmm?)
Iāll be happy to list them down and/or put up alternate .cam files if youād like (will just do a quick pass via Mission Commander myself) Iām not well-versed with Falcon editing in any way, but I have become a bit of a āVietnamologistā over the last few years (and am working on Vietnam air-related content for another commercial game).It would also be neat to see interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh trail implemented - the installations for it are certainly all there!
Looking forward to enjoying this for a long time to come, in any case