I've noticed that MANY planned aircraft for DCS (F-18C, AJS-37, possibly Tornado or Jaguar, and others) have some very interesting navigational and targeting systems that incorporate themselves into said aircraft...However these systems only provide useful information to the crew by how well the mission was planned before the flight.
For instance, British (and possibly other Air-forces that acquired Tornados and Jaguars) fast-strike aircraft such as the Jaguar and Tornado had moving maps displayed in-front of their A/G radar navigation display(s), with waypoints chosen before the flight by either the lead pilot, or someone else (It seems to be a dedicated mission coordinator/wing leader of the sort, but I don't know how the ranks and positions of the RAF worked in this timeframe). Anyway, these waypoints were chosen via a map on a table with a special marking instrument that took the precise position the crosshairs were on the map and fed the exact GPS coordinates into a computer, which uploaded them into data cartridges that would then be inserted into the aircraft's own computer.
Good footage/example of this:
Now as far as I know from my own research, the Swedish Air Force had a similar system. However, I do not know how this system worked, what it was like to plan these strikes, how the waypoints were chosen, how accurate it is, (although thanks to another post by renhanxue, we do know that the system can drift) or even how to access them in the cockpit.
Okay...all of that out of the way I can get to my main purpose of posting this thread. Is there going to be any way to actually plan waypoints and other mission parameters in multiplayer? I'm very aware that the planned waypoints and other fight information for each available aircraft is determined in the mission planner when the server's base mission was made. However the current UI for the game doesn't allow players about to step into their aircraft to change any waypoints or strike information, only re-arming and re-fueling.
What my point is, is that what will happen to aircraft assigned to a strike mission if the target they've been assigned was taken out earlier? Will ED or LNS implement some way for a player, server admin, or even combined-arms JTAC/GCI to change the information stored in these data cartridges before a flight on a multiplayer server? Because I think it would be GREAT to have a system for this somewhat similar to online pre-mission planning in Falcon 4.0/BMS 4.33. :)
renhanxue's post about the AJ/AJS 37's "pseudo-inertial" system:
https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2967909&postcount=7
Let me know what you guys think about this, as any suggestions for a similar system or ANY comments for that matter are most warmly welcomed. :smilewink:
-Ice_Cougar (Kingfisher in-game)
(P.S. It would be especially great to hear ANY developer's opinion(s) of this from ED, or any Third-Party-Dev teams. Seeing as this could be a sim-changing feature, I'd love for developers of all teams to see this, as it could lead to some interesting aircraft being planned in the future...*cough* Jaguar *cough*)