AI tanker questions

[sirrah]

Can somebody explain to me how to:

 

1. Make a tanker return to base when it runs out of fuel
   
2. Make an AI aircraft to get the tanker when it runs out of fuel and then resume it's mission (E.g. make an AWACS refuel at the KC-135 and resume it's AWACS orbit afterwards
   

 

Concerning question 1:

I tried adding an "RTB on bingo fuel" action (see screenshot), but the tanker keeps flying its refueling orbit. Even when I preset its internal fuel to 1%

 

 

As for question 2:

I have no idea where to start :P

Edited October 28, 2019 by sirrah

[Yoda967]

Having worked in military war gaming for many years, I've seen a bit of how AAR assets are managed, and it's never "fly until you're out of gas". The JFACC *always* knows who's going to need gas and roughly when, so they schedule the tankers accordingly. They know where every drop of that tanker's gas is going before they publish the ATO.

 

The way to get your tanker off station is to set an orbit duration or set a time for it to depart the orbit and RTB.

[sirrah]

Having worked in military war gaming for many years, I've seen a bit of how AAR assets are managed, and it's never "fly until you're out of gas". The JFACC *always* knows who's going to need gas and roughly when, so they schedule the tankers accordingly. They know where every drop of that tanker's gas is going before they publish the ATO.

 

The way to get your tanker off station is to set an orbit duration or set a time for it to depart the orbit and RTB.

Thanks for your response Yoda

I do understand that the situation described in my OP might not meet with real life operations, but they were just examples.

 

Maybe I should have used an orbit CAP flight as an example. How do I get them to RTB when fuel gets low?

 

Or, and that would be my 2nd question, how do I get them to refuel at the tanker and then return back to their CAP orbit?

[Yoda967]

Sirrah,

 

Unfortunately, we don't have anything remotely like a workable fuel planner, but you can use the concept of "flight cycles" to your advantage here, whether we're using a carrier or not.

 

But, for the sake of discussion, let's say we are talking about a carrier operating on a 90 minute flight cycle. What that means in a practical sense is that the carrier starts launching aircraft every 90 minutes, and it completes its launches and transitions to recovery in about 15 minutes. This means that a sortie scheduled for a single cycle lasts about 1+45, which is about the limit for a Hornet with 2 external tanks. Tomcats and Hummers (Hawkeyes) would be double-cycled, launching at the start of one 90 minute cycle and recovering at the end of the next cycle.

 

We CAN double-cycle our Hornets, too, but we'd have to send them to the tanker about the time that they'd be recovering, if we weren't keeping them on station.

 

Specifically, you launch your SEAD CAP Hornets at 0900, expecting them to recover during the 1200 cycle. We'd refuel them at about 1030. So, they fly to their SEAD CAP station and start their orbit (which is set in ME to end at 1030). The next leg of their flight plan would take them to the tanker, and the leg after that sends them back to the SEAD CAP racetrack, where they'd start a second orbit until they need to RTB about 1130.

 

All of that is fairly complicated, though. I've found that the AI is pretty great at a lot of things, and not so much when it comes to the mundane stuff like this. I've read a lot of "how do I get the AI planes to actually refuel from a tanker?" posts, so in creating missions for myself, I tend to make things as simple as possible...unless my mission is being built to simulate a double-cycle sortie, I don't think I'd go as far as to try and make this work.

[sirrah]

Ok, thanks for the info :thumbup:

 

 

Not quite the answer I was hoping for, but it doesn't come as a surprise that DCS is not yet ready for this :smilewink:

[Yoda967]

Yeah...I'm sure that some of the guys with more ME experience than I have (particularly the scripters) can come up with a better solution to your original question.

 

I spend most of my DCS time playing with ME to see what I can do with it as is, and everything is a struggle. What works in a scenario designer's favor is knowing how much the player(s) can see from their vantage point and making everything LOOK like it's real. The trick is to get rid of everything the players can't see, because it''s entirely unnecessary.

 

For example, I'm building a SP mission now where the player launches in an FA-18 on a planned 1+45 mission. I wanted some traffic on the ground, so the KC-130 supporting the mission taxis by while the player is starting engines, and if he's paying attention, he'll see the tanker again as he passes it en route to its tanker track. It'll be on station by the time he checks out with his JTAC, and he can refuel on the RTB leg for enough gas to get home.

 

But the KC-130's flight would, in reality, be six hours on station...I made the orbit six hours long, but there's no RTB leg for the tanker. Why should I? The player's sortie ends when he lands back at Al Dhafra AB at about the 1+45 mark. Why would he care what happens four hours later?

 

I recently read an article about the longest-ever combat sortie for an F-16. It happened during ODYSSEY DAWN in 2011 when a pair of Vipers on a SEAD CAP out of Aviano got stuck on station when their relief failed to launch, and then they got stuck on station for a third stint. By the time they landed, they'd flown over 13 hours, mostly boring holes in the sky and shuttling back and forth between their CAP station and the their dedicated tanker. The pilots reported that by hour eight, they'd both used all their piddle packs and eaten their energy bars, and it was an uncomfortable last five hours.

 

Pretty sure that if someone put a mission like that up on the server, there'd only be a handful of folks that would appreciate it. Once I get to where I'm comfortable enough with my mission creation, I might do one like that, just to be cantankerous.

Edited October 28, 2019 by Yoda967