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AFT01 (Air to Air Refueling Day): The trouble with the triggers


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Hello,

 

I am having two issues with the mission here:

 

1) Getting the FE to acknowledge a successful contact with the tanker.

 

I am approaching the tanker from astern; call "ready pre-contact", get "cleared contact", boom operator reacts, FE says his "just a little bit more" line. Now, boom connects, tanker calls out "contact" , followed by "you're taking fuel".

 

So far, so good.

 

However: The FE either

 

  • says nothing at all or
  • takes several seconds before calling out "there you go, contact" or
  • (sometimes) reacts immediately

In the videos I looked at (e.g. the ones by Recon Stewart), the FE always seems to react immediately.

 

This makes it hard to complete the mission successfully, because you are required to maintain contact for 10 seconds and do multiple refuelings.

 

Do I understand this correctly: The FE is supposed to acknowledge contact and each successful 10 second connection - and that's also what I need to wait for.

 

2) FE does not acknowledge an early disconnect.

 

This might be related: I manage "contact", and the FE acknowledges it.

Now, I do badly and disconnect early. FE is silent and does not say his "you disconnected too soon" line.

 

I go back to (roughly) pre-contact position, try again and approach the boom. Just before making contact again, the FE says his "you disconnected too soon" line, followed by "try another attempt". In this situation, when I make contact, the FE never seems to react (On one attempt, I managed more than 20 seconds in contact, but nothing happened. I failed that ride with more than 10000 pounds of fuel in the tanks.)

 

Is there a mission trigger I might be missing (distance to tanker, altitude, pitch/roll limits etc.) or a dependency between triggers that would explain what I am seeing?


Edited by TangoNovember
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Have you tried a DCS Repair, or uninstalled and reinstalled the campaign? When triggers start acting wonky we find a repair or reinstall usually corrects them.

 

Does this happen in the practice mission or the campaign mission or both?

 

You do need to stay connected for at least 10 seconds to count as a successful connection but if the voice prompts are not aligned with the actions then you would have to stay connected longer as the timer starts at the voice prompt.

 

You should hear "Well Done!" when the 10 sec timer is done. When you hear that it will count as a successful connection.

 

Post a .trk file and we can replay it to see if we can duplicate the behavior.

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I find that the FE often won't notice your connection unless he's started with the "that's it just a little bit closer" (or similar) dialogue as you approach...getting the "well done" dialogue triggered without hearing his pre-amble is a bit hit & miss...

 

 

Failing that...staying connected for longer eventually seems to trigger the "well done" dialogue - though (especially in the practice mission where you need 6 sips/less so in the campaign where you need 3 sips) that runs the risk of topping up before you've done the require number of reconnects...

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Have you tried a DCS Repair, or uninstalled and reinstalled the campaign? When triggers start acting wonky we find a repair or reinstall usually corrects them.
Tried again after DCS repair and campaign uninstall/reinstall. Worked much better - I am still seeing a delay between contact and FE acknowledge, but it seems much more reliable now - got a Q- on the first attempt.

 

Does this happen in the practice mission or the campaign mission or both?
Happened with both missions.

 

You do need to stay connected for at least 10 seconds to count as a successful connection but if the voice prompts are not aligned with the actions then you would have to stay connected longer as the timer starts at the voice prompt.

 

You should hear "Well Done!" when the 10 sec timer is done. When you hear that it will count as a successful connection.

Alright, thanks. That's what I was assuming.

 

Post a .trk file and we can replay it to see if we can duplicate the behavior.
Here you go: Practice mission after DCS repair and campaign re-install.

 

I think I could replicate what jasonbirder said and issue 2 as well. Here are the relevant times (using the on-board clock and noted when the text message first shows on the screen):

 

Attempt 1

12:04:22 Tanker: "contact"

12:04:32 FE: "There you go - contact!"

12:04:42 FE: "Well done"

Given that it is about 3 seconds from "contact" to "you're taking fuel", the FE is about 6-7 seconds late. And I am seeing 10 seconds until "well done".

 

Attempt 2

12:05:40 Tanker: "contact"

12:05:46 FE: "There you go - contact!"

12:05:57 FE: "Well done"

OK - not a constant delay apparently.

 

Attempt 3

12:06:28 Tanker: "contact"

12:06:38 FE: "There you go - contact!"

12:06:50 FE: "Well done"

Similar to the first one.

 

Attempt 4

12:07:52 Tanker: "contact"

12:08:01 FE: "There you go - contact!"

12:08:11 FE: "Well done"

Nothing new here, so let's go for the second issue by forcing early disconnections.

 

Attempt 5

12:09:55 Tanker: "contact"

12:10:59 FE: "There you go - contact!"

- Dropping down to force disconnect -

12:10:10 FE: "You disconnected too soon"

Everything as expected with that one. Let's disconnect again...

 

Attempt 6

12:11:37 Tanker: "contact"

12:11:49 FE: "There you go - contact!"

Retard throttle and disconnect at 12:12:00.

Moving to contact again.

12:13:47 FE: "You disconnected too soon" - just before connecting again.

 

Now for the bad news: This seemed to break something in the triggers, because...

 

Attempt 7

12:13:52 Tanker: "contact"

- no reaction from FE -

12:14:40 Disconnect

Player is in trouble now - drawing 45 seconds worth of gas means that the tanks are getting full.

 

Let's fall back and try again:

 

Attempt 8

12:16:54 Tanker: "contact"

12:17:03 FE: "There you go - contact!"

12:07:14 FE: "Well done"

FE is fashionably late (as usual), but otherwise, that one went smoothly.

 

Cut off the rest of the track to keep file size below the 9.77MB limit, but the attempts after only demonstrate that tanking with a full tank gives you a tanker-induced disconnect even before the FE notices the contact.

AFT01-Practice-short.zip

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Thanks for the detailed report.

 

Not sure what happened at attempt 6 as the "You disconnected too soon" message was way later than when you actually disconnected at 12:12:00 as you indicated. Could be some other process was getting in the way so DCS was delayed in playing it's voice message.

 

For attempt 7 it looks like the flags weren't cleared properly before the next attempt (likely because of the delayed disconnect message).

 

Here is some background on the timings for the voice messages:

 

We have a 10 sec delay between voice messages so when you hear the FE say something, he won't speak again until after 10 seconds (unless you disconnect). This is to stop the voice messages from running too closely together. These are mission generated messages as opposed to the game engine generated messages (the tanker responses) which we can't control the timing of.

 

So for example 10 seconds after you hear "Just a little bit more...a little bit of stick and throttle..." then you will get the "There you go! Contact!" if you successfully connect within that 10 seconds or anytime later. Even if you connect 2 seconds after hearing that message you won't hear the "There you go! Contact!" message until the 10 seconds are up.

 

Then if you are still connected after 10 seconds you will hear the "Well Done!" message. If you disconnect before that you will hear the disconnect message.

 

Even after attempts 6 and 7 the next connection was SOP with respect to the timings as by then it looks like things had gotten caught up so the flags were set correctly.

 

If the timings seem off best advice is to back off from the connection attempt and try again as you did.

 

You can also burn off fuel between filings if you are getting too close to full. As you found the tanker will do an automatic disconnect when full so depending on where you are in the connect, feedback, disconnect loop it may result in not ideal comms.

 

We will retest and play with some of the timings to see if we can improve the connect, feedback, disconnect loop.


Edited by Sabre-TLA

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Thanks, Sabre, for the explanation.

 

I did AFT02 (Air to Air Refueling Night) yesterday and knowing about the 10 second delay made it so much easier. :-)

 

The trigger for the "you disconnected too soon" line seems to be dependent on the distance to the tanker - it seems you need to be close to the tanker to get this call. That would at least explain what I was seeing.

 

 

Getting rid of fuel: Advancing throttle and opening the airbrakes can burn enough fuel for about one, maybe two additional attempts.


Edited by TangoNovember
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  • 9 months later...

I just tried to play the 1st aerial refueling practice mission and still experienced the same issue.

 

I sometimes stay connected for 25 seconds and still get the "You disconnected too early" message which causes me to fail the mission....

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

J'ai aussi le même problème ,je me connecte plusieurs fois 10s  mais je le plain est complet avant que j'ai connecté 6 fois .je suis donc bloqué dans cette campagne..

J'ai fais plusieurs vols et le problème reviens à chaque fois ...les réservoirs sont et le tanker disconnect avant la validation de la mission..

[sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]

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