less confusing display of travel speeds to TOT waypoints following a hold point

[ColonelPanic42]

Just to be clear up front, everything in the sim is behaving correctly here :) The problem is that the way the ME displays speeds for waypoints with a TOT when the previous waypoint has a departure time different from its arrival time confuses people.

 

I've attached a mission (and track file) that includes two flights.

 

The first travels a longer distance from waypoint 0 to waypoint 1 and is set to arrive (based on speed, not a fixed TOT) at waypoint 1 at T+0:10:00 and waypoint 2 at T+0:15:00.

 

The second flight has the same waypoints 1 and 2 but shifted south a bit. Waypoint 0 is much closer to waypoint 1, but it should arrive at waypoint 2 at the same time. This is accomplished by creating an orbit task on waypoint 1 that ends at T+0:10:00 so the two flights each depart waypoint 1 at the same time and arrive at waypoint 2 at the same time.

 

For the second flight, the travel speed between waypoints 1 and 2 is shown as 175kts because it is calculating that speed based on the arrival time of waypoint 1, not the departure time. In any case, the speed shown is just a hint to the designer because the flight will obey waypoint 2's TOT regardless of how the speed is set (because the orbit might end 180 degrees out of phase, the jet ended up going 660kt to get there on time).

 

While everything is behaving correctly, this is confusing to anyone trying to debug the mission. If such a flight plan exists in a mission that's being used to demonstrate an AI flying behavior issue, the bug is usually dismissed because of the seemingly low travel speed, which the AI is not expected to handle.

 

Perhaps instead, where the previous waypoint has an orbit action, the departure time of the waypoint could be used. There are a lot of other end conditions or actions that could cause waypoint 2 to be pushed, and for those cases it might be best to just say "unknown" or "trigger dependent" for the speed instead of the misleading speed based on the previous waypoints arrival time? Open to other ideas :)

post hold waypoint speed.trk

me speed after hold.miz