Landing Craft

[Tank50us]

With the Marianas map around the corner, I wonder if ED has put any thought into including various Amphibious Assault Craft, including the Roll-On-Roll-Off types seen in late WW2 through to today. It would certainly be nice if we had the ability to see actual assault craft hit the beach and offload the heavy armor to directly assault the hostile positions who didn't heed the eviction notices. Such examples include the ever famous Higgens Boat:

the LCT:

the LCU:

The LCAC:

The various Ecranoplans, including the Caspian Sea Monster:

and of course, the Zubr class LCAC:

 

It'd be nice to have some actual ships capable of delivering the troops and equipment to shore, either to protect them as they're approaching the beach, or to try and stop them before they can offload their troops.

 

What do you guys think?

[Northstar98]

We already have the LST Mk.II and the Higgens Boat LCVP as part of the WW2 assets pack. There's also been a Pr. 775 BDK [NATO: Ropucha I] LST in the model files for a few years.

 

And yes, I would love amphibious operations in general, but there's missing functionality that needs to be there to really make them worthwhile. For instance, we need the ability to place vehicles and infantry onboard them in the mission editor (related to this thread) at the moment we can only place amphibious vehicles up on the decks of ships (unless they're static objects). We also need the functionality there for vehicles and infantry to drive/run on/off ships and for ships to actually go right up to the beach (right now they stop further away).

 

The Higgens boat and the LST Mk.II does have the bow door(s) and ramps animated, and in the case of the LST Mk.II even a cargo elevator too. The Pr. 775 has its doors and ramps on the bow and stern animated, but doesn't have the hatch up on deck animated.

 

Also FWIW, the KM (Caspian Sea Monster) was just an experimental vehicle, and the Lun (which you provided a picture of above) is essentially a fast attack craft equipped with 6 P-70/P-270 AShMs (as well as twin NR-23 23mm cannons as a defensive armament in a barbette), the A-90 'Orlyonok' however was designed as a transportation/amphibious assault vehicle, but it could only carry infantry or a single BTR AFAIK, and none of these were operational - only test vehicles.

Edited August 15, 2021 by Northstar98
forgot link

[Tank50us]

21 minutes ago, Northstar98 said:

Also FWIW, the KM (Caspian Sea Monster) was just an experimental vehicle, and the Lun (which you provided a picture of above) is essentially a fast attack craft equipped with 6 P-70/P-270 AShMs (as well as twin NR-23 23mm cannons as a defensive armament in a barbette), the A-90 'Orlyonok' however was designed as a transportation/amphibious assault vehicle, but it could only carry infantry or a single BTR AFAIK, and none of these were operational - only test vehicles.

 

I think that we can agree that when it comes to RedFor, we can certainly have these as full production equipment given the lack of Red RORO capability overall.

 

On the subject of starting units in transports, that could be easily fixed by giving them a "Embarked" function in the same place you see the formations and on/off road bits, with the limiting factor being the number of units the transport group can reasonably fit. So for example if you have two UH1s that can carry six guys each (just a random number), when you place a unit down and set them to 'embarked', you can select them, and start adding to the number until you hit the max, however if you try to turn one of those rifleman into, for example, a HMMWV, then it'll throw an error and tell you that you can't do that (kinda like with the airfields). So in that example, the two Hueys can hold twelve infantryman, and if one of those choppers get shot down, then the infantry group is down to six. When they reach a point where the transport lets them out, they just move to their next point, and follow their pathing from there. Should be fairly simple to code in theory, although in reality we'd be looking at months at best.

[Northstar98]

9 minutes ago, Tank50us said:

I think that we can agree that when it comes to RedFor, we can certainly have these as full production equipment given the lack of Red RORO capability overall.

 

I wouldn't say no, I'm okay with having hypothetical or prototype stuff, though I would prefer to have production and operational stuff (such as the Zubr, the Pr. 775 [NATO: Ropucha I] LST, Pr. 1171 [NATO: Alligator] LST, Pr. 11711 Ivan Gren-class landing ships and the Pr. 21820 Dyugon-class.

 

9 minutes ago, Tank50us said:

On the subject of starting units in transports, that could be easily fixed by giving them a "Embarked" function in the same place you see the formations and on/off road bits, with the limiting factor being the number of units the transport group can reasonably fit. So for example if you have two UH1s that can carry six guys each (just a random number), when you place a unit down and set them to 'embarked', you can select them, and start adding to the number until you hit the max, however if you try to turn one of those rifleman into, for example, a HMMWV, then it'll throw an error and tell you that you can't do that (kinda like with the airfields). So in that example, the two Hueys can hold twelve infantryman, and if one of those choppers get shot down, then the infantry group is down to six. When they reach a point where the transport lets them out, they just move to their next point, and follow their pathing from there. Should be fairly simple to code in theory, although in reality we'd be looking at months at best.

 

How I envisage it, is we'd have a cargo configuration editor that among other things, allows us to load groups or templates of units. Here's a related thread.

 

The main issue is the functionality being there, at the moment amphibious stuff isn't really implemented beyond vehicles that are able to swim. 

[upyr1]

I also need the ability to preload troops and cargo on vehicles

[Callsign112]

+1 on the more assets suggestion, and +1000 on the update to be able to use them effectively suggestion.

[Walshtimothy]

++1

[upyr1]

I'm chiming in again, as saying DCS lacks in amphibious warfare modeling is an understatement.

Here is my wish list

• amphibious assault ships should be spawn points for landing craft and amphibious vehicles
• the ability to configure vehicles and troops on amphibious assault ships in the supply menu (similar to the aircraft menu on air bases and carriers)
• The option to preload cargo, vehicles and troops on transport vehicles 
• a roll on roll off waypoint for landing ships
• more landing craft and assault ships