Guide: How to restart the carrier TACAN if it stops during a mission

[Bankler]

TL;DR: Use the provided .miz to be able to reactivate TACAN and ICLS on the carrier through the comms menu they stop working.

 

For as long as I can remember, there has been a bug causing the TACAN and the ICLS to randomly stop transmitting. This can obviously be a disaster if it happens during a large multiplayer event, especially night time. Unfortunately ED has not been able to solve it, and it's rare and random enough making really hard to help out by providing any data.

 

There have been suggestions on workarounds resetting the TACAN when the carrier group reaches certain waypoints, or putting a reactivation timer in there or so. I haven't really liked any of these solutions, because you'll still have to wait until the next reset point. And if you're on your way down during a CASE 3 recovery, you can't really wait, you need that TACAN now.

 

My workaround uses the comms menu, adding an entry under "Other" which reactivates the TACAN and the ICLS. We have been using this for months in my community, and it has saved it dozens of times. It works in both SP and MP, any player on the server can trigger it, and it reactivates the carrier TACAN and the ICLS immediately. It can be used multiple times during a mission if needed as well.

 

I'm providing a .miz which you can use as a template. If you want to re-create it on your own, here's how you do it:

 

1. Place a carrier (legacy or SC) and give it a route

2. Under "Triggered Actions" on the carrier, add the same TCN and ICLS tasks that you normally set under WP 1 Adv Waypoint Actions.

3. In the mission triggers section, create two triggers.

4. The first one should be set to "Mission Start", no condition, and as action add a radio item that sets a flag to 1. I used "72" to make it easy since I use TCN 72 and CVN 72, but you can use anything.

5. The second trigger should be set to "Switched Condition", have the condition Flag equals 1 (or Flag true), and as actions A) AI TASK PUSH (the TACAN action), B) AI TASK PUSH (the ICLS action), SET FLAG VALUE back to 0 (so it can be used several times), and (optionally) spit out a MESSAGE TO ALL saying that the deed has been done, just to confirm to the players on the server.

 

If you want to test it, you can remove the automatically created TACAN WP 0 action from the carrier, and run the mission. Note that you can't see the TCN, but when you activate it through the comms menu, it will be there. Just don't forget to re-add the WP 0 actions again (not only TCN btw, you should probably set the ICLS in there as well), so you don't have to enable the stuff manually first time you start the mission.

If you don't understand the above, just download the .miz and carefully copy what's in there, or even use the .miz as a base for your mission.

 

 

TacanReactivation.miz