Tanker Sharing Issues

[icecold951]

Anyone work out any good ways to get the craft to share a tanker's fuel? Now that tankers have a limited supply, this is a new issue. The AI always want a full tank. But a S-3 might fill up one plane that is low. No way it can do it now for a flight of 4. I've taken currently in my missions to use a 135 tanker, even when unrealistic in situation, just so the rest can get a drink too. And that's before the hopefully soon fixed infinite refueling issue.  And they still love to over use afterburners. Face palm.

I'm currently learning to better stage landings and refuelings, though broken. Just made a naval action that included 24 F18, 8 F14s and try getting them all back on the boat before gas runs out. I did manage to make the infamous Harpoon missiles kill a fleet. It only took 96 harpoons.

 

Also, is their anyway to get AI to jettison their external tanks? I can't tell the other flights to do anything of the sort. And my flight has only Jettison Weapons, which can be a little inconvenient if they need....weapons. We really need a Jettison specific pylon triggers.

[Exorcet]

For most of what you want, I think we need improvements to the core sim.

 

Maybe you could manage AI flight refueling by monitoring their fuel level via scripting and then cancelling and reissuing the refuel task, but I don't know if this will work and it sounds cumbersome.

 

AI will only jettison when threatened. You could spawn an enemy near by them just to get them to drop tanks and the despawn the enemy. It's kind of janky but it should work. Although I don't think keeping ext tanks is that unrealistic for modern aircraft. As long as the fuel was drained on ingress, performance shouldn't be hit too hard (depending on the aircraft).

[toutenglisse]

16 hours ago, icecold951 said:

Anyone work out any good ways to get the craft to share a tanker's fuel?...

 

There is a way to do it by script, but only works with single aircraft flights (if a flight is composed of several aircraft the script won't work at all, at least the way I scripted it).

Here in this track example 2 single AI hornet flights start with 75% of fuel, connect with tanker and stop refueling when reache 80% of fuel by script, then pursue their way.

(PS : track made in OpenBeta from June the 16th, not latest one)

test-refuel-80.trk

Edited June 27, 2021 by toutenglisse

[icecold951]

2 hours ago, toutenglisse said:

 

There is a way to do it by script, but only works with single aircraft flights (if a flight is composed of several aircraft the script won't work at all, at least the way I scripted it).

Here in this track example 2 single AI hornet flights start with 75% of fuel, connect with tanker and stop refueling when reache 80% of fuel by script, then pursue their way.

(PS : track made in OpenBeta from June the 16th, not latest one)

test-refuel-80.trk 95.93 kB · 1 download

 

Single air craft, I'd just give them their own tanker. I guess for now my method works best. I just think limited fuel was implemented without consideration to the lack of command and control for sharing. For instance multiple tankers or sending each plane to a separate tanker.  One of the issues of an S3 is that each plane gets so little fuel, then uses that up waiting for the others to get a bit, that it uses up that fuel during that time.  A four ship flight can take a considerable time just hooking up to get a couple thousand pounds of fuel. It does work though to provide flight time to waiting air craft.

I was doing a very detailed mission of a fleet battle, needing to stage landings very carefully. And the limits on tankers make that harder than real life.

In real life you'd be using a few tankers to keep some airborne while they waited to land. Not so workable currently. Excluding the refueling bugs going on, my hornets think they are in the air force. I now just have one flight with an extra wing tank and three harpoons race ahead to land, another at FPAS most efficient speed for altitude, two coming in slow to extend air time. No sense of racing to the carrier to orbit at 1000 feet and use up gas. And my flight and another using tankers. I'm just using the 135 simply because it has the fuel capacity to give my greedy wingmen the full tank of fuel they want.

Without tanker support, there is no way for a carrier to put all its craft in the air on the same mission. Shame too. 32 air craft, 8 tomcats, and 88 harpoons was impressive. so was the amount of defensive fire. I bet I could do a lot of damage with twice the number of hornets in the air. My computer just sighed in relief that I can't do that and land the planes.

 

And wouldn't it be nice if we could ask our flight their fuel status? I'm guessing there might be scripts for that too.

Edited June 27, 2021 by icecold951