AAR Kneeboard Page

[Cepheus76]

As far as I know, in real life information about tanker tracks are part of the briefing package pilots receive.

 

Therefore, I wondered if it is possible to create automatically a kneeboard page, detailing the station area, inbound track, leg length flight level, speed etc, when a tanker is present in the mission? I don't know anything about programming, but I think the suggestion might be worthwhile, if it is possible to extract the tanker information, which are present in the mission editor, into a kneeboard page.

 

Such a page would greatly help with setting up the rendezvous with the tanker and we could do away with the radio calls, which some people (rightfully) decried as unrealistic. Last but not least, it would add to the immersion, at least for me, to leaf through the kneeboard to get the tanker information.

[Tippis]

It's entirely possible — kneeboard files can be Lua scripts that write text on imported images quite easily; enumerating the tankers is also pretty darn easy; and while it would be a lot to sift through, it's reasonably easy to extract the settings you're after from the unit data.

 

You can probably get a lot of that quite quickly if you ask in one of the mod development channels.

 

There are a few things that make it a bit more tricky, though, and where it's possible that it has to be an ED addition because they would require deeper coding hooks than the scripting engine offers. Two complications appear pretty quickly.

 

One is how it should handle dynamically added and removed (or destroyed) tankers. Kneeboards are generally initiated when the pilot spawns in the cockpit, so if anything is added after that, the kneeboard needs to have dynamics to catch that. A similar issue exist these days with tankers that are set up on a landing-and-refuelling loop, where they can be out of action for upwards of an hour on end (but where a well-set up mission will have two tankers working on different cycles). Modules like the Harrier, Viggen, and Jeff show that this can be done, but there has to be some agreement and logic in when and how that data is updated. Only when you land and explicitly rearm? When you land, just in general? Continuously even in the air? Or is just the initial setup good enough? Should it include tankers that are on the ground and not active? Etc etc.

 

The other issue is with the tracks in particular, because those can be set up in a whole bunch of very different ways. If it's just a simple racetrack between two waypoints, then the logic is reasonably simple: find the first “orbit, racetrack” WP action after the tanker task has been activated, and figure out the geometry between that WP and the subsequent one (since that's how a racetrack orbit is defined). But how should it handle if the track is set up using “go to waypoint” loops, which can follow very odd routes? Now combine that complexity with the possibility of them being spawned or even set up and altered dynamically and the number of cases that has to be handle skyrockets.

 

Arguably, there could be some pre-defined convention: tankers in missions will only show if they employ the racetrack methodology, and only if they're pre-spawned in the air, or some such. So the basic request is pretty darn easy; making it work reliably and flexibly is a very different matter.

[Cepheus76]

@Tippis Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain where some possible pitfalls may be. I guess I would be already happy if the track is only detailed when the tanker is orbiting. For tankers not spawned yet, or sitting on the ground waiting for their take-off time, perhaps the kneeboard page would then have to reflect the tanker's entire flightplan- I am working on the assumption that waypoints and timings are available in the background.