Great Campaign but F10 reloading new missions is killing it for me

[deltatango]

Great Campaign thanks Bunyap! I love the history of the Red Eagles and this does it justice. Especially the special guest voiceovers

I also love practicing the SFOs. Guessing this is something you got from the SMEs. This is something lacking pretty much everywhere else for all single engine aircraft in DCS. But it's something that is practiced regularly in RL.

But having the mission reloading just after takeoff through via the F10 menu is really killing it for me. Why go to all the trouble of a cold start, taxi, takeoff and setting up the cockpit how I like it (a multitude of switch selections and setting RSBN up), monitoring your fuel state and knowing exactly where you are - only to have an entire new mission load just after takeoff that puts you in a different position, sometimes with different weather and more fuel?

I know the DCS ME has limitations, but surely you can just activate the units (e.g F-15s) you are supposed to interact with by using the F10 menu once airborne, rather than loading a whole new mission?

The FWIC intercept mission was good, but once you get killed just once, you get sent back to base which also seems like a big waste. Usual thing to do would be to fly to a certain area to 'respawn' before re-joining the fight.

[Bunyap]

Thanks, I really appreciate it.     I totally agree about the F10 mission loading.  Splitting the missions up was the most heartbreaking and demoralizing thing I have had to do in DCS, and that is saying a lot.

In finalizing the design, I had to keep the tasks that were described by the Constant Peg pilots like the BFM setups as authentic as possible while ensuring they work 100% of the time, without fail.  That meant sacrificing authenticity in other areas like fuel management and navigation.

There are many points where things break down when they are flown as one continuous mission.  Taking the idea of spawning new F-15s as an example, to have them engage the player immediately would result in head-on engagement after head-on engagement.  That would not be at all what they did in Constant Peg.  To go with that would defeat the purpose of consulting with the real participants. 

To have the newly spawned F-15 form up on the player in the correct position for BFM could take a minute or two, or it could never happen.  It all depends on the player's location, altitude, airspeed and other actions taken after the F-15 spawns.  There is just no way to ensure things happen correctly 100% of the time while accounting for player actions, AI behavior and changes to the way things work in DCS from update to update.  The campaign was full of problems like these to solve.

I hate it.  I tried for almost four years to find a way to make these work well as one mission.  In the end, this was the only way and I think it works pretty well.

 

17 hours ago, deltatango said:

The FWIC intercept mission was good, but once you get killed just once, you get sent back to base which also seems like a big waste. Usual thing to do would be to fly to a certain area to 'respawn' before re-joining the fight.

I was surprised to find they did not do that for FWIC sorties.  According to our sources, those were always one engagement then RTB.  The exception was the final Red Flag arrival show in 1988 that is replicated here in mission 10.  They received special permission to regenerate at Tonopah that one time. 

I strongly suspect they did it other times, but not during the period our sources were part of the program, or at least not that they recall.

Edited November 3, 2021 by Bunyap

[Reflected]

I do agree that it breaks the flow, but I actually like it! You can repeat each stage as many times as you want.

And while it would be easy to set up an enemy for a single engagement, repeating the engagement would be a downright impossible due to the many unknown variables. Also, once an AI engages the enemy it sometimes doesn't obey orders anymore. The missions are so much more reliable this way.