Call Artillery Script

[MBot]

This script will allow you call and correct artillery fire using the F10 radio-menu. Works with every aircraft and can control tube artillery, rocket artillery, mortars and naval guns. MP compatible.

 

Demo mission: CallArtilleryScriptDemo.miz

 

How to play:

All functions are accessed with your radio-menu in the sub-menu F10>Fire Support.

1. Call for Fire:

a) Select the name of the battery you want to to request a fire mission from. Then select the type of fire mission:

I) Fire for Effect calls a full artillery barrage right away.

II) Adjust Fire will initially fire single rounds for you to spot and correct placement, with a full Fire for Effect following when all position corrections are done.

b) Next you have to provide the target position as a 6 digit MGRS coordinate (100 m precision). You have two options to enter this:

I) From Map Marker: Select the coordinates taken from existing map markers. If you add a new map marker only at this point, you have to select Refresh List first.

II) Manual Grid Entry: Manually enter the coordinate through the radio-menu. Requires 3 discreet entry steps due to the way DCS does the radio menus. First step is to enter the MGRS grid letters (e.g. GC or UV etc.). The grid you are currently in and all 8 grids surrounding it are automatically available for selection. Second step is to enter MGRS east coordinate in 3 digits (100 m precision). Third step is to enter the MGRS north coordinates in 3 digits (100 m precision). To find out MGRS coordinates on the F10 map you can switch the coordinates system display to MGRS using Alt+Z.

c) Request the number of rounds for the Fire for Effect phase (Adjust Fire will always fire single rounds first).

2. Fire Mission: The battery will process your call for fire. If the battery is alive, has ammo and the target is within minimum and maximum range of the battery, the fire mission will proceed. If the battery has less ammo available than requested, it might inform you of a reduction of the number of rounds. Once the battery fires the first round, it will call "shot". 5 seconds from impact of the first round, the battery will call "splash", giving you warning to observe it.

3. Adjustment phase:

a) You can request north/south and east/west adjustments in meters of the impact position and ask to follow up with either another Adjust Fire (single round) or Fire for Effect (full fire mission).

b) If the last round was an adjust fire and you are happy with the placement, you can directly request Fire for Effect on this position.

c) Repeat will repeat the last salvo. Useful when doing adjust fire and you were unable to spot the impact, or to repeat a fire for effect when the target was not fully destroyed.

d) End Mission will end the current fire mission, freeing the battery to receive requests from other participants.

4. Cancel Request/Check Fire/End Mission: You can end a fire mission at any point, freeing you and the battery for new requests. The only exception is a Check Fire call after the first rounds have been fired. The battery will cease fire immediately, but the adjustment phase will still be entered once the rounds land that are already in the air.

 

How to set it up in your own missions:

1. Run CallArtilleryScript.lua with either a Do Script or Do Script File trigger.

2. Run the following function with a Do Script trigger for each aircraft (Forward Observer) you want to be able to call artillery missions:

AddFO("UnitName")

For multiplayer, make sure that all forward observers are in a separate group.

3. Run the following function with a Do Script trigger for each ground/ship group (Fire Support) you want to be able to provide artillery missions:

AddFS("GroupName", {3, 6, 12})

The second function argument is a table with salvo sizes that is available for this FS. In this example you could request 3, 6 or 12 round salvos from this group. You can put in up to 10 different options for selectable salvo sizes of your choosing. Ideally they should make sense depending on the type and number of artillery systems in your FS group. If you do not want to deal with available salvo sizes, you can leave the second argument nil and a standard selection will be given automatically:

AddFS("GroupName")

Note that FS requires the group name while FO requires unit name.

You can add artillery, rocket artillery, mortar and ship groups.

FS groups should be equipped with homogeneous artillery unit types and these units must be the first units in the group. You can add non-artillery unit types (command, logistics, air defense etc.) after the artillery in the same group.

4. To get the beep sound on each radio message, add beep.wav to your mission using a Sound to All trigger (or any other sound trigger).

5. Tips:

• Setting your artillery units skill to excellent will decrease time between request and shot. It will also make fire more accurate.
• Beware of having ammo trucks in your artillery groups for reloading. After having spent just a couple of rounds, units will start to restock ammo. These units will not open fire for fire at point tasks received while reloading even after reloading is complete. This seems to be a DCS bug. The script will reset after a couple of minutes with the artillery not opening fire to clear this problem. If you want to reload artillery groups, it might be better to drive up ammo trucks at specific points for a short duration and then drive the ammo trucks away again.
• Groups that are performing artillery missions will skip over regular tasks they may subsequently get when reaching waypoints. This may happen for example with a ship skipping over a Switch Waypoint task for doing a waypoint loop.

 

I hope you find this interesting and have fun.

 

CallArtilleryScript.lua

Right-click and save as beep.wav:

Edited October 15, 2022 by MBot

[MBot]

Silkworm Island

OV-10A_Silkworm_Island.miz

Mission for the OV-10A Bronco Mod. Control naval gunfire against Iranian Silkworm missile sites in the 1987 Persian Gulf during the Tanker War.

Edited October 15, 2022 by MBot

[wraith70]

This is sweet!  Thanks so much.

Going to try this out with a Huey calling out arty attacks on enemy positions.

 

[DoctorNo]

This is absolutely excellent!
I have one request, in the script could you create an option to turn off F10 marker or MGRS?
That way the mission designer has a little customization on how real they want to make it?

 

[chromium]

As usual, incredible work. If you don't mind, I'll integrate in an AI enhancement script I'm working on for DSMC integration. 

[Andrew8604]

It didn't work for me.  But this is the first script I've ever tried, and I undoubtedly did something wrong or am missing something ...like knowledge. 

Can you direct me to a tutorial on the basics of using scripts?  Is MOOSE really easy to use?  Can it already do something like this?  Any others? 

I read something about rescue of downed pilots feature.  Is that where a random generated downed pilot is placed to where you can fly out and rescue with a Huey?  Or a helo will come out and get you if you are the downed pilot?  I wish there were helicopters with a rescue winch ...such as the old Sikorsky HO3S-1, or Sea Sprite or Sea King.

Back to artillery:  I was thinking of a scenario where I have set up fire bases in the mission and I want to be in a Willys Jeep or such and be able to observe enemy forces and call for artillery from 1 or more separate fire bases.  It would make things easy (maybe too easy to be realistic) to be able to point a laser at the enemy and get range and bearing info to add to my coordinates and automatically generate the coordinates of the "target" and send them to the fire bases' artillery groups, with your commands like, "adjust fire" and "fire for effect".  Just not have to select the somewhat repetitive choices of coordinates.  But I could evaluate that further once getting this to work.  It might be fine just as it is. 

[MBot]

That error message is an indication that you have not beforehand initialized the script itself:

1. Run CallArtilleryScript.lua with either a Do Script or Do Script File trigger.

The order is important, as the function "AddFO()" only starts to exist after CallArtilleryScript.lua has been executed.

Hope this helps.

[Andrew8604]

17 hours ago, MBot said:

That error message is an indication that you have not beforehand initialized the script itself:

1. Run CallArtilleryScript.lua with either a Do Script or Do Script File trigger.

The order is important, as the function "AddFO()" only starts to exist after CallArtilleryScript.lua has been executed.

Hope this helps.

It did help.  Thank you!  That and a posted picture of the "TRIGGERS" page in DCS by cfrag on another thread, "Questions about loading scripts..."

It works now!  That's pretty cool.  Any possibility of adding to it a way to play sound files of the dialog?  Some good voice-actor sound files would really make this realistic, I think. 

Also, I discovered for myself that in order for a vehicle without a radio to have comms, you apparently have to set a frequency for it...and possibly the callsign, too.  I just set both...and on the artillery groups, too. 

I haven't yet figured out how to add the "beep" sound file.  I'd like to replace that, anyway, with a radio static burst, like at the end of a transmission.  "ch-shhh-t".  Once I figure out how to get it to work, it should be easy to swap a different .wav file in there.

In that frequency setting in DCS, there's an entry for watts, which defaults to 10w.  I would figure a small vehicle might only have 5w transmitter.  A walkie-talkie maybe just 1w.  Mobile CB radios are supposed to be no more than 4w.  Trying it out with just the text comms, 5w of power seemed to have no problem at all up to at least 7 miles.  Maybe there's no limit with text of the message.

I can only talk to one artillery group at a time?  You think there's a way you could expand your script to allow comms dialogs with up to 3 to 5 fire support sources?

And is it normal for the artillery to take about 2 minutes to commence firing after they receive the coordinates and number of rounds?  And especially after an adjust location.  I would think that would take only about 15 seconds to adjust fire 100m and then resume firing.  Instead, I'm seeing the same 2 minutes.  I did move my ammo supply assets over 500 feet away.  But how far away do they have to be?  And what units are ammo suppliers?  Trucks?  FARP Ammo Depot?  Helipad?  I suppose that takes another script to move trucks into reloading range (whatever that is) when the artillery units are out of ammo?  

 

[Baxes44]

Is it possible to use this script with ground vehicles that are FAC capable? I set everything up correctly as near as I can see and I even get the radio option to call in artillery fire, but once I get to the option to choose either adjust fire or fire for effect, the menu crashes and nothing happens (the game still runs with no hiccup or anything), I am getting no error message that I can see. I've double checked the group and unit names and added in check logic to the triggers to confirm the scripts are being loaded, so I'm really at a loss as to why it is failing to progress past the CFF/AF phase

Any ideas?

[MsKatze]

The artillery seems to be limited within 20 km, and the appropriate distance cannot be determined according to the ammunition

[Sandy331]

Anyone having an issue that when you start using the Artillery f10 option all other f10 options go away?

[gmangnall]

This is superb!!!! Thank you

[id275etac]

Nice work Mbot.
Do you have any suggestions regarding how to edit the lua to spit out Gun-Target Line, maximum ordinate, and time of flight data?

Cheers!

[titi69]

I have same issue, this is probably due to how "Fire support" menu is removed and added with menu and submenu ID

[rooster328]

Nice script and really adds to the mission.  I keep forgetting it's unit ID's for the Observers that one needs to enter and not Group ID.

[gmangnall]

Im afraid this isn't working properly. If you fire one round then adjust fire, you are stuck firing one round at a time unless you end the mission and start over.

[Mac D]

On 2/15/2023 at 12:22 PM, Andrew8604 said:

It did help.  Thank you!  That and a posted picture of the "TRIGGERS" page in DCS by cfrag on another thread, "Questions about loading scripts..."

It works now!  That's pretty cool.  Any possibility of adding to it a way to play sound files of the dialog?  Some good voice-actor sound files would really make this realistic, I think. 

Also, I discovered for myself that in order for a vehicle without a radio to have comms, you apparently have to set a frequency for it...and possibly the callsign, too.  I just set both...and on the artillery groups, too. 

I haven't yet figured out how to add the "beep" sound file.  I'd like to replace that, anyway, with a radio static burst, like at the end of a transmission.  "ch-shhh-t".  Once I figure out how to get it to work, it should be easy to swap a different .wav file in there.

In that frequency setting in DCS, there's an entry for watts, which defaults to 10w.  I would figure a small vehicle might only have 5w transmitter.  A walkie-talkie maybe just 1w.  Mobile CB radios are supposed to be no more than 4w.  Trying it out with just the text comms, 5w of power seemed to have no problem at all up to at least 7 miles.  Maybe there's no limit with text of the message.

I can only talk to one artillery group at a time?  You think there's a way you could expand your script to allow comms dialogs with up to 3 to 5 fire support sources?

And is it normal for the artillery to take about 2 minutes to commence firing after they receive the coordinates and number of rounds?  And especially after an adjust location.  I would think that would take only about 15 seconds to adjust fire 100m and then resume firing.  Instead, I'm seeing the same 2 minutes.  I did move my ammo supply assets over 500 feet away.  But how far away do they have to be?  And what units are ammo suppliers?  Trucks?  FARP Ammo Depot?  Helipad?  I suppose that takes another script to move trucks into reloading range (whatever that is) when the artillery units are out of ammo?  

 

It's a old question, but I would like to answer it.

Is 2 minutes fast for fire unit to actual start firing ?
It depends on multible variations :
1 ) What kind of fire unit is being used ? , 81/120mm mortar, houwitzer or missile artillery
2) Are the fire units in  Direct Support or General Support ?
3) Is the CFF a pre-planned fire (like High Value Target, Priority Fire, Final Protective Fire), a Danger Close CFF or a "normal" CFF during a fight.
4) At what level are you working ? (company, battelion, brigade, division)

Okay, let's say you do a pre-planned  PF, with a 120mm mortar unit in Direct Support.
Pre-planned means the Fire Unit already knows the coordinates, what the target will be (armord, unarmored, in the open, under cover etc etc etc) plus the Fire Unit is in direct support of your unit, so your CFF doesn't has to pass true the full Fire Support Chain.
The only thing the Fire Unit is waiting for is your sign (as FO) to start firing (at Target Number ** etc)
Your fire request could be on the ground within 1 minute, depending on the distance from the fire unit to the target (travel time grenade)

Next one :
A CFF to a Houwitzer (M109 for instance) unit, with the Fire Unit in General Support (this means the Fire Unit is taking CFF's from other units as well, so when you push your CFF it will end on top of the pile of other CFF's and the Fire Unit "will get to it, when they get to it"
(Unless it's a FPF, those ALWAYS go first)

Seeing the Fire Unit is in general support, this means your CFF has to pass through multible FDCC's before it actually ends with the Fire Unit : this wil take time ... a lot of time.
Then the Fire Controller of the Fire Unit has to figure out with ammo needs to be used for your CFF.
Next up is the Fire Unit itself, if it is still working on a CFF from another unit it isn't available for you, untill the CFF it's working on gets a End Of Mission, so your CFF is being put on the before mentioned pile
When the Fire Unit final is able to start working on your CFF they first need to allign the unit to the coordinates in your request, and prep the ammonition allocated to your CFF (this actually happens very fast, couple of minutes tops)

So real waiting time for a CFF to be handled by a Fire Unit in general support ?
15/20 minutes (if your lucky) up to a hour and a halve, so do yourself a favor : smoke a mug of coffee, and drink a sigaret, you'll have the time.

Last up, and this one a real "fun" one :
Rocket Artillery.
Rocket Artillery works ONLY on brigade level or higher (division) , so the possibilty you as FO of a lowly company to actual be calling in some rockets on a target is so close to zero , it's none existend.
What you'll see in real-life, with rocket artillery, is that they will be used in the initial fase of a fight, or used for taking out HVT far behind enemy lines (SO/SF support).
The main reason the is because there are so many safety measures that need to be check, deconflicting with air assets, etc,  that if you would use rocket artillery in a "normal" setting, it would take up to 2 hours before they would, or actually could, fire a round.


Now your second question : the time needed for a Fire Unit to switch from Adjust Fire to Fire For Effect :
When you push your CFF for the AF, it already tells the fire unit what target they are getting, if it's armored, unarmored, in cover, in the open etc, so they already know which type and how much ammonition they need.
To actually switch from AF to FFE : less then a minute.
If they (the Fire Unit) is on their game, I think less then 20 seconds is possible.

I hope this explains your questions, and makes sense.
If your not familiar with artillery and the 'flow' of a CFF, it 'll give you a massive migrain.
(Took me quite a while to understand how this works in real life)

[edit] 
And to answer a question that will probably be asked :
Isn't a Danger Close CCF a High Priority Fire, aka shouldn't it get priority over other CFF's ?
Depends ...
If it's a DC situation, but Blue Force has'n't bin recognized yet by OPFOR (read there hasn't bin contact yet) the DC CFF will end on top of the before mentioned pile.
Why ?
There is no danger to BLuFOr yet, and there is no reason to "inform" OPFOR that they are being watched by BluFor.
(The minute artillery/mortar shells start falling on someone's head they tend to start looking for the person responsible for getting before mentioned shells on their head)

Now it's a DC situation were BluFor has TIC, and OPFOR is within safe distance.
Here it depends on the decision of the FDCC commander.
If there is a Fire Unit available, yes the DC call will get priority.
If there are no Fire Units available, and there are CFF's with a higher priority, there's a very big posibility that your DC CFF wil NOT get pushed to the front of the pile.

Edited August 11 by Mac D