TANKER Arriving Time on Station and Fixed Track Oribit Length

[Shrike88]

Greetings.

Seems like I am past the amount of time I want to keep messing with this.  I am trying to place Tankers through out a map in specific orbit positions and arrive at the track start at a specific time, and with a fixed hold length. From what I understand this is similar to how it is actually done on speaking with actual tanker guys.  

Now in DCS we are limited to what we can actually tell the tanker to do, however I want the initial Turn and start of the track to happen exactly every X amount of minutes, so the tanker is passing a known fix for me every 20 minutes exactly.  That way in the mission if we need gas we can plug in a known fix.   Enter a TOS or TOT rounded to the nearest 20 and arrive at meet the tanker close to that point.  

I have tried locking speeds,  Track lengths and even the Time checkbox (which breaks the entire unit and points it seems and cannot edit them further.) 

Has anyone had any luck with this ? It seems im at wits end, and every time I test the Tanker changes speeds when actually in the hold and it never works out accordingly. 

Thanks 

Shrike

[TEMPEST.114]

I think we’re asking too much of dcs’s ai scripting and the api. None of what we’re all trying to do should be this hard - yet it is. 
 

I can’t get ground units to follow waypoints precisely, I can’t trust a convoy won’t get stuck on a bridge or in someone’s back garden, and I can’t make infantry stop where I want them to.

it’s no surprise that air units AI & scripting api sucks just as much as the ground/naval stuff. 
 

I think rather than having fixed points and times in a racetrack, you should just stick to circle tanking. It’s not any harder and you always know where the tanker is (unless it gets spooked or a player gets too close then it steep turns and won’t ever recover). 

Edited January 31, 2023 by Elphaba

[Grimes]

Speed directly impacts the size of the orbit. White is at 500kmph while cyan is at 600 kmph. As long as they aren't refueling then their orbit should stay relatively stable.  

When they do refuel though it throws a bit of a wrench into things. Here both are set to the same speed but a B-1 came to refuel off of the tanker with the white track. The tanker shallows its bank angle for the turn and ends up doing a much wider turn as a result. Then when it is finished refueling the B-1 it returns to the normal bank angle when it reaches the end of the track, but it offsets its final heading slightly to get back to where it needs to be. It always turns once parallel with the start/end points of the track, but only offsets, IIRC, during the opposite track where it stopped refueling. 

[buur]

My observation is that the tanker orbit with 2,5 minute turns. (Before refueling starts) This means that the full turn needs 5 minutes and with the aircraft speed you can easily calculate the turn radius.

After starting tanking (success of rejoin) the tanker makes orbits with a radius of 10 nm,

Depending on when the switch from one orbit size in the other occurs, you get the above behavior.