cannot repoduce and missing track file TGP doesn't stay

[Gunfreak]

I found a enemy column.  I do a not very effective laser rocket attack. I fly away the TGP seems to stay put. I extend 5 miles. I turn around aiming for the tgp sqare on my hud. But just as turn the plane around and expect the tgp to be were i left it and were i aimed when i turned around. The tgp has moved and is now aiming into thr sky. It looks like it stayed in place until i was just about to require it then it goes some place else. I also tried to make a SPI with TMS long right. But damned if the tgp wanna go back there.

[Yurgon]

1 hour ago, Gunfreak said:

It looks like it stayed in place until i was just about to require it then it goes some place else.

I don't suppose you can record a short track to share with us?

1 hour ago, Gunfreak said:

The tgp has moved and is now aiming into thr sky.

The TGP is ground stabilized, and in order to look anywhere other than straight ahead, the head has to rotate on 2 axes. There are limits to how much they can roll before getting tangled up. When the motion of the aircraft is too much for the TGP to handle and it reaches its limits, it'll usually show a "GIMBAL ROLL" message (or similar). Did this happen in your case?

Next, the TGP has a kind of "blind spot" somewhere around 3.5 degrees below its horizon line; when the TGP is looking straight ahead and a little down and it passes through this spot, the head has to roll in order to resume tracking, and when this happens the TGP more often than not jumps and loses the spot it had been tracking before. At short slant ranges and/or high zoom levels, it'll be pretty difficult to find the original spot from where ever the TGP is looking now.

1 hour ago, Gunfreak said:

I also tried to make a SPI with TMS long right. But damned if the tgp wanna go back there.

Did you double check that the HUD reads MARK in the lower left corner, and did you command "Slave all to SPI" afterwards?

TMS Right Long does not "make a SPI", it makes the last created markpoint SPI. Going by your description, that markpoint should be where ever the IFFCC calculated your last used weapon to have impacted the ground. Assuming that you hit the general area where the hostiles were located, it should be fairly straight forward to find them in the TGP from markpoint Z.

Anyway, story time. It's pretty easy to lose situational awareness when you're focused on the soda straw view of the TGP in one of the MFCDs. Avoid that. Look out the window. Acquire your target visually, understand the lay of the land, find landmarks that will help you re-acquire the target after egress (and evasion, if you're getting shot at). This is really the most important advice. Don't limit yourself to staring at the screens, or you'll always have at best 10% of the SA you'd have by looking out the window.

All that said, the jet can help you. Drop markpoints. As soon as you find a noteworthy target that you can't access through waypoints or through a quick slew from a waypoint, just hit TMS Right Short and you can easily come back to this markpoint at any time. Just make a quick mental note or even scribble something on a piece of paper to note down which markpoint is what. This totally applies to moving objects as well! Maybe a column is moving away from a markpoint and you lose them. Well, call up the markpoint, slave the TGP, and slew it in the direction the column was moving. You may even drop a series of markpoints and a quick glance at the TAD or in the HMCS may show a straight line A -> B -> C -> D and so on, allowing you to extrapolate the position of the column based on TAD/HMCS alone.

 

[Avio]

I find pulling away 6 to 7 nm before turning around for attack seems to help minimize the Tgp drifting away. Also, reduce the G and also throttle back some when nearing the aim point seem to help too, especially when turning around from less than 5 nm.

 

[Shein]

INR mode is your friend. Assuming you aren't tracking a target, ALWAYS put the pod back in INR mode (TMS after short) and even if you make the pod jump, it'll always go back to where it was looking.