Set tanker bank angle or turn radius in missions editor.

[WHOGX5]

Currently, tankers decrease their bank angle when an aircraft is refuelling. This often leads to a close to 40 nautical mile turn radius which is absolutely enourmous. This effectively means that a tanker with 20nm legs, with the possibility of initiating refueling on either of the two legs, will occupy an airspace of about 70x60 nautical miles. It would be nice if the mission creator could choose either the desired bank angle and/or turn radius in the mission editor. For communities who try to adhere to real life airspaces it is simply an impossibility to do so when the turns are so incredibly wide.

[TEMPEST.114]

Wow, almost like I hadn't bugged this yesterday... lol

 

Edited April 17, 2024 by Elphaba

[TEMPEST.114]

8 hours ago, WHOGX5 said:

Currently, tankers decrease their bank angle when an aircraft is refuelling. This often leads to a close to 40 nautical mile turn radius which is absolutely enourmous. This effectively means that a tanker with 20nm legs, with the possibility of initiating refueling on either of the two legs, will occupy an airspace of about 70x60 nautical miles. It would be nice if the mission creator could choose either the desired bank angle and/or turn radius in the mission editor. For communities who try to adhere to real life airspaces it is simply an impossibility to do so when the turns are so incredibly wide.

How fast are your tankers and are you doing circle or race-track? 

[Tom Kazansky]

40nm turn radius would be quite off, according to the following info:

Found some good insights on almost every AAR aspect where it is stated that a RL* pattern is more like max. 20 nm x min. 50 nm

https://wiki.ivao.aero/en/home/specialoperations/Documentation/AAR

 Edit: *the info is from the IVAO website, so I don't know how close it matches RL info.

Edited April 17, 2024 by Tom Kazansky

[WHOGX5]

4 hours ago, Elphaba said:

How fast are your tankers and are you doing circle or race-track? 

They're always in racetracks, but the speeds and altitudes vary in accordance with real world tanker setups for recieving different airframes. So for the F-16C's for example, optimum altitude and airspeed is at FL300, 315 KIAS.

[WHOGX5]

@Tom Kazansky If you look at the real life tanker tracks from Operation Allied Force from the af.mil webiste, and you do some Google Maps measurements and MS Paint forensics, you'll find that the AGIP tanker tracks are about 40x20 nautical miles in total, meaning a 10 nautical mile turn radius and 30 nautical mile legs.

Edited April 17, 2024 by WHOGX5

[ACS_Dev]

We absolutely need this.

There is a near-infinite mountain of evidence that the current turn radius for tankers is very oversized. It is almost never this large, especially for fighters.

To observe this for yourself go to adsb exchange at basically any time of any day and view the flight path of one of several KC-135s active at nearly any given time. You will find no shortage of examples.

As OP stated, due to the forced unrealism within the simulator the vast majority of real-life patterns are unusable.