AI Tanker flying rollercoaster while refuel

[bruennlein]

AI tankers (tested with KC-135 and KC-130) are not maintaining a stable circle after calling intend to refuel. They are not even maintaining altitude.

Tankers are pulling out of the left-hand turn, flying straight, going into a right-hand turn and then going back to the left hand-turn. To make things worse, they are changing altitude up and down while doing this.

Tested on 15.000ft  and 26.000ft with setting the tanker to Orbit.

Tacview file is rather short, but doesn´t matter. The tanker keeps doing this all the time.

Tacview-20250219-224850-DCS.zip.acmi

[MAXsenna]

AI tankers (tested with KC-135 and KC-130) are not maintaining a stable circle after calling intend to refuel. They are not even maintaining altitude.
Tankers are pulling out of the left-hand turn, flying straight, going into a right-hand turn and then going back to the left hand-turn. To make things worse, they are changing altitude up and down while doing this.
Tested on 15.000ft  and 26.000ft with setting the tanker to Orbit.
Tacview file is rather short, but doesn´t matter. The tanker keeps doing this all the time.
Tacview-20250219-224850-DCS.zip.acmi

It's better for the devs of you post a track. Click "Save track" when you exit a mission. Give the file a relevant name, and drag and drop it here.
Cheers!

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[KevinAu]

Try racetrack instead of orbit.

[TonyRS]

My understanding of orbiting tankers…

I’ve set up a tanker to orbit around a waypoint.
Without any trade in trail it seems the tanker orbits quite tightly at about 45 degrees of bank.
When an aircraft approaches the tanker for a hook up the tanker will reduce its bank angle to assist the hook up and fuel transfer.
However, we are still, from the settings in mission editor, asking the tanker to orbit around that same waypoint. To do so, at a lesser bank angle, the tanker must, necessarily orbit in a wider circle as it is turning less sharply. Therefore, it will initially need to turn away from its orbit waypoint to be able to orbit it in a wider circle at the lesser bank angle
Have not experienced orbiting tankers changing altitude significantly. Although, if you get out of position & too close the thanker may see you as a collision threat and decide to take evasive action Which, I’m guessing, may account for any significant altitude changes?

Edited February 25 by TonyRS
More…

[bruennlein]

Hi TonyRS,

 

thanks for pointing this out. In the past, the behavior was exactly like you described. On "Ready for contact" the tanker reduced the bank angle and speed. But, the tanker kept a constant altitude, bank angle and speed.

What Iḿ experiencing now is that the tanker is not only slightly changing the bank angle but even changing turn direction. So for a short period, we are in a right hand turn, coming back to a left hand turn right after. And this is not only happening once, the tanker keeps doing that. It's probably this left-right-left turn change, which is causing an altitude drop. which makes it hard to stay inside the basket. And the tanker even does this, when you drop out of the basket and back-off to re-approach. So it's not a proximity thing.

 

All others: Thanks for trying to help. But when something seems to be a problem, I don´t like to move to a workaround like race-track. It's better to report and get feedback on the actual problem. The hint with the track is pretty helpful, I will post that as soon as I have time.

[KevinAu]

In real life, they fly race track holding patterns, not circular orbits. So it is not a ‘workaround’.