F4E - Navigation Kneeboard - Waypoint Leg/Distance and selectable speed - thoughts?

[Hawkeye_UK]

Heatblur, hope this finds you all well !

 

Many thanks for taking my recomendations with the flight computer last year, I note on revisiting them recently it is far superior to use with the clickable values.

I have another request, which "should" be relatively straight forward, or certainly for you guys.

The large joy of this module is to be able to navigate correctly to target and is critical for its attack runs.  I note in reality a good few hours preflight would be designated to route selection, map making and cutting, choosing the nav points from the terrain profiles and then working back from target for good offsets/nav fixes and final IP's to begin attack runs.  So that from this a kneeboard can be made with the drawn legs with timings, heading, dangers etc etc.

However at present, especially in VR it is very problematic for this information to be calculated and referenced.  Given that the game engine stores in GPS format (a joy) there are formula's out there that will calculate a magnetic heading and distance from point A to point B.  Given that we can plan a route in the mission editor, or indeed from the F10 map - can we in the back end populate this into the kneeboard.  It would be a quantum shift in ease/reality especially for those of us that cannot say spend an hour planning the "mission" first and measuring marking legs with distance and bearing.  So with the time players have they could concentrate on route selection, but then the "donkey work" would be completed and be able to referenced inflight.  It also stops us having to reference the F10 (which in itself is a cheat mode) during "flight".  This could really be represented on one page (an additional bonus would be for it to be split in addition onto the map pages within the kneeboard itself).  It would be a huge help for either single crew flight, or for a nav alike that flies in VR.

It would be most beneficial for just about every single phantom player that really wants to play with the module in the spirit of true gen 3 aviation.

It would with this data then be very simple to have to additional boxes on right hand side, that you could select airspeeds, say 420, 480, 540 (ideally starting at 360 in clicklable 20 knot increments to say 600) that would then populate a time for that leg.

This is bare bones, currently i tend to use 450, 480 (8 miles a minute) and finally 540 for attack runs (9 miles a min) as it gives easy timing on the fly.

 

PS Note to map developers - when you build a map start putting in the aerial masts that are shown on pilot charts, every time a new map comes out i end up populating it with around 40+ of them lol as they make great VRP's.

Edited July 20 by Hawkeye_UK

[Karon]

Apologies, but I don't understand why you cannot do this stuff before the mission, and then load the results in the kneeboard.

[Hawkeye_UK]

3 hours ago, Karon said:

Apologies, but I don't understand why you cannot do this stuff before the mission, and then load the results in the kneeboard.

without using any other third party app or having to insert files into a saved games folder, please explain how waypoints set either in the mission editor or mission planner tool would then give leg distance, bearing of each waypoint and this be loaded into the kneeboard prior to takeoff, and easily available during play?

If you read my post, you will note time and also VR considerations.  Note personally i use open kneeboard and also have a drawing pad/stylus that can write into that directly - however most players will not.  This is not about what i want, but what is better for the module and players in general with simple improvements.

This is about getting basic information calculations into the kneeboard from the off, which is easy for a PC to do if you have known GPS positions.  Having the bearing, and distance to the next waypoint as part of the kneeboard would be invaluable.  

It was then a logical progression to have a speed table to calculate times on the fly in a vertical column, or even two columns would make sense.  Again i do that myself and have experience, but this is about making it more realistic and helpful to the majority.

It wouldnt be too much of a push to have a base fuel calculation either for each waypoint.