Altering an AI-generated Flight Path

[AndrewJ]

ORIGINAL: SeaQueen

I can literally do it with a slide rule. Everyone is so math averse. It's just arithmetic. It isn't hard. They give you everything you need to know.

Unfortunately, the database viewer only gives you the fuel consumption figures for the clean condition. Different loadouts have an enormous impact on fuel consumption. For example, consider some loadouts for an F-15E cruising at high altitude.

Clean - 32.45 kg/min
Mavericks - 38.6 kg/min
AMRAAM Light - 39.1 kg/min
AMRAAM Heavy - 46.8 kg/min
Assorted JDAMs - 49.5 kg/min
Mk.84s - 62.5 kg/min

Fuel consumption can nearly double, depending on what's being carried. Unfortunately, the only way the player can currently get these precise figures is by putting a plane in the air and flying it.

If you try to figure out fuel consumption from the loadout description and database viewer, it quickly bogs down. Consider this loadout: another plane with 4,855kg of fuel has a 300nm strike radius, composed of 40 minutes cruising at high altitude, 16.2 minutes military at SL, and 30 minutes loitering at low altitude plus a 5% reserve.

40 x Consumption 1 + 16.2 x Consumption 2 + 30 x Consumption 3 + reserve = 4,855 kg.

What are Consumption 1, 2, and 3? What if you want to use medium altitude instead, and need Consumption 4? Or military at high, for Consumption 5? To my math-challenged eyes the information just isn't there.

So yes, if a player really wants to they can plot complex courses, measure all their leg lengths in advance, do little tests to find out what the fuel consumption is, and put together a spreadsheet to figure out whether they have enough fuel to make it, and when they need to launch to have everything arrive together in a coordinated attack at the proper time from different bases. But that's slow, cumbersome, and just as exciting as it sounds.

Commercial CMO is an entertainment product. Doing aircraft fuel consumption admin is not so entertaining... Why not give the player integrated route-planning tools to help them move past the housekeeping quickly and accurately, and get them to the focus of their operations?


(And kudos for keeping your slide rule skills fresh! But I'd bet that in 2022 most of the new customers will hope we're a little beyond slide rules, nomograms, and knotted string. [:D])

[DWReese]

Andrew,

I have been able to successfully manipulate the game to establish a designed flight path in the 2 1/2 minutes BEFORE it takes off, and then aborting the take-off. The purpose of this is to establish that flight path, which doesn't go away. From there, I am able to alter it to do things that I want to do.

The only downside, as I mentioned before, is that you never really know how far you can take it. Adding a little extra to each leg might not look like much, but in the end the planes could end up crashing, as my just did in my last test. The game gives you some data, but who wants to go around and measure each leg, when I'm certain that the game does that when it first creates the flight path. Since it does it originally, it should have the means to be able to calculate the new flight path, and then warn you if YOUR newly-created flight path is no longer valid because of a lack of fuel.

It doesn't seem like much, but who knows? To me, it appears that each leg could be measured in terms of altitude, speed and distance. Each leg could them be added together to produce a total, which would need to be within certain parameters, or an error message would pop up. (I'm sure that the game already does this.)

I do believe that this could be really beneficial. And, as I said, it would be a "poor man's flight planner" while we are waiting for the real thing.

Thoughts?

[kevinkins]

Was not an advanced Mission Planner mistakenly released right before LIVE: Operation Broken Shield around January, 2020? Then it was immediately pulled back via a new beta. Where the heck is it after all these months? Some very very few players still retain a copy of Mission Planner. And use it. And love it.

[guanotwozero]

I regularly alter generated missions as I find they work well as long as I don't exceed the mission radius. It's easy enough to measure legs using the distance tool, and keeping the same path for the return keeps it simple. Sometimes I want several missions sharing a ToT or sequenced waves, so I usually use a spreadsheet to work out the timings.

Other than using auto-generated missions the only other option is to manually run them, but that's a bit more work as it needs careful placement of RPs and steady paying of attention for the course changes and attacks.

Edit: I missed the erroneous flight planner, and very much look forward to when we can get a release version!

[guanotwozero]

FWIW, here's an example spreadsheet (.xlsm) for calculating timings for 3 missions based on a ToT, including weapons.

It only calculates times from distances & airspeed, i.e. nothing fancy like fuel calculations. On the up-side it should work in any modern spreadsheet as there are no macros, and customisation via copy/paste should be easy.

[jannas34]

Not likely anything will get done about this