Escorting patrol missions?

[MarkJoergensen]

Is it possible to set up escorts for patrol missions, such as an MPA with Harpoons on an ASuW patrol mission?

[DWReese]

From my experience, the short answer is NO, if you were trying to get an escort like the escort that exists in the Strike Mission.

That being said, obviously, you can send your fighters into their own patrol zone, which is the same as your MPA. They wouldn't be directly together, but they should be close enough.

Another solution, which I find to be even better is that the SUPPORT Mission, and it actually works just as well. If you are looking for a one-time approach and exit. You can set the path so that the MPA flies in, and it will encounter whatever enemy that it sees, and then set the fighters to do the exact same thing, at the same speed. It would be like having two separate groups flying together. They both should finish at the same time, and fly back together. If the fighters encounter something, then they will break away to attack it. I've used this quite a bit.

I believe, from looking at hundreds of scenarios that have been created, that the SUPPORT Mission is underutilized by many designers. It is a very powerful mission, and it can do a lot of things.

[SeaQueen]

So you really want to ingress an MPA, huh?

Ooookay. Here's how to do it.

First off, the option to explicitly attach escorts to a mission is really the option to attach close escorts to the mission. I wouldn't advise people make much use of it even for strike missions. It's a bad tactic unless the threat weapons are very short ranged. Close escort has been out of favor since WWII. The reason is that you want to be able to engage the badguy fighters well before they get in range of the protected asset (in this case the MPA). You don't want them piled on top of each other like they do in the game. The problem is particularly bad when you consider that the range of air to air missiles has grown longer and longer. We don't live in the era of guns-only dogfights anymore and haven't since shortly after the Korean War. That means you need to make even more space between the fighters protecting the protected asset and the protected asset.

So you don't really want to do that anyhow (nor is it realistic, really).

What you really want to do, is build a shield of fighters to protect the MPA. Set up AAW missions and prosecution areas for your escorts some distance away from the MPA and then make the reference points relative to the MPA, that way they move relative to the thing you're protecting. Typically, I'd make them fixed relative, and orient the CAPs towards the threat axis. More escorts means more CAPs. If you're clever, you can sit down and figure out when to make the missions start and end to provide 24/hour coverage for a given number of CAPs. There may be more than one way to make that work.

I didn't set up the specific example below against any particular threat. Depending on what the bad guys are armed with, you might want to move closer or further away. Notice the distance scale, though. The fighters are more than 100 NM from the thing they're protecting. Their boxes are set to engage things as soon as it's possible based on their weapons range (from front to back, their prosecution area is >100 NM as well).

480 KTS (the default speed of a typical fighter aircraft in CMO) = 8NM / MIN. If you figure (I'm not being exact), 200NM from the defended asset to the front of the CAP, then you have ~25 MIN to destroy the enemy assuming they only have guns. Imagine they're equipped with a 40 NM missile, though. You just lost 5 MIN. If they have an 80 NM missile, you lost another 5 MIN. Pushing your escorts out, gives you space to attrite the enemy before they can achieve a firing solution against the thing you're trying to protect.

I hope this helps you think about the problem in a different way.

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Is it possible to set up escorts for patrol missions, such as an MPA with Harpoons on an ASuW patrol mission?

[Easy301]

From my experience, the short answer is NO, if you were trying to get an escort like the escort that exists in the Strike Mission.

That being said, obviously, you can send your fighters into their own patrol zone, which is the same as your MPA. They wouldn't be directly together, but they should be close enough.

Another solution, which I find to be even better is that the SUPPORT Mission, and it actually works just as well. If you are looking for a one-time approach and exit. You can set the path so that the MPA flies in, and it will encounter whatever enemy that it sees, and then set the fighters to do the exact same thing, at the same speed. It would be like having two separate groups flying together. They both should finish at the same time, and fly back together. If the fighters encounter something, then they will break away to attack it. I've used this quite a bit.

I believe, from looking at hundreds of scenarios that have been created, that the SUPPORT Mission is underutilized by many designers. It is a very powerful mission, and it can do a lot of things.

Good idea, I also think support missions are under utilized, they provide a lot of flexibility outside of just AEW and AAR Tracks.

From my understanding support missions disable the offensive logic of a unit and prevent it from attacking. Has this changed recently?

I use support missions for a lot of things but I've always had to unassign the aircraft from the support mission before I tasked them to engage a ground targets for example, as the support mission itself seems to prevent any type of offensive action. I have read that this is intentional from a development standpoint.

Have you used support missions in the way you're suggesting above and had no issues with units engaging in offensive operations while on those support missions? Unless I'm understanding your plan on how you want to utilize the support mission for MPA and Escorts incorrectly you'd need the support mission to allow offensive engagements, right?

Thank you

[DWReese]

"From my understanding support missions disable the offensive logic of a unit and prevent it from attacking."

I have no problem with them firing. You MAY have to set them to "Opportunity" or whatever that is called, but the will definitely fire. I play with things like this all of the time. The SUPPORT MISSION is great. It's a way to select a designated path and have the unit stick to it. It's sort of like a strike but you will have to preset the altitude and speed, because it doesn't actually know that it's not on a STRIKE MISSION. Play around with it. You will love it.

It works just fine.

[Blast33]

A good tip off
I used it only for tankers and ISR aircraft.
Will try it out

[Easy301]

"From my understanding support missions disable the offensive logic of a unit and prevent it from attacking."

I have no problem with them firing. You MAY have to set them to "Opportunity" or whatever that is called, but the will definitely fire. I play with things like this all of the time. The SUPPORT MISSION is great. It's a way to select a designated path and have the unit stick to it. It's sort of like a strike but you will have to preset the altitude and speed, because it doesn't actually know that it's not on a STRIKE MISSION. Play around with it. You will love it.

It works just fine.

My aircraft refused to engage a ground targets unless dropped from the Support mission.

Thanks for clarifying that it's supposed to work, maybe something else was going on or there was another reason why it wasn't working.

I'll try again with support missions next time the need arises. Thanks a ton for this.

To add an additional tip to your idea if I may: As someone posted on here a few months ago support missions also work well when you set up a "Safe RTB mission" set a route out of the hostile area or wherever you want with reference points, set the route to be traveled once instead of a repeated loop and then set the transit and station altitude.

This way instead of aircraft climbing up 36k and flying directly back to the airport overflying anything and everything, every time you want an aircraft to RTB just right click and assign them to that mission. They'll fly to the singular point/fly the route you set at a safe altitude and then automatically RTB, instead of getting in trouble flying home.

Not ideal all the time but it helps tremendously when RTBing aircraft keep causing trouble due to the scenario setup.

[MarkJoergensen]

Thanks for the help guys!