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Many aircraft for tactical reconnaissance carry cameras. IRL these cameras have a altitude and speed limit on which to shoot. In the database, these restrictions are not specified. So the aircraft can perform reconnaissance from an altitude of 5000-7000 m, whereas in reality it would have to descent to 1000 meters or even lower and become vulnerable to air defense or increase fuel consumption.

Question to the community and developers: whether such restrictions should to be added or their lack is an assumption, simplification of the game model?

ORIGINAL: Filitch

Many aircraft for tactical reconnaissance carry cameras. IRL these cameras have a altitude and speed limit on which to shoot. In the database, these restrictions are not specified. So the aircraft can perform reconnaissance from an altitude of 5000-7000 m, whereas in reality it would have to descent to 1000 meters or even lower and become vulnerable to air defense or increase fuel consumption.

Question to the community and developers: whether such restrictions should to be added or their lack is an assumption, simplification of the game model?

Are you sure? I've found more acuity at low altitudes with optical sensors than at high, depending on the type.

ORIGINAL: Primarchx

Are you sure? I've found more acuity at low altitudes with optical sensors than at high, depending on the type.

Ok. May be I mistake. I base on only database data.

I had such an experience while playing "Good Morning Malvinas" a few days ago - I sent a Sea Harrier with EO equipment on a recon mission over Goose Green and form about 5000 m it couldn't see a thing so I manually ordered that to descend lower. Immediately it spotted and identified a lot of details, some of them having been AAA fire which downed that in a matter of seconds. Howevere, that was also a case of breakng the thick cloud layer barrier so I am not sure if that fully qualifies as an argument here.

Altitude definitely is taken into account, as for speed I think it’s not directly evaluated but longer ‘time over target’ often results in a more accurate contact ID.

Colleagues, I just test generic visual camera and have to say that I was wrong. Cameras at altitude 7000 m didn't detect armored vehicles , but at altitude 1000m detect them at distance up to 2,4 nm.
My apologies to the developers.

I'd be interested in a "Mobile Missile Launcher" or "Strategic Re-Locatable Target" expansion pack which expands the fidelity of reconnaissance and ground search modeling. It'd be nice for reconnaissance pods to have much better capture of assets along a path, but come with the cost that you only get the results some time after the aircraft has landed. This can then change for aircraft with high-resolution datalinks and modern targeting pods.

As of right now, camera pods work better than eyeballs but are modeled very generally.

You can already set up delay in information through changing sides I have played around with quite a bit and it works really well.

ORIGINAL: thewood1

You can already set up delay in information through changing sides I have played around with quite a bit and it works really well.

Could you please post file? Would like to see how you do this.

Thank you

I'll see if I can find it. I did back when lua was first introduced. Oh wait...I don't want to be accused of stalking you. I'll find it and if anyone else wants it PM me.

edit: Thinking about this...I can't believe you have the stones to ask me for something. After the posts you dropped, posting a private message in the public, and supposedly siccing your ISP on me, etc., you can come in and just casually ask for something? I would normally have sent this as a PM. But since you have a tendency to post private messages, I figured I'd save you some effort and just cut the middle process right out.

"Keeping her face in a jar by the door..."

I wish they were snarky. At least there might be some entertainment value.

There is also on thing in CMANO about some recon cameras. The game system does sometimes kind of cheat with them, albeit for very understandable reasons.

As far as I can tell, if something is picked up, it is immediately made available to the player. However, several systems, such as the famous U-2 for much of it's service life, actually require the aircraft to get back to base and get the film developed and THEN manually get the photos to the decision makers, by then the photos could be outdated.

Of course there are good gameplay reasons why this is not the case, but It could be interesting to implement as an optional realism option down the line...

That is exactly what I am talking about. Here is an old scenario I was using to test this out. So it doesn't go all the way.

An RF-101 on neutral side recon flies over a hostile red side radar site. The currently neutral blue side sees nothing. I created an event that when the Voodoo gets to the airbase, it changes posture to friendly to blue. Blue now can see what the 101 saw.

I never had the 101 land, but could have. I could have changed the 101's base to the blue base and then ordered it to RTB. There are all kinds of things you can do with this process, including running timers on a RTB to not change sides or postures until a designated delay after landing.

The scenario is a few years old and has an old db, but seems to still run.

Nobody has yet factored in cloud cover. If your camera suite is operating in visible light they will be useless if you're above the lowest cloud layer.

-C

It was kind of mentioned above...sic

"Howevere, that was also a case of breakng the thick cloud layer barrier so I am not sure if that fully qualifies as an argument here."

Yes cloud cover is definitely factored in the game... run the same recon mission cloudy, then clear, and there is a tremendous difference what your cameras will see...satellites I at first thought were rather poor in comparison to real life, but then the weather changed and on their 3rd pass they were picking up great detail.

ORIGINAL: HalfLifeExpert
As far as I can tell, if something is picked up, it is immediately made available to the player. However, several systems, such as the famous U-2 for much of it's service life, actually require the aircraft to get back to base and get the film developed and THEN manually get the photos to the decision makers, by then the photos could be outdated.

Of course there are good gameplay reasons why this is not the case, but It could be interesting to implement as an optional realism option down the line...

That's kind of my desire too. I'd like to see reconnaissance get a realism overhaul in tandem with better modeling of ground vehicles in clutter and vehicle movement patterns, a fancy phrase for roads. Certain systems, like high-speed side-view cameras, can give a very detailed description of the target area, but only after some lag. Also, IR systems working better at night and, if one wants to be most accurate, IR systems working best on units that have moved recently.

I understand that LUA can accommodate this, but like shoot-and-scoot tactics, it'd be nice for this to be regularized in game mechanics.

As far as lua goes, this is one of the simpler ones that can be incorporated into a scenario by a designer. I hope it goes down low on the priority list.

btw, that realistic recon feature would only be one put in by a designer, whether lua or not. So if that type of feature is important, put it in scenarios you build or only play scenarios that use it. If it important enough to the broader audience, it will start showing up in community and DLC scenarios.

One pther thing to point out is the isolated comms function being available to handle a lot of what I did in my sandbox scenario. I think it might end up being a more elegant approach.