Matrix Games Forums

I've been seeing those Arc sector names PB1, PB2, SB1.. etc for sensors in the DB and looked it up to try to learn it.
I could not find any information on the whole world wide internets about this and the only result was this game forum and an obscure Lockheed Martin document about sensors.

I understand these acronyms and will use them since necessary but why on earth would anyone choose this to describe the range of an arc? Almost any other method would be better than this. It's like someone made this as a joke.

The silly thing is with the numbers being added clockwise to the sectors, making it non symmetrical.
It looks like a very obscure technical sensor reference was chosen for general use.

I can't say for sure whether or not this graphic I made for personal use is 100% accurate, but now, whenever I have trouble wrapping my mind around the arcs, I pull this graphic up for reference, and it typically ends up being correct...https://imgur.com/a/sX76j4n

Speculation on my part, but the obvious guess here is:

First letter, P or S, means "Port" or "Starboard".
Second letter references the longitudinal direction of the airframe. B = Bow, S= Stern. MF=Mid-Fore, MA=Mid-Aft.
The clockwise numbering is just a reflection of the way we read - left/right, around the circle.

Initially its confusing, but once its detailed out it makes sense. I have always thought it was more for lua terminology.

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 2#p4931386

I agree entirely. The codes are counter intuitive to say the least. A simple clock system would be vastly more useful. Let's hope they change it to something the average joe would find digestable.

Regards,

John

dcpollay wrote: Wed Mar 09, 2022 11:30 am Speculation on my part, but the obvious guess here is:

First letter, P or S, means "Port" or "Starboard".
Second letter references the longitudinal direction of the airframe. B = Bow, S= Stern. MF=Mid-Fore, MA=Mid-Aft.
The clockwise numbering is just a reflection of the way we read - left/right, around the circle.

Exactly.

Difficult for air operations fans but probably very intuitive for naval operations fans.

How did Harpoon do it?

Yea, it can be understood what the abbreviations stand for, but it's just not automatic reading it and very unintuitive

What was puzzling is that this is almost non existent on the internet. I think it may have originated from Air IRST passive emissions sensors from some time ago which weren't very precise and just gave regions rather than degree bearings.
It does have a Naval terminology, but have found no naval use of these terms. Also it would make more sense to call it forward, abeam fwd, abeam, abeam aft, aft.. and even add port and starboard if needed. But at least not those numbers.
Also with the numbers going clockwise, making it asymmetric.

I have a hard time believing anyone actually uses these. Why not Clock terms..

So yea, still wondering if it's actually used being terrible and obscure..

Sorry for hating on it, but it's just maddening to me, and when trying to read weapon sectors having to "interpret" as if decoding a cypher for some reason.

And to add to the absurdity..
In the DB, the sectors are listed alphabetically then by number, which has no relation to the geometric order.
Also, the term flank is usually used for meaning sides in naval language, yet the codes refer to Midship Forward or Midship Aft, rather than Flank, but there is the F letter which nicely is the same as Flank, yet means forward.
Couldn't be consistently Forward or Bow but had to be different.

Tbh when I first was getting into cmano it confused the hell out of me too, then I learned what they meant, as it detailed in this thread for those that don't. It made some sense,and it's not been big deal since to me - but yeah sometimes I gotta hit the nice graphic in the lua documentation to remind me.

As for changing it, why? I imagine if one was starting over from absolute scratch you might use clockdegrees for the tables or whatever. But it was originally this way in CMANO, and you have a ton of code to write for CMO, then test, and lots of areas where changing this forces you to rewrite and retest, and not just exe code, but scene code as well that might reference it via lua, it would be one of the last things you'd probably decide to spend limited time on. Juice for the squeeze is really low in my humble opinion, and you removed backward compatibility.

Not that I'm advocating for a change, but I think you could just have the interface call it by clock and the actual code and execution refers back to the original labels. Still would be more work than its worth.

KnightHawk75 wrote: Tue Mar 15, 2022 9:53 am Tbh when I first was getting into cmano it confused the hell out of me too, then I learned what they meant, as it detailed in this thread for those that don't. It made some sense,and it's not been big deal since to me - but yeah sometimes I gotta hit the nice graphic in the lua documentation to remind me.

As for changing it, why? I imagine if one was starting over from absolute scratch you might use clockdegrees for the tables or whatever. But it was originally this way in CMANO, and you have a ton of code to write for CMO, then test, and lots of areas where changing this forces you to rewrite and retest, and not just exe code, but scene code as well that might reference it via lua, it would be one of the last things you'd probably decide to spend limited time on. Juice for the squeeze is really low in my humble opinion, and you removed backward compatibility.

Yes, it wasn't very difficult to figure out the meanings, but then just could not figure out any benefit to this naming convention, or imagine who would think it was a good idea. Anyway, I'm over it, and will take an extra 10 seconds to read sensor arcs until it unfortunately becomes natural.

As to changing it in the game, it should not be as much a problem as you may think. Most software is written with internal ids and a dictionary of translations for the words to display. This allows for simply changing one word in this dictionary file. This is certainly proper practice and hard coding labels is a bad idea. The other benefit is you can swap languages for different countries just with a file name change.
In the DB they do indeed do that with enums, which just map names and descriptions to IDs for internal reference.
I would only need to delete the codes and replace with whatever label I'd want. Come to think of it, Giraffe and cardboard box would be better labels by a miles since at least real words are easy to read and remember,. .
But can't be done since the program checks for any tampering with the DB comparing a checksum of some kind I'd guess.. So the it doesn't turn to players just being able to change any parameters of all units and weapons and kill all the properly designed reality and balanced planning for the units in the game. Could probably hack it somehow but not worth it really.

Anyway.. That's that.

There is also a presumption that everyone understands the clock based facing without being told. Why not use degrees? The clock reference was built for 18 year old inductees to air forces with limited education. I think the far majority of CMO players could handle degrees. The current terminology is very naval-centric and the clock is very air war-centric.

These sectors look to be a relic of the early RWS which has discrete sensors for each of those named sectors. So these are aircraft only and specific to those sensors. But then generalized for all sector identifications.