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I'm new to the game (90hrs), but I have some questions about unknown contacts identification.

For underwater classification, I know that every referenced acoustic signature is classified in a database, so visual contact isn't required for positive classification. Just time.

For ground and air units, there are differents methods. Some are implemented in the game other don't seem (or I didn't figured them).

1) Can't we select a contact and send a "identify yourself" clear radio msg, for civilians airliners or boats by exemple ?
2) Is there an automatic military IFF classification ? I didn't noticed it yet, perharps because I'm playing cold war database and perharps it wasn't implemented at the time.
3) Even visual ID seems difficult, I tried it in Falkland campaign, to spot AA defence around airport or mobile ground units...

I imagine that forecast has a lot to do with visual ID, but if I make a low pass with recon pod, I would have expected better results.

Perharps I should take into accound the map elevation layer, if a ground mobile is along a sidehill and I come from the other side ?

Greetings.

You've been playing Sea Power, haven't you?

To answer 1 & 2 in the context of civilian units,

To the best of my knowledge, IFF, transponders, explicit ID requests, etc. are NOT explicitly modeled in CMO, at least not out-of-the-box. Could be someone's Lua project, I guess.

What CMO does do:
It's up to the scenario designer to handle this, although I don't know if they generally do.
In the Scenario Editor->Edit Sides dialog: in each scenario and for each side, there is an option that the side 'can auto-track civilians.' That will sort of abstract the various methods available for civilian identification. Similarly, there are different options for each side's "awareness level." They could auto-detect everything without using their sensors, for example. Or be completely blind.

The convention in most CMO scenarios that I've seen seems to be that if civilian units are included, then the assumption is that those are not auto-trackable and their very purpose for being included is to make the player's job more difficult by having to ID their targets before firing...or else. How realistic this is is a matter of debate, I guess.

On the other hand, if we assume that the identification of civilian units is trivially easy, then they should probably just NOT be included in the scenario to begin with. Plenty of scenarios have few or none of these.



To answer 3,

CMO handles this very well, I think. It IS very difficult to spot and identify things on the ground from and airplane. Many historical examples of this. That's why FACs (or whatever they're called these days) are a thing. You have to get close. There are many sensors in CMO to help you with this though, so it gets better with time period and how advanced your side is with the tech.


You can also manually side-ID each contact. I've posted tips before on how to do this by context, so do a search. For example, if an "unknown" formation of two aircraft is heading right toward you at supersonic speed, that's military- civilians don't do that. Could still be neutral military, so you still need to read the situation.

Yes, I've played Sea Power a little, to be fair it is Sea Power that convinced me to buy CMO !

Since the post, I've been practicing a lot and took the time to read the whole manual. For unknown air I did what you said, looking at alt, vector and speed.

With the editor too, I found the auto-track civilian. It's practical but could be too easy. I prefer friendly fire risks, that's how civilized modern nations have to deal with (most of time).

For identification yes, it's reminds me the forward observer planes over Vietnam.. Wise VC should retain their HMG fire while they hover in the area.

I'm actually working on a multi sided rebellion scenario, and I'm using different ROE for each side, which affect how they retain fire against unknown contacts or not...

1.) The problem with calling someone to identify themselves is that a civilian and an enemy will both give you the same answer.

2.) IFF at the time would have been either the Mark X or Mark XII system. Mark XII started to get introduced in the 70s. I have no idea when the Royal Navy converted. I worked on Mark XII IFF Mode 4 systems for the US Air Force. The problem with the earlier Mark X system was that it would respond to all attempted interrogations on the correct frequency. It had no way of knowing if the interrogator was friendly. This meant that an enemy, even if they didn't know the code, could use the IFF frequency to broadcast a wide interrogation signal. Then, the responding transponders would reply. They could detect those replies and triangulate the location of the responding units. So, in practice, aircraft in hostile airspace would simply turn the system off. They would turn it back on again when they were coming back into friendly territory. The Mark XII system would not reply to an interrogation that didn't transmit the correct code. We switched codes every 24 hours. Now they use Mode 5 transponders for IFF. I don't know how it works because I was out of the Air Force by then. Remember that IFF still creates the same problem as calling someone to identify themselves. Enemy bombers and civilian passenger jets respond the same way. The only thing IFF tells you is who's a friendly military unit. In pretty much all scenarios, you can already see all of the friendlies on your map. So the functionality of IFF is the default state of the game.

Sorry for geeking out on that one. It's just in my wheelhouse.

3.) Visual ID in the Falklands was probably using a Harrier with a recon pod. Remember that the Harrier recon pod during that timeframe is pretty basic. It's an Electro-Optical system. So basically, it's a zoomed in TV. The major weakness of the system is that it doesn't work at night. It's not infrared or low light capable. And you're going to have to get pretty close to get an exact ID, if you can get it at all. It will probably tell you what type of equipment you're looking at. But not likely much more.

Looking at what the contact is doing is one of the best ways to figure out if you should shoot it.

Got an underwater contact moving at 1kt? It's probably not a submarine. Keep an eye on it, sure. But don't start launching the ASROCs just yet.

See a single aircraft flying out of an area with a shared airport heading in a random direction and climbing to cruising altitude? Probably an airliner. See 4 aircraft launch in a row and orbit the airport while they form up? Go ahead and select them and press "H". See an unidentified bogey far out to sea flying at 400 feet directly towards your ships? Yeah...

See a bunch of boats scattered around a coastal area broadcasting generic navigation radar? Probably fishermen. See one contact in that group not broadcasting any radar at all? Keep an eye on that one.

Klahn wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 7:13 pm The problem with the earlier Mark X system was that it would respond to all attempted interrogations on the correct frequency. It had no way of knowing if the interrogator was friendly. This meant that an enemy, even if they didn't know the code, could use the IFF frequency to broadcast a wide interrogation signal. Then, the responding transponders would reply. They could detect those replies and triangulate the location of the responding units. So, in practice, aircraft in hostile airspace would simply turn the system off. They would turn it back on again when they were coming back into friendly territory.

Thanks for sharing that, very interesting.

Early Soviet IFF (up to "Odd Rods" IIRC) had a similar flaw, and the USAF exploited this for a while in Vietnam by using the "Combat Tree" IFF-spoofer (which provided very clear tracks, even better than AEW radar detections), until the VNAF wisened up and turned them off.

Was there a Sov/WP analog to Combat Tree, to exploit this vulnerability?

Dimitris wrote: Wed Jan 01, 2025 10:05 am

Klahn wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 7:13 pm The problem with the earlier Mark X system was that it would respond to all attempted interrogations on the correct frequency. It had no way of knowing if the interrogator was friendly. This meant that an enemy, even if they didn't know the code, could use the IFF frequency to broadcast a wide interrogation signal. Then, the responding transponders would reply. They could detect those replies and triangulate the location of the responding units. So, in practice, aircraft in hostile airspace would simply turn the system off. They would turn it back on again when they were coming back into friendly territory.

Thanks for sharing that, very interesting.

Early Soviet IFF (up to "Odd Rods" IIRC) had a similar flaw, and the USAF exploited this for a while in Vietnam by using the "Combat Tree" IFF-spoofer (which provided very clear tracks, even better than AEW radar detections), until the VNAF wisened up and turned them off.

Was there a Sov/WP analog to Combat Tree, to exploit this vulnerability?

Not that I'm aware of. I think it was more a matter of, "we can do this, so the enemy could do it too." It's the same reasoning behind all of the hoopla surrounding TEMPEST emissions. The real problem is that it would be difficult to know if the enemy was exploiting it.

I can tell you that the Mode IV Mark XII IFF we used had another feature that people wouldn't think about. If the Mode IV computer received an interrogation but didn't respond to it for whatever reason, (usually interrogated with an invalid code,) it would light up a caution light for the aircrew. If you saw that light in friendly territory, it was usually a good idea to call it out. It likely meant that a friendly weapon system had interrogated you, and you didn't respond that you were friendly.

Another thing people wouldn't think about was the code switch. As I mentioned above, we switched codes every 24 hours. So when we loaded the codes, we would load both the current one, and the next day code. (I was in a special operations Combat Talon II unit, hence my profile picture. Our aircraft usually operated at night and in places friendly aircraft weren't expected to be. They were often flying during the code switch. So this was a pretty important thing for our crews.) But the system didn't switch codes automatically. A member of the aircrew had to physically switch the system to the 2nd code. This could easily be forgotten.

Unless combat was hot and heavy, a failed transponder interrogation doesn't normally have disastrous consequences. There were enough transponder system failures that a shooter normally wouldn't fire based on lack of Mode IV response alone. Most friendly identification comes from C3, not from technical means. Mode IV was more of a system of last resort. The famous 1994 shootdown of 2 US Army H-60s by 2 USAF F-15s over Iraq provides a great example of how a lot of other things besides a failed Mode IV need to go wrong for a blue-on-blue to occur outside of intense combat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Blac ... n_incident

But, if the Mode IV was working properly, it still wouldn't have happened.