OK, challenge accepted:
Test 1
• Took an Ark Royal 2001, depleted a few munitions both in mag & guns, reduced the fuel (aviation & gas)
• Added a Fort Victoria 2001, added (908 Carrier magazine (UK,2001))
• With the two running separate, different courses on cruise. About 20nm apart
• Selected Ark Royal to UNREP (select automatically)
- CV immediately changed course and speed to RV with AOR
o AOR did not adjust course
o Moved AOR (‘m’ key) and CV immediately adjusted
o CV did a good RAS maneuver, approaching from behind, adjusting speed (to a point)
o Automatically started to replenish items
o BUT – I had set a speed of ‘Cruise’ which for the CV is 18 knts, and it retained the manual override tag. So it passed the AOR which was also set to ‘Cruise’ (15knts) and retained the manual override tag.
o When I untagged the manual override on both, they adopted 15knts but by now they were in almost line ahead formation 80M apart. It still worked but looked odd
o Carrier mag to carrier mag worked perfectly; however
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- Fuel did not transfer, am not sure if that is because it may have been transferring Avn fuel first or not
The Fort Vic has Stingray Mod 0 in her helicopter magazine, and she started passing those to fill the slot (0/60) in the carrier magazine
Did not have Oerlikon ammo in the Fort Vic so those were not replenished.
Test 2
• Same setup except
Reset Avn fuel to max so it wouldn’t be a factor
o Unchecked the speed override buttons
o Removed the Stingray Mod 0 (and others) with a 0/xx value from the CV magazine
o Added some Oerlikon ammo and Gnat decoys etc
• Told the CV to UNREP (select automatically)
Same maneuver except speed was better handled but they stayed at line astern (AOR followed by CV) at 15knts distance 370M. It works but looks odd.
o Ammo transferred well from about 600 items down to about 200 then slowed down considerably. The pinch point seemed to be reloading the Mk214 & Mk245 Gnat flairs as they probably adopted the mount reload time as opposed to just getting them aboard the CV quickly and reloading in slow time
• I then realize the Fort Vic did not have Gas fuel so I added a Leaf Class which does.
o Told the CV to UNREP specifically from the Leaf class while it was UNREPing from the Fort Vic. It continued the first UNREP
o The items count jumped from 180 to 18 in one stop, not sure what happened there (save attached). Long pole in the tent was now 1000lb bombs which were slow but that is understandable
o The CV did not retain the 2nd UNREP order, when it was done with the Fort Vic it resumed course.
o Re-issued the UNREP order and it automatically selected the Leaf class and maneuvered to refuel.
So this works well. I’m going to run some more tests within groups, specific ammo etc. A couple observations:
• Overriding the speed override caused some issues. Perhaps a dialog or trigger to either remind the player to do that or that it will be done for them.
• Some feedback to the player – XXX ship refueling from XXX ship but it doesn’t have the right fuel type or something. It was a proper DOH moment for me…
• An AOR should be able to refuel two ships at once – I’ll test that in the group
• A ship should be able to UNREP from two ships at once (AOR & AO)
• Some ammo was slow- I think it probably takes up the magazine reload speed. This is fine in most instances but for things like flairs and heavy bombs, this can be a problem. The aim in the UNREP is to get them cross loaded quickly, then reload the mounts in slow time. It took about 6 hrs to cross load all the ammo and 95% of it was done probably in the first hour or so. This would probably take a two step process
• Another thing I will test is air ops – which I think would be severely limited during UNREP
