- This is more of an ongoing (hopefully) report of my journey of discovery as it pertains to C:MO
- C:MO Build 1527
- All Scenario Options left at Default settings.
Part One - Planning the AAR Stations
With no Air Defenses selected this is a pure Air to Air Refueling exercise. After some trial and error I've placed 2 refueling stations, Gold AAR for the British tankers and Juno AAR for the Canadian tankers. As seen here:
- GR2 AO.png (1.08 MiB) Viewed 209 times
My plan: An AAR Gold AM Mission will meet the Strike Group on it's ingress leg (at Gold) then return home after refueling them. An AAR Juno Mission will meet the Strike Group on it's ingress leg (at Juno) to refuel them then wait there and refuel the Strike Group again on it's egress leg. An AAR Gold PM Mission will meet the Strike Group on it's egress and refuel them at Gold.
This plan took many iterations and I finally settled on creating a spreadsheet to help me determine "on station" times for 4 refueling events. For this mission plan here are the inputs I needed:
- GR2 Inputs.png (27.46 KiB) Viewed 209 times
It took some trial and error to determine the durations of these events (distances are just FYI), I probably should have use the flight plan editor to determine them, but I wasn't comfortable with that at the time so I just sent planes out on test runs (yes, some ran out of fuel).
So based on just those inputs above I started with Time On Target and calculated all the Mission timing:
- GR2 Plan.png (61.26 KiB) Viewed 209 times
I've created the Missions with activation and deactivation/RTB times and even ran it through with a manual controlled strike. It worked pretty well (see below) but next step is to create a flight plan for the strike and hopefully let it manage the AAR.
Some issues I had and will try and resolve:
- The strike mission gets pretty spread out after refueling and time on station requirements tended to drift a bit depending on leading and lagging planes.
- The strike mission air units panicked after the strike about not being able to reach their home airbase and changed it to Gander, I had a hell of a time getting them to England and when I did they wanted nothing but to go to Gander to land. I couldn't change the home airbase.
- I spent most of this mission, so far, in the spreadsheet. But I enjoy the puzzle and like using Excel to help me attack it.
This zip contains the C:MO save file (no strike mission yet, just AAR stations) and the Excel spreadsheet that generated the mission timing.
Nest step is to coordinate the Strike with flight plans, more to come.