I am planning the MI campaign, and I was thinking about a possible feature which could be very nice, when planning large strike packages.
The problem I am encountering is planning multiple bomber flights so that they are well organized in the air, mutually-supportive and so that in general they give an air of awesomeness when encountered by a human pilot. It is very hard to click a near identical flight path for multiple flights, so that they stay close together. Therefore, I am thinking about a dynamic Task Force feature for flights.
How would it work, and what would be the features Devill? I am glad you ask!
Lets go here step by step:
1. create a Strike Package (SP), select the lead flight.
2. add available flights to the SP (from any available airbase/CV; as long as the flight is available for tasking)
3. select parameters of the formation (trail, box, staggered, etc) as well as spacing (lateral, vertical for each consecutive member) - little graphic interface here as for the infantry formations would be awesome...
4. define a gathering point; here, the lead flight will have to wait for a preset amount of time in order to assemble the formation. All members will automatically have this point as their first waypoint, with a maximum allowed speed setting. A dialog box gives a warning if any of the members will take an excessive amount of time to join the formation.
5. rest of the waypoints are as usual, except the mission planner coordinates for all flights are automatically generated with respect to their position vs the lead flight. I guess you could do the same thing as for escorting flights?
6. define a disperse point, where each flight will be assigned its own final landing waypoint, so that every flight has time to return to their own base, no transfers.
What do you think Shades? Sorry if this comes at a bad moment, I know you are mostly interested in the ground stuff now.
On another note, did you ever take a look at a possibility to apply SEOW to Cliffs of Dover?
Hope to talk to you sometime soon on TS. Maybe we could play that game of Panzer General which we talked about a long time ago?
Cheers!
