Official SEOW

I had two ideas...

1) your army is moving west. You set waypoints for one hour to take them west. You fly the next mission which lasts for 57 minutes. You can't give your army new waypoints until the next mission. In the MP-config you can change the 1 hour waypoint thing to whatever you want, which helps. But, what do you think of having a checkbox in the DCS that changes the Mission end time in the log to an even hour. Mission starts at 0800 hours and ends at 0900 regardless of actual flight time?

2) this idea is about freight and I'm using it now .
I changed the object_spec's table so the transport weight of all units was the actual unit weight. Then changed the cargo capacity to the actual cargo capacity for each unit. Also I included jeeps, VW's, trucks, convoy's, landing craft, etc...

The new ones, MG42's and .50 cal's I added an extra 100kgs for the soldier's weight.

then I set the speed for each unit a bit different. A GI can walk at 4 km/h so that's all he's got now. How fast can GI's push artillery? pretty slow. So now I load the machine gunners into trucks and jeeps and drive them off. I load guns on trucks, etc.

My favorite is, load your troops into landing craft, then load your landing onto cargo ships(pretend they are LST's). Now take you cargo ships close to the beach and launch your landing craft toward the beach head. Just make sure you protect them or it gets expensive.

The same works on the ground. Load up 5 or 6 trucks with artillery and machine guns then make a task group out of them, maybe include a tank and a truck with AA. You now have an "amoured convoy" that's live. It makes a juicey target and a great way to storm an airfield when you unload you units and they start blasting away those allied bad guys It also solves something else that's been brought up before. When you shoot one unit of a regular convoy the entire convoy is lost. If you make your convoy's this way you only lose the one unit.

Anyway, I've been playing around with that and really like the results, so I thought I'd share it.

My thoughts

1) The new release of DCS will support a "Truncate Ground Movement" option, similar to the current "Truncate Ship Movement". This will allow the admin to automatically halt all ground movements at the end of each mission.

2) Perfect! Using actual weights (e.g. in kg or pounds) will make everything scale properly. The only problem is to capture all the weight specifications for every unit in the Object_Specifications table! But if you are running a limited scenario, you really only need the weight data for the object types in your scenario.

Speeds: The Number_Name field actually sets the speeds for ground units. AFAIK, if you fiddle with the Number_Name values then IL-2 is likely to crash at mission load time, so be careful.

2nd Level Loading: Yes, by design we can load unit A on unit B (first level), then load unit B on unit C (second level). Then wherever unit C goes, unit A and B are there too and can be unloaded in hierarchy. I am not sure that 3rd level loading works though...

RC, I really like your "actual weight" idea. It should work really well.

Cheers,
4S

It really does work out nicely. I have only setup the units that I was using to test out the Italy map. I took almost all of that weight data directly from the objects list in IL2. The others I got from the web.

There is only one problem i found so far and it was easily fixed ( i think) an 88mm flak gun is about 5 metric tonnes. A german truck can carry about 3 tonnes...so how does one move an 88 flak gun? I used two methods. First use convoys which have several trucks in them and the sum of their loads is greater than the wieght of an 88. Or/and I faked the rules for the RSO and gave it a higher load it can carry. This simulates the RSO being a tow vehicle. I think the 88 is only one like that. perhaps it's easiest just to reduce the weight of the 88 so that a truck could "tow" it.

I am packing up the Italy map for you, It's not finished yet but I'll send the DB with those weights in it too.

Hi RC,

Just had a breakthrough on the remaining bug before the next release. This brings the release very close now. If you have completed Italy map, please make it available for me to download and I'll slot it in.

Cheers,
4Shades

Hi Shades,

I actually emailed it to you yesterday but it got bounced (too big) yes, I should have known better.

It is not ready yet, I haven't had much time to work on it. I'll send you a link to download what I have and you decide. It probably will have to wait until a future update.

It needs some php refining for the clickable districts map in the intel.php
- bridges need touch ups (wooden, metal, etc) Placement is finished
- Rail is not complete
- New airbase types need to be made (i'm having trouble there)
- I think everything else is good to go. roads, climate, suppy, etc

S~ RC