Official SEOW

We recently started a new campaign on the Crimea map and quickly noticed the lack of detailed airfield maps. I have put together a set of such maps for the thirty airfields and five seaplane bases for our own use. The scale of each is approximately 6 km in the East/West dimension and they include grid lines to aid in the placement of units. If you would like to try them, you can get them here: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.ph ... 12288&da=y. Just place the files in your MP4/Crimea directory. A copy of the original Crimea-intel.php file is included in case you decide the airfield maps are not to your liking. The Crimea-intel.php file is the only file that needs to be overwritten. All other files are new.

Please let me know if you find any serious errors. These are the first airfield maps I've done.

Hi Tushka,

That is very nice work. I have slotted it into the next SEOW release. Crimea was the very first SEOW map developed, way back in 2003, so a lot of the data structures and methods that are taken for granted in SEOW now were only just being prototyped when we were working on Crimea. It is only in the last few years that MP support has become more elaborate.

Many thanks,
4S

Hi Tushka, 4Shades,

Thanks for the airfield maps, they are very usefull in our campaign with =69.giap=, especially when a supply plane has unloaded its cargo, the pieces are scattered all over and sometimes they are on the runway itself. Tushkas's team has lost some planes at mission-start because of this.

At our side a lot of planes were killed by 'landscape'.
When we look at the statistics, 'landscape' and not '=69.giap=' seems to be our 'worst nightmare' on the Crimea map. We figured out that the Dzankoy airfield in AO-15 must be in error because all our reïnforcements that should have land there have crashed without exception.

Thanks a lot for all the efforts,
1.JaVA_Pion

S! Pion,

Unloaded items on the runway was one of my motivations in doing these airfield maps. Unfortunately the maps have not entirely solved the problem. We find some unloaded units that show in Mission Planner as being as far as 2 km from the spawn point as still showing up on the spawn point when the mission is built. I haven't been able to track down the cause yet.

Pion, in your case would it help if we reversed the take-off and landing positions at Dzankoy Airbase?

4Shades, when a freighted unit is "unloaded" to a specific location, in which file is this location recorded? It looks to me as if in some cases Mission Planner sees the new location but the mission build process doesn't and so the build process ends up putting the unit back where it landed.

I haven't reported this as a bug as I can't completely rule out commander error and we are running on a somewhat older version of SEOW (DCS 3.2.0) so this may be an already corrected bug.

Hi Tushka,

Both loaded and unloaded units are stored in the ObjMissionData table, along with every combat unit. Once unloaded, the MP will display the unit at its unload location according to the coordinates in the ObjMissionData table. The DCS will place the unit at that location too, using the same data in the table.

One thing to look out for is the "unit dispersal" feature. If a unit has more than one member, e.g. a flak unit containing 3 guns, then the unit will be dispersed when placed in the next mission. This dispersal occurs over roughly 50-100 m radius around the true unit location, depending on unit type. The purpose of the dispersal is to present a harder target for airborne attack. So it is perfectly possible for a multiple strength unit to be placed near a runway (but not on it), but be dispersed in such a way as to have a member on the runway. Solution: move the unit further away from the runway, taxiways and hardstands.

Note that I am not ruling out a bug here, but we haven't seen such a bug in our campaigns so far.

Cheers,
4Shades

For the time being I'll call this commander error. Each of the units involved was located at the precise coordinates of the airfield landing point (to the decimal point at three different airfields) and had been transported as a single unit so it is unlikely to be a dispersal problem.

We will emphasize to our quartermasters that they must verify that unloaded freight has indeed been offloaded to a safe location in each instance rather then just dumped on the runway.

Hi Tushka,

Send me your DB if you like. I could check it to see what is happening.

Cheers,
4S

Thanks for the offer but that would be premature.

We have appointed a "safety officer" (me) who will monitor unloading in our two current campaigns to prevent any repeat of loads dumped to the runway and I am requiring the loadmasters to document their loads and actions. If we have any unexplained problems they should at least be well documented but I expect these measures will put a stop to the problem. These are the first campaigns where we have made extensive use of air cargo and I suspect we are simply learning safe cargo handling practices the hard way.

=69.GIAP=TUSHKA wrote:S! Pion,

Pion, in your case would it help if we reversed the take-off and landing positions at Dzankoy Airbase?

No need to change anything, we have anough other airfields available, maybe usefull in a future campagn.

S!

OK, Pion, but I am thinking of setting the allied-controlled airfields to "takeoffpoint" to see if this puts the spawn point at the opposite end of the airfield from the "dump" point. Whether this works will depend on whether the "spawn" and "dump" points have the same or different relationships to the landing and takeoff points. e.g. If the "dump" point is defined as the landing point and the "spawn" point is defined as opposite the takeoff point this should work and if both are defined as opposite the takeoff point it won't.

Our problem of spawning into ground units on the runway may be a problem of my own making. I gave the Betty some cargo capacity and we are using it to bring in air cargo from off map. The Logistics/Freight unloading process does not appear to work properly for the Betty. Unloaded cargo is always dumped on the landing spot. We have found that an Li-2 at the same airfield can then be used to move the air cargo out of the way through a load/unload process.

What do I need to edit to let the Betty directly unload to a separate location like the Li-2 can?

Perhaps Object_Class in Object_Specifications?
Li-2 --> PTR
G4M --> PBO --> PTR with Transport_Capacity > 0

Shades?

Correct, Dore. As far as I know, they should be the only important settings to turn any aircraft into a transporter.

Cheers,
4Shades

OK, it was the PBO -> PTR that I missed.

Presumably it can still carry bombs as a PTR?

Yes, it can.