TEPonta Posted July 10, 2008 Report Posted July 10, 2008 I don't know how these could be modeled, but I do recall some restrictions imposed on an UnRep group from my days on the USS Mars. 1. While ConRepping, the ability of the units involved to maneuver is severely limited. Although course changes are possible, they are made gradually in 10 degree increments IIRC, so the replenishment course isn't quite carved in stone, but nearly so, for the duration, which can be several hours. 2. In addition to the above, a VertRep or combination ConRep/VertRep imposes limitations based on relative wind. a CH-46 is pretty flexible in this regard, but there is a cone of wind that will result in problems with the rotors meshing properly. Unfortunately, I can't remember what those winds are exactly, but I'll see what I can find. A torpedo detection, for instance, would cause emergency breakaways and all the chaos that entails. My only problem is that I can't think of how these could be modeled. If replenishment is automatic, they probably can't be. If a provision is made for the player to schedule or order replenishment, maybe something could be worked out. Also, our procedure was to load supplies in Subic and Kao Hsiung, and then rendezvous with the groups we were tasked to supply, which would involve joining and splitting groups rather than simply including the UnRep unit in the formation for the duration of the scenario. For any of you guys who spent endless days on Yankee Station because of our ability to keep you supplied, don't hate me too severely. All that time in Subic was rough, but someone had to do it. Buddha 1. So we cap the speed of the entire task force for a set amount of time to complete the replinishing. I don't know how long it takes but obviosly its not something that is done in 30 minutes. Of course there is also the ships that much replishish DITW. This would require the group coming to a complete stop. 2. VertRep could be accompilshed underway I assume. You just assign a set number of replinishment points per helo load and let them fly from one ship to another. 3. Torpedo contacts: Preferably you would want to find a 'safe' place to replinish anyway. Question is do we want to auto-break if the contact is made, or do we want to keep the simple speed limit on until it completes? One of those things that puts a little planning into it, instead of topping off after every engagement. You pay your money and take your chances basically. 4. Obviously by my #3, I think UnRep should be a player initiated action. It doesn't attempt it until you are comfortable doing it. In all the UnReps we did, max speed was based on safe speed for the conditions at the time, as well as being limited by the supply ship's max speed., Course alteration is also extremely limited. Time involved varies with the type of rig used and quantity of cargo involved, but is substantially longer than 1/2 hour. I never saw a DIW replenishment except those conducted using barges at anchor. We tranferred some A/C engines to the Coral Sea in Mautitius once that way, but it was a rare occurence. VertReps were always done while underway, although I see no reason they couldn't be done DIW. The only limitation I can see there is that if you're not maneuvering, you have no control over relative winds. I never saw an unrep interrupted by a torpedo, but emergency breakaways do happen, and it can get pretty chaotic. I agree that UnReps should be player initiated if they're to contribute to the gaming experience. I'm just not sure how many of the details should be player controlled, and how many automatic. I've known a Grognard or two in my time who'd have the player filling out requisitions on the screen. I think we can find something that will add to realism without bogging the player down with details. Buddha Quote
Akula Posted July 12, 2008 Author Report Posted July 12, 2008 Yeah, filling out requisitions on screen = not my idea of fun. If you make it an automated process, then the ship or ships in question take on supply points of each type until they are topped off. I'd rather see an interface that lets me just load 'missiles' for instance for a quicker turn around. The actual movement would be automated, but I choose how much and of what I reload at sea. AFAIK, DIW would only apply to really old oilers such as the ancient T-2s that are still in services in some countries. Basically WWII relics...I know the USSR was still using a few of these at the end of the cold war, but one would assume they are now decommissioned. Quote
TEPonta Posted July 12, 2008 Report Posted July 12, 2008 I believe the Soviets also used an astern refuelling setup. What a nightmare that must have been. I wonder if they had rear view mirrors on the bridge wings? Buddha Quote
TonyE Posted July 17, 2008 Report Posted July 17, 2008 There was some exciting IRC conversation on the topic today. I didn't have a whole lot to add so I won't add a whole lot here. Sorry you missed it Buddha, saw you flash in and out of IRC during the chat. What I came away with is the possibility of letting the scenario designer limit loadouts above a certain ammo point value. Example would be F-14 with a 2 x Sidewinder loadout being 10 points, 4 x Phoenix loadout + 2 x Sidewinder being 90 points. The scenario designer might say that CVN Nimitz can only use 20 loadouts that cost 50 points or more even if the carrier still has enough points to buy the fancy weapons. That counter resets after a unrep cycle. It is a way of limiting scarce weaponry even farther than the points system alone would do. I'm not a big fan of going that route but it would be a possible and outrageously difficult modification of the basic points-based logistics model that seems to be winning the day here. Quote
TEPonta Posted July 18, 2008 Report Posted July 18, 2008 Sorry I missed it, Tony. Vista hit me with the usual "Not Responding", so I must have something setup wrong in the IRC. Whatever method is decided upon, it seems the first thing that needs to be established is the quantity of each missile/ammo type the ship will start with. There's also the "Start with full ordinance?" variable in the scenario setup to consider. A count of each weapon type will need to be maintained as the scenario progresses, remembering that just because an A/C launches with ordinance doesn't necessarily mean it is expended. Although on the Midway I was pretty familiar with most of the loadouts for the A/C, I don't have the slightest idea what we carried below decks. If that's not classified, which it probably is, that should give us the starting point we're looking for. However this is handled, it looks like you guys who understand programming and code and stuff like that have your work cut out for you. Buddha Quote
Akula Posted July 18, 2008 Author Report Posted July 18, 2008 I'm still voting for the simple each weapon has a point value, and every time you load it that amount of points is deducted from the pool approach myself. Like you said, no way to really know exactly how much of what is carried. And I'm sure it could be modified based on what the mission was going to be. Quote
TEPonta Posted July 18, 2008 Report Posted July 18, 2008 Probably correct, Akula. I find myself getting dangerously close to being a Grognard here. Most ships and subs seem to already have limits on what they start out loaded with, making the availability of unrepping useful. If there is any limit imposed on the A/C ordinance carried, either by the CV's or by the smaller ships for embarked Helo's, I haven't noticed it yet. I've noticed that the Mag entries in the PE impose limits on various types of ammo carried for the ship's own weapons, but no entries for A/C ordinance of any kind. Buddha Quote
noxious Posted July 18, 2008 Report Posted July 18, 2008 Probably correct, Akula. I find myself getting dangerously close to being a Grognard here. Most ships and subs seem to already have limits on what they start out loaded with, making the availability of unrepping useful. If there is any limit imposed on the A/C ordinance carried, either by the CV's or by the smaller ships for embarked Helo's, I haven't noticed it yet. I've noticed that the Mag entries in the PE impose limits on various types of ammo carried for the ship's own weapons, but no entries for A/C ordinance of any kind. Buddha Actually, right now you have infinite loadouts of each type carried by each and every of the a/c based onboard or at a base. And moving them from base to base doesn't change this. The point system would put a ceiling on how much weaponry you can replenish from a supply point (carrier or base). but would not limit a particular weapon over another. I will be writing more on the topic a bit later on, as I think a pure point system is fine for consumables (food/water/minor equipement/toiletries, etc.), diesel, and aviation fuel. (might forget something there) Consensus yesterday on spare parts/major repairs is that there isn't a need to model it in the game engine as for the most part, these kind of repairs are beyond at sea capabilities, while it can be safely assumed that minor repairs and juryrigging of parts is already "modelled" since it's part of daily life onboard ships to repair all the little things that go wrong all the time. So no change there. Ship ammo can be modelled with points pretty safely, as it'll only serve to replenish stores as they were at scenario onset : if you didn't have TLAMs at the scenario onset, you won't be able to buy them... (Hmmm, albeit might be nice in a latter iteration to add scenario level modifications of such constraints. More on this in my writeup) As for ammo for a/c, well ,that's why I want to write more on it : I have trouble with the fact that it'll invalidate scenarios like Fleet Defender (example for the scent, the drift, as it's not quite exact. Thx ) by allowing the player to go around scenario design and get whatever weaponry he wants for his a/c. Without forgetting that from where I stand, it really contradicts anecdotal evidence on the topic of weaponry where one particular type of loadout is in short quantity, not permitting a certain kind of sorties with any sustained rate. That said, I think we can safely assume it'll be a point system, and that the first iteration of it will in all likelyhood conform to Akula's plan, in beta/internal release form for some hardcore testing and breaking of things Quote
TEPonta Posted July 18, 2008 Report Posted July 18, 2008 Probably correct, Akula. I find myself getting dangerously close to being a Grognard here. Most ships and subs seem to already have limits on what they start out loaded with, making the availability of unrepping useful. If there is any limit imposed on the A/C ordinance carried, either by the CV's or by the smaller ships for embarked Helo's, I haven't noticed it yet. I've noticed that the Mag entries in the PE impose limits on various types of ammo carried for the ship's own weapons, but no entries for A/C ordinance of any kind. Buddha Actually, right now you have infinite loadouts of each type carried by each and every of the a/c based onboard or at a base. And moving them from base to base doesn't change this. The point system would put a ceiling on how much weaponry you can replenish from a supply point (carrier or base). but would not limit a particular weapon over another. I will be writing more on the topic a bit later on, as I think a pure point system is fine for consumables (food/water/minor equipement/toiletries, etc.), diesel, and aviation fuel. (might forget something there) Consensus yesterday on spare parts/major repairs is that there isn't a need to model it in the game engine as for the most part, these kind of repairs are beyond at sea capabilities, while it can be safely assumed that minor repairs and juryrigging of parts is already "modelled" since it's part of daily life onboard ships to repair all the little things that go wrong all the time. So no change there. Ship ammo can be modelled with points pretty safely, as it'll only serve to replenish stores as they were at scenario onset : if you didn't have TLAMs at the scenario onset, you won't be able to buy them... (Hmmm, albeit might be nice in a latter iteration to add scenario level modifications of such constraints. More on this in my writeup) As for ammo for a/c, well ,that's why I want to write more on it : I have trouble with the fact that it'll invalidate scenarios like Fleet Defender (example for the scent, the drift, as it's not quite exact. Thx ) by allowing the player to go around scenario design and get whatever weaponry he wants for his a/c. Without forgetting that from where I stand, it really contradicts anecdotal evidence on the topic of weaponry where one particular type of loadout is in short quantity, not permitting a certain kind of sorties with any sustained rate. That said, I think we can safely assume it'll be a point system, and that the first iteration of it will in all likelyhood conform to Akula's plan, in beta/internal release form for some hardcore testing and breaking of things For ship based ASW A/C, you may want to include Sonabuoys as part of the ordinance loadout, if they are not already. Land based types such as P-3's probably don't need any limitations in this regard, but S-3's and various helo's will. Buddha Quote
Akula Posted July 19, 2008 Author Report Posted July 19, 2008 For ship based ASW A/C, you may want to include Sonabuoys as part of the ordinance loadout, if they are not already. Land based types such as P-3's probably don't need any limitations in this regard, but S-3's and various helo's will. Buddha For the ASW weapons, if we go with the pure point system, each item on the loadout will be assigned a point value. So those SBs will be limited by the total points available on each ship in the form of ordnance points. For example if the SB = 3 pts, and the Torpedo = 25 points and your helo carries 12 SB, and 2 Trops, then you have a total loadout cost of 86 points. If we give a DD 860 ordnance points, then it could launch 10 missions before running out of ordnance for example. Once those points are depleted the ships would have to stop off at a port or an AO to replinish the ordnance points or no longer be able to launch missions. Perhaps not a perfect system, but it does put a soft cap on the number of missions you can fly from each base/ship in the game. Also keep in mind that we are tracking AV-Gas as well...so if you try to cheat th ordnance limits by using the lowest point loadouts, you are still going to be limited by the amount of fuel the ship/base has available. And fuel loads are something you really don't have control over...sure you can use the LR loadouts to limit the strain on the ordnance pool, but then you are using more fuel and pulling more out of the AV-Gas pool. Quote
TEPonta Posted July 19, 2008 Report Posted July 19, 2008 For ship based ASW A/C, you may want to include Sonabuoys as part of the ordinance loadout, if they are not already. Land based types such as P-3's probably don't need any limitations in this regard, but S-3's and various helo's will. Buddha For the ASW weapons, if we go with the pure point system, each item on the loadout will be assigned a point value. So those SBs will be limited by the total points available on each ship in the form of ordnance points. For example if the SB = 3 pts, and the Torpedo = 25 points and your helo carries 12 SB, and 2 Trops, then you have a total loadout cost of 86 points. If we give a DD 860 ordnance points, then it could launch 10 missions before running out of ordnance for example. Once those points are depleted the ships would have to stop off at a port or an AO to replinish the ordnance points or no longer be able to launch missions. Perhaps not a perfect system, but it does put a soft cap on the number of missions you can fly from each base/ship in the game. Also keep in mind that we are tracking AV-Gas as well...so if you try to cheat th ordnance limits by using the lowest point loadouts, you are still going to be limited by the amount of fuel the ship/base has available. And fuel loads are something you really don't have control over...sure you can use the LR loadouts to limit the strain on the ordnance pool, but then you are using more fuel and pulling more out of the AV-Gas pool. I hadn't thought about AVGAS and JP-5. Even a Nuke CV still needs fuel for the A/C it carries, which means time alongside an oiler. Although I've definitely seen my share of wrangling over tanker assets, I don't recall the question of how much fuel was aboard either on a CV or on Helo equipped small boys. Someone was keeping track of that somewhere for sure, but I never heard the issue raised personally, so I can't offer much input in that area. Buddha Quote
TonyE Posted July 19, 2008 Report Posted July 19, 2008 I was sketching out a test implementation of the points logistics system today and thought I'd post up the approach. Overview: Give the DB designer and game player a feel for the points-based logistics system. This would not be giving the AI any intelligence about using the system and I would probably exclude the AI from the test all together. The player would be able to do unrep from ship to ship in the same group and by using aircraft with special unrep loadouts. Information Fields (in some case database fields): Ship/Sub/Land Unit/InstallationsAV-Gas Total Capacity Usage Rate Production Rate TX Rate (transfer off of platform to another) RX Rate (receive from another platform) [*]AV-Ammo Total Capacity Usage Rate Production Rate TX Rate (transfer off of platform to another) RX Rate (receive from another platform) [*]Fuel Total Capacity Usage Rate Production Rate TX Rate (transfer off of platform to another) RX Rate (receive from another platform) [*]Ammo Total Capacity Usage Rate Production Rate TX Rate (transfer off of platform to another) RX Rate (receive from another platform) [*]Food-Fuel-Razors Total Capacity Usage Rate Production Rate TX Rate (transfer off of platform to another) RX Rate (receive from another platform) [*]Weapon Annexes Ammo Cost (if used in a ship/sub/land unit this pulls from Ammo type, if from aircraft then it pulls from AV-Ammo) Weapon TypeLogistics (new weapon type with the following fields)(this is letting us create essentially a logistics pod that may hold a DB defined quantity [maybe max quantity] of each type) AV-Gas AV-Ammo Fuel Ammo Food-Fuel-Razors [*]Loadout Annex AV-Gas Note the AV-Ammo amount is calculated from the weapons in the loadout Some mechanics: Each game second decrement Fuel, Food-Fuel-Razors as used up, increment Fuel, Food-Fuel-Razors, AV-Gas, AV-Ammo, Ammo if unit has a non-zero production value for that resource. Some manner of transfer interface will also be needed for the non-air logistics usage and Unrep. The DB information will be stored in separate file(s) for the purposes of this testing as not to disturb or break anything in the existing system. The modified code will hopefully live in DLLs via an expanded DLL interface. Quote
Akula Posted July 24, 2008 Author Report Posted July 24, 2008 While reading through the wishlist threads, I realized something else that needs to go under the logisitics model: Aerial Refueling. In its current state, the refueling can only take place 1 time from a tanker, irreguardless of the number of planes refueled. If you refuel 1 or 100 it does not matter, cause the tanker can only refuel planes 1 time before being rendered useless. By using the point system we should be able to fix this by allocating a number of points to the tanker, which can be drawn from multiple times until the points are used up. Since we are tracking JP for the carriers and bases anyway, we might as well track it for the Tanker Planes at the same time. Quote
Stalintc Posted July 25, 2008 Report Posted July 25, 2008 While reading through the wishlist threads, I realized something else that needs to go under the logisitics model: Aerial Refueling. In its current state, the refueling can only take place 1 time from a tanker, irreguardless of the number of planes refueled. If you refuel 1 or 100 it does not matter, cause the tanker can only refuel planes 1 time before being rendered useless. By using the point system we should be able to fix this by allocating a number of points to the tanker, which can be drawn from multiple times until the points are used up. Since we are tracking JP for the carriers and bases anyway, we might as well track it for the Tanker Planes at the same time. Yes I quite agree with this! You could even take this one step further and have these points assigned to the aircraft that are to be refuelled, this could possibly lead to better modelling of aircraft endurance to different thrust settings(As currently I dont see any difference in endurance unless the aircraft are running on reheat), perhaps it could even lead to an extra value displayed in the little unit info box which displays total remaining airborne time? I think that would be very useful. Just an idea for the mixing pot. Quote
Gdtrfb Posted August 4, 2008 Report Posted August 4, 2008 Ok been gone awhile but back now.....The thing with the point system is that there must be a certain pecentage that is guided vs unguided ....e.g no CVN or AOE carries all guided weps or all unguided weps.What im saying is i think that there should be a seperation of guided vs unguided probably 60% guided in a modern combat enviroment.I was stationed on a CVN and an AS(sub tender) on the carrier my buddy was assigned to the sparrow mount and told me we had 3 reloads for each cell(this was in 90-92) also when on the tender we only carried 36 slbm(posiedon) and 60-70 mk 48s and 12 harpoons and NO Tlam I was ESWS qualed but No one is allowed in the magazines....so i can only hazard a guess but on the CVN you might have like 120 AIM-54 those suckers are big! also 2000lb bombs are also quite big so i think that the points should reflect the size of the weapon as well as the technical aspects. When we were droppin stuff on Iraq we would unrep/vertrep every day......CVN-71 dropped the most tonnage on Iraq so this may be an extreme example they weps were brought on pallets like the parts were e'g engines and tail secions or what ever....but i was an MR(machinest) and we had 7 people in the shop so we had a fairly decent ability to make or fix whatever had broken........anyway once more i stress if we use a point sytem that the guided/unguided must be dealt with differently. hope this helps in some way! any questions feel free to message me p.s we carried 1.2 million gallons of JP-5/4 also 100,000 gallons of fuel oil for the escorts in case something happened to the supply ships. Joe Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.