Brad, Rene, and myself went thru a chat about refueling. When tweaking code in 2007.023 it was pretty apparent that refueling can be expanded from its current behavior without breaking the scenario or save game format.

 

Goals:

1. Allow a tanker to offload fuel multiple times, until it has no more fuel to offload.

2. Separate the amount of offloadable fuel from the tanker's loadout range, instead characterize it in 'drop tanks'.

 

Mechanism:

1. Tanker loadouts will use a special case drop-tank with a non-zero range. A scaling factor of 100 will be applied.

a. example: drop tank with range 3.0 means it can offload 300nm of fuel (cruise speed).

b. Maximum value for the field is 3276.8, meaning a tanker could offload 327,680nm of fuel.

2. Assume for now only the first drop-tank in the tanker loadout will be used, but there is no impediment besides some code to allowing multiple refuel stores (drop tanks) on a tanker loadout.

3. Drop tanks with zero range remain as symbolic drop tanks.

4. Retain refuel hotkey for forced immediate refueling.

 

Challenges:

1. Figuring out when a group needs to be auto-refueled.

a. My first guess says the auto-refuel begins when the last refuelee would reach 10% fuel. That may mean refueling starts when some planes in the group are well above 10% fuel. Note, this may be way past bingo fuel of some of the individual planes (think transiting the Atlantic with F-16s).

2. Figuring out which planes get refueled, in theory the shortest legged planes would get fuel to even out the ranges of the planes in the group.

 

Left Undone:

1. Planes will not automatically find and join with a tanker group, it will still be the same player controls, just more ability once the refuel commences. The auto-find-a-tanker cannot be implemented without breaking save or scenario formats.

 

Please comment, this is the first draft and I haven't started any coding.

Next question to ponder, do we want to do this or should we just keep tweaking the existing refueling? The new refueling won't work for pre-ec2003 battlesets and so the old method still needs to be maintained in some form.

Next question to ponder, do we want to do this or should we just keep tweaking the existing refueling? The new refueling won't work for pre-ec2003 battlesets and so the old method still needs to be maintained in some form.

 

Personally my biggest problem with refueling in its current state is that I basically have to launch the tanker with the group to get it to work. I should be able to order a group to go meet the tanker and take fuel (granted I have not yet had a chance to check the latest changes, so I could be discussing something already fixed).