tricks with tankers

Here are some bugs that I came across while doing experiments with tankers. Not really bugs as in the game doing something wrong and unintented when a player does something normal and appropriate, but rather me doing something abnormal that the game was not designed to do, and getting away with it. One of them may not have been seen before.

I am posting it in this location because the hardcore testers might derive some amusement from it, but it might give the wrong impression to a more general audience.

If you order a plane to "patrol" to a location that it doesn't have the fuel to reach, the game will not allow the plane to be launched. If the plane cannot be refueled in the air, you will also be informed of this. Bug #1 is that the restricted distance should be half the plane's fuel range, not the full distance, because the plane also has to return.

However, if you first allocate a tanker to the launching group, you can then include the short-range plane in the group. The program also appears to consider how many tankers might be required for the short-range planes, and will prevent a launch with insufficient tankers.

If you now remove the tankers from the launching group, you can get the short-range planes to attempt to fly to a location that they don't have the fuel to reach.

This is not the only way of getting a plane to fly a path that it doesn't have enough fuel for.

Notwithstanding the above, if you have somehow managed to get a plane to fly a path that it doesn't have enough fuel for, the game will still let you know about that in a number of ways.

I suppose that some people might find this procedure to be vaguely amusing. I used it to help me do some tests, where I actually wanted the planes to fly some random long distance.