Advanced Mission Planner (AMP)

[Airborne Rifles]

emsoy, I think in real life an attack on a mobile target is plotted to arrive at where the target will be rather than where the target is at the time of launch. I think the AI already does this with some weapons? If the player/AI is trying to execute a simultaneous ToT attack, than evasive maneuvers by the target while the missiles are in flight becomes much more important to try to create a situation where the incoming weapons arrive in sequence and can be engaged in sequence by the defenses rather than simultaneously as the attacker intended.

[thewood1]

"waypoints early or late"

These kinds of issues are way underestimated. A number of things can happen to throw the timing off. How should those be handled?

[HaughtKarl]

Look at the juicy mission planner from Tornado, a PC sim that came out in 1993!

http://www.moodurian.com/tornado/home.h ... ml&content

Copy and paste the code from that into CMANO; it should be about a 15 minute job tops.

--------

In all seriousness, if you only did one thing I hope it would be giving the player to plot waypoints prior to air assets taking off.

[Airborne Rifles]

Well, if the player decides to plot their own waypoints, then the achievement of a ToT is completely on them and their own planning, as it should be. The suggestion I'm making is about weapons for which the AI already automatically plots an off-axis attack without player input other than to assign the salvo to a target.

[tango4]

ORIGINAL: emsoy

ORIGINAL: tango4

I am not sure I am competent enough to say what a perfect mission planner would be.
But what I could say is what I miss the most that could be part of an advanced planner version 1.
As I said in my previous post I would really like to be able to specify the waypoints prior to mission start, and mission profile. So at least when the aircraft get airborne, I know what route they will fly, and at what altitudes. If possible as mentioned by someone else, being able to specify time on some waypoints would be awesome. Today, when launching a big strike, each time a group gets airborne, you have to hit pause, catch the group's icon on the map and edit the whole plan. I really feel this is cumbersome and very time consuming.
At least that would allow some of the work to be made prior to mission lauch, which could alleviate the workload while running the mission.
And even better, sharing a common waypoint between mission would be awesome to create a sort of "rally point" to synchronize missions.
I am really glad this is still worked on and will continue buying dlcs (even if I do not actually play them for those very reasons) because I really feel this dev team deserves support.

Thanks for asking Ragnar !

Best regards.

Charles MOULIN

I see, thanks [8D]

- Display a list of waypoints for each flight
- Ability to move waypoints
- Set speed and altitude
- Set times
- Set Rally points (aka Push Points)

Would this solve all your problems?

I guess it would solve the biggest things holding me (and I insist on the "me" as other people might have other views on this).
I understand that getting the equivalent of a real life planner would probably require as much dev time as cmano itself... So my point of view is that I would try to get a first version released with the most needed features, which are not necessarily the most complex to develop. Of course, the drawback of such an approach is that at a later point you might realise that you want to add feature x or y and that the way you started coding the planner in a simple version would not allow that and would require a complete redevelopement.
Two caveats to what I requested: I am not experienced in air to air refueling in cmano and it might be worth giving it some thought.
And when dealing with fast moving targets it might be difficult to implement a "perfect" tool (but I guess this is the same in real life).
Now in the list I would add a feature: ability to use pre planned attack profiles (another time saver).
Let me explain what I have in mind (this is a quick and dirty explanation, especially given that I am not home right now and don't have access to my computer).
Imagine I want to plan a strike of a static target.
-First I would select the target.
-Then I select participating aircraft (so at this point the planner knows the performance of the aircraft: for example if my target is 500Nm from the airbase and my aircraft radius with their current load out is 400Nm it will be able to give me a warning at a later point in planning).
-Now I would select the profile (of course the default profile for the loadout would be preselected). But the idea would be to use Hi Lo Hi or Lo Hi Lo on a list so that it generates initial altitudes and speeds on the waypoints consistent with that.
-Then you click "generate" and it creates a flight plan that you can visualize with preset altitudes and speeds consistent with the profile you entered.
-Next you would graphically edit the flight plan, repositioning and adding waypoints.
-Then you would look at TOT or things like this.
-In the list of waypoints, one of them could be identified as the "push" waypoint and could be shared with other missions.

I know I forgot lots of things to make it work and that my above list does not take into account averyrhing that is already part of the current mission editor that is already great. My intent was just to try and give you a feel of what I think would be a great help in most scenarii.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

Charles.

[ComDev]

ORIGINAL: thewood1

"waypoints early or late"

These kinds of issues are way underestimated. A number of things can happen to throw the timing off. How should those be handled?

Yes, very difficult to deal with these things. What should the AI do?

[ComDev]

Tornado was amazing, I played it to death.

It had a number of shortcomings, however. Like aircraft accidentally arriving within 5 seconds of each other on low-alt RET delivery, causing aircraft to accidentally blow up wingmen. Setting up properly spaced strikes was a huge job and could take an hour or more for even just a six-aircraft flight.

Etc.

What could be done to make a Mission Planner better in Command?

ORIGINAL: HaughtKarl

Look at the juicy mission planner from Tornado, a PC sim that came out in 1993!

http://www.moodurian.com/tornado/home.h ... ml&content

Copy and paste the code from that into CMANO; it should be about a 15 minute job tops.

--------

In all seriousness, if you only did one thing I hope it would be giving the player to plot waypoints prior to air assets taking off.

[ComDev]

ORIGINAL: Airborne Rifles

Well, if the player decides to plot their own waypoints, then the achievement of a ToT is completely on them and their own planning, as it should be. The suggestion I'm making is about weapons for which the AI already automatically plots an off-axis attack without player input other than to assign the salvo to a target.

Hmm but then the missiles have two possible routes, one going left and one going right? Wouldn't me much spacing between weapons other than that?

[ComDev]

ORIGINAL: tango4

I guess it would solve the biggest things holding me (and I insist on the "me" as other people might have other views on this).
I understand that getting the equivalent of a real life planner would probably require as much dev time as cmano itself... So my point of view is that I would try to get a first version released with the most needed features, which are not necessarily the most complex to develop. Of course, the drawback of such an approach is that at a later point you might realise that you want to add feature x or y and that the way you started coding the planner in a simple version would not allow that and would require a complete redevelopement.
Two caveats to what I requested: I am not experienced in air to air refueling in cmano and it might be worth giving it some thought.
And when dealing with fast moving targets it might be difficult to implement a "perfect" tool (but I guess this is the same in real life).
Now in the list I would add a feature: ability to use pre planned attack profiles (another time saver).
Let me explain what I have in mind (this is a quick and dirty explanation, especially given that I am not home right now and don't have access to my computer).
Imagine I want to plan a strike of a static target.
-First I would select the target.
-Then I select participating aircraft (so at this point the planner knows the performance of the aircraft: for example if my target is 500Nm from the airbase and my aircraft radius with their current load out is 400Nm it will be able to give me a warning at a later point in planning).
-Now I would select the profile (of course the default profile for the loadout would be preselected). But the idea would be to use Hi Lo Hi or Lo Hi Lo on a list so that it generates initial altitudes and speeds on the waypoints consistent with that.
-Then you click "generate" and it creates a flight plan that you can visualize with preset altitudes and speeds consistent with the profile you entered.
-Next you would graphically edit the flight plan, repositioning and adding waypoints.
-Then you would look at TOT or things like this.
-In the list of waypoints, one of them could be identified as the "push" waypoint and could be shared with other missions.

I know I forgot lots of things to make it work and that my above list does not take into account averyrhing that is already part of the current mission editor that is already great. My intent was just to try and give you a feel of what I think would be a great help in most scenarii.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

Charles.

You have some really good points, I must say [8D]

So getting a total overview of the desired functionality would be a good place to start, and then implement piecemeal.

What would the complete feature set be like?

Thanks for the suggestion on how to automate the job of generating flightplans. Loadouts already come with a default profile, would that work as a starting point?

[DrRansom]

I see, thanks [8D]

- Display a list of waypoints for each flight
- Ability to move waypoints
- Set speed and altitude
- Set times
- Set Rally points (aka Push Points)

Would this solve all your problems?

- Time-on-target for missile strikes.

Those would cover almost everything I would want in an advanced strike planner.

The only thing I would add to the list is:
- Show on the map which targets have weapons/missions allocated. This came up a lot in planning the mission Hit Hard, Hit Fast. I had to juggle between 3 - 6 different missions when allocating airstrikes against an airbase. Each mission was given a target set (hangers, tarmac, runways) and I needed to keep flipping between different missions to make sure everything had the right number of aircraft. I would find it very helpful if that information was displayed transparently, maybe when zooming in on the target.

If there is time to go into more detail, here are some other suggestions:
- Ability to group missions into a single event. Again with the airbase strike, say I want to hit 4 different targets at the airbase (runway, hangers, fuel tanks, control tower). Give the strike planner the ability to view the four attacks as part of a single meta-mission; that meta-mission can be assigned shared escorts and route planning. The advances above will make it easy to control when those events happen, which is a big impact. But it would be nice to group those missions together for the purposes of allocating escorts. Instead of assigning escorts to individual strike missions, the escorts are allocated to the group of missions and the escorts work to cover each striking aircraft. Grouping missions could also facilitate ToT planning and weapons allocation.

- A radar shadow map, so you can plan breaking through an air defense. This would be a bunch of work, though, useful but hard to implement.

[Cik]

TOT and WTOT is the real trick. coordinating between fast weapons and slow weapons is a real headache sometimes when the launch ranges are all different and the cruising / mil speeds of the A/C are all different.

actually being able to plan waypoints for the strikers that enable certain behavior subsets (loiter, push, group, split, fire, change your EMCON, change your altitude, fly a certain aspect to XYZ target etc) would also be real great.

setting up a coordinated strike (flight 1 loiters on steer for formup, then pushes to steer 2. at steer 2 pop down to 25,000 light up your jammer. at steer 3 fire decoys, at steer 4 begin flying abeam, at steer 5 go to tanker, once full on fuel RTB) with each flight having it's own semi-programmable behavior.

but i mean if we're just wishing even TOT/WTOT assuming mostly a straight-line ingress would be real handy.

[Airborne Rifles]

ORIGINAL: emsoy

ORIGINAL: Airborne Rifles

Well, if the player decides to plot their own waypoints, then the achievement of a ToT is completely on them and their own planning, as it should be. The suggestion I'm making is about weapons for which the AI already automatically plots an off-axis attack without player input other than to assign the salvo to a target.

Hmm but then the missiles have two possible routes, one going left and one going right? Wouldn't me much spacing between weapons other than that?

Basically the idea would be that the initial off-axis leg of the AI-plotted attack would be slightly shorter for each successive missile fired from a single unit. So a weapon travelling at 500 kts might travel 10 miles in one direction before turning onto its attack vector. the next weapon, launched say ten seconds later, would travel ten seconds' worth of distance less along the off-axis leg, and the next weapon another ten seconds less etc.. The key is for each weapon to travel the same distance to the point where it's terminal guidance kicks in minus the amount of distance traveled by the first weapon prior to the successive weapons' launches. A player can already do this manually by making sure that the (player-plotted) pre-planned off-axis attacks all travel approximately the same distance during their entire flights. Of course, maneuvers by the target throw off the ToT calculations, but hey, that's war [:)]. A variation of just a few seconds can mean the difference between overwhelming a modern ship's point defenses or not.

[tango4]

ORIGINAL: emsoy

ORIGINAL: tango4

I guess it would solve the biggest things holding me (and I insist on the "me" as other people might have other views on this).
I understand that getting the equivalent of a real life planner would probably require as much dev time as cmano itself... So my point of view is that I would try to get a first version released with the most needed features, which are not necessarily the most complex to develop. Of course, the drawback of such an approach is that at a later point you might realise that you want to add feature x or y and that the way you started coding the planner in a simple version would not allow that and would require a complete redevelopement.
Two caveats to what I requested: I am not experienced in air to air refueling in cmano and it might be worth giving it some thought.
And when dealing with fast moving targets it might be difficult to implement a "perfect" tool (but I guess this is the same in real life).
Now in the list I would add a feature: ability to use pre planned attack profiles (another time saver).
Let me explain what I have in mind (this is a quick and dirty explanation, especially given that I am not home right now and don't have access to my computer).
Imagine I want to plan a strike of a static target.
-First I would select the target.
-Then I select participating aircraft (so at this point the planner knows the performance of the aircraft: for example if my target is 500Nm from the airbase and my aircraft radius with their current load out is 400Nm it will be able to give me a warning at a later point in planning).
-Now I would select the profile (of course the default profile for the loadout would be preselected). But the idea would be to use Hi Lo Hi or Lo Hi Lo on a list so that it generates initial altitudes and speeds on the waypoints consistent with that.
-Then you click "generate" and it creates a flight plan that you can visualize with preset altitudes and speeds consistent with the profile you entered.
-Next you would graphically edit the flight plan, repositioning and adding waypoints.
-Then you would look at TOT or things like this.
-In the list of waypoints, one of them could be identified as the "push" waypoint and could be shared with other missions.

I know I forgot lots of things to make it work and that my above list does not take into account averyrhing that is already part of the current mission editor that is already great. My intent was just to try and give you a feel of what I think would be a great help in most scenarii.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.

Charles.

You have some really good points, I must say [8D]

So getting a total overview of the desired functionality would be a good place to start, and then implement piecemeal.

What would the complete feature set be like?

Thanks for the suggestion on how to automate the job of generating flightplans. Loadouts already come with a default profile, would that work as a starting point?

Clearly the default loadouts are a very good starting point (I knew that they are already part of the database which is why I was suggesting that). The idea of using a list with different loadouts is because it would be easier. Let's say a weapon has a Hi Lo Hi default profile. But for some reason I want to use it with a Lo Hi Lo (I know it is not very common, just for the argument's sake). Instead of modifying every single waypoint, it would be great to have a drop down list allowing me to select Lo Hi Lo. And next I will fine tune my waypoints data. But the starting point would be consistent with my goal.
Another thing you could imagine, on top of "generate" button (which would basically pre generate a flight plan like the off angle option already does) you could add a "validate "button. First you enter the data (aircraft, loadout,target, desired profile, you generate a flight plan, you edit it according to your needs, and at this point you click validate. It would tell you for example if you don't have enough fuel (perhaps the editor could be made aware of the fact that a tanker is assigned to the mission or not), or if your weapon are totally useless for such a target (that specific type of warning could be added at a later point in development if deemed doable).
I also feel the above post by DrRansom is very interesting.

Many thanks for your interest in this issue Ragnar.

Good night !

Charles

[Gunner98]

OK

Took a few min and jotted down what I think it should look like. Many points are repeated from some of the above posts and I may have missed other bits. Not sure it is all possible but it needs to be quick, intuitive and reliable:

Screen clip because of the formatting. This is pie in the sky stuff, a simple TOT function would be the basic requirement but this would be much more powerfull.

[DrRansom]

Gunner98 - that's a great summary. One quibble, for the allocate weapons, this perhaps might need to change depending upon weapons / era. Two potential issues, first is doctrinal, is it realistic for an airplane to hit multiple aim points in a pass? Second, is allocating a single dumb bomb realistic versus allocating a single JDAM.

[Cik]

well, you could allocate a single bomb. whether or not you'd actually try to do that is just situational and doctrinal.

one problem we have currently is that the aim-assisted CCIP / dive bomb modes of gen 3+ are not really modeled, so irons are probably less accurate than they should be from certain platforms and against certain targets.

each weapon class (or, well, at least a few) would have to have their own specific option subset or things might get a little weird.

it's a good mapout though.

[Gunner98]

Yeah, those are fair points.

I'm thinking that the target priority should have some setting that issue the player warnings - or add munitions that the player hasn't

Eg.

5 targets. 1 is pri 1 a bunker, 1 is pri 2 a runway and the rest are pri 3 - hangers

Player assigns 10 TLAMS to his pri 1 target and lets the planner assign the rest say 20 TLAMS, 4xF-16 with 2 2KJDAMS penetrators each

When player hits 'calculate' he should get a message like:

1. weapons allocated to target #1 inappropriate need penetrator - recommend removing these weapons

meanwhile the planner has allocated
-2x F-16s to the bunker
-2x F-16s to the runway
-12x TLAM to the hangers (4 each)

8 TLAM unallocated as not requried

Player can change what he wants add extra TLAMS if he wants to use them anyway etc

The real trick is the planner adjusts the firing time and course of each TLAM to make sure it arrives at the right time and not produce the long train of Growler bait to get chewed up piecemiel.

Just some thoughts

B

[JPFisher55]

Kind of like the patrol mission planner. The strike mission would be divided into the legs like now, but for each leg, you could specify an
altitude, like for patrol missions, whether to refuel on ingress leg and which tanker mission to use, and whether to refuel on egress leg and which
tanker mission to use.

[DrRansom]

Gunner98 - there's a reason I wanted to switch to a meta-mission structure, because I think that weapons allocation might be a step too far for the computer to handle. The strike planner should support player weapons allocation with design tools

CiK - I agree there's room for customized terminal delivery options, e.g. toss, dive, level, but that is a beyond the immediate scope of an advanced strike planner.

[tango4]

Gunner98, there are lots of very interesting thoughts in your posts, and it looks like a target design for a final version of an advanced strike planner (I know, this is exactly what Emsoy asked).
Just a thought but perhaps it would be interesting to see if such an advanced tool could be developed in increments. The idea here would be to define a target version, but in the process making sure that it's development could be split in "bricks" so that we can get the basic functions in a reasonable timeframe.
Clearly you have given much thought into this (if I remember correctly you are the author of brilliant tutorials...[:)]).
These are just food for thought of course, as this is starting to go far beyond my level !