The great leaps of v1.11: AGL altitude settings, stores jettison and mission player feedback

March 9, 2016 · Posted in Command

The v1.10 update for CMANO was released on Feb 26 to widespread acclaim. The dev team is already hard at work preparing the next upcoming major release, version v1.11. After the panoply of new features in past updates, what new tricks do the CMANO devs have up their sleeves? Let’s take a peek.

Above Ground Level (AGL) altitude settings

Further preparations have been made for the startup of the Advanced Strike Planner project. Command v1.11 adds an Above Ground Level (AGL) altitude setting, in addition to the existing Above Sea Level (ASL) setting, to enable terrain-following (i.e. ride altitude) for aircraft equipped with terrain-following and terrain-avoidance radar. Currently, this distinction is only made in the Speed/Altitude window but it will be a important feature in the Advanced Strike Planner.

(Click on image for full view)

In addition, all weapons have had their weapon release parameters updated in database v441. The minimum and maximum release altitudes may be AGL or ASL, or both. For example, the firing parameters could require the aircraft to fly at minimum 1000ft above sea level (ASL) and also have minimum 200ft ground clearance (AGL).

Stores Jettison

This has been a popular user request and especially after we introduced the weight-dependent aircraft performance tweaks in v1.10. Aircraft will now jettison their A2G stores when evading an attack (if the relevant doctrine setting is set to YES). This is accompanied by a relevant message detailing the stores ejected.

The jettison check is made every 5 seconds (it takes a few seconds to do this in the cockpit), so there is a chance that an aircraft that is caught by surprise will have no time to jettison its stores before the missile impact happens. Also only external stores can be jettisoned (we have no knowledge of internal stores being ejected in combat).

The current implementation has a known issue: Conformal Fuel Tanks (CFTs), like those on the F-15E and numerous export F-16s, are treated like drop tanks and thus jettisoned (in RL they cannot be ejected). We plan to address this in the future.

Mission player feedback: “Why aren’t my strike aircraft taking off!?”

Mission Editor 2.0 introduced in Command v1.07 was a significant step forward in mission planning capabilities. However, many users felt that the built-in flightplan generator wasn’t too forthcoming with the reasons why a mission would refuse to launch. Is the target out of range? Have we run out of aircraft or targets? Is it due to a lack tankers? Something else?

Command v1.11 solves this by giving a lot more feedback. If a strike mission fails to launch it will tell the player the exact reason, and in most cases also give advice on how to solve the problem. So keep an eye on the message log, and you may see something like this: