Piett

Thanks MK2, your efforts are very much appreciated.

Recently I've been flying quite a few missions in the Canberra B2 in the Falklands mod. The optical bomb sight for level-bombing works extremely well, and is an interestingly different challenge to the dive-bombing more common in Third Wire sims. The way the bomb-sight works is ingeniously simple, too. As far as I can see, it's essentially just a radar altimeter. The trick is the calibration so that bombs hit where the crosshair shows for any current altitude. Of course, this will only work for a single airspeed, so this is taken care of by an on-speed indicator light which illuminates at the correct airspeed. This got me to thinking - you could do the same for radar bombing, by superimposing a similar radar-altimeter-controlled crosshair over the radar screen, instead of over the cockpit glass for the visual bomb-sight. Note that this wouldn't be part of the radar symbology as such, but a separate cockpit instrument placed over the radar scope. Assuming it was correctly calibrated, you would then have to place the target return blip on the radar centre-line, make sure you were wings-level and on-speed, then drop the bomb when the crosshair was on the target blip. This would only work for a single range setting on the radar: maybe there could be a status light much like the one for airspeed which would illuminate when the correct range was selected (don't know if such a thing is supported). Of course accuracy is going to be nowhere near as good as for visual bombing, but for area targets like clusters of buildings, or airfield runways, it's probably good enough. This could be useful for B-52s for instance, or particularly (what brought it to mind for me) Vulcan Black Buck raids on Stanley airfield in the Falklands. With a suitable mod to the Vulcan cockpit much like the Canberra's, pressing H could take you to the navigator radar's position with a suitable radar scope and cross-hair. Resolution is probably sufficient for at least as accurate a strike as the real missions managed. I would have a shot at this myself, but have not the first idea about cockpit construction. Any cockpit modders out there find this idea interesting?

Yep, I think you're right about this. I've seen exactly this effect also in the Falklands mod. Before the date of the British landings, flying for Argentina I have been assigned bombing targets in the San Carlos Firebase, which shouldn't exist yet. If the target is a terrain object only, the game engine acts as though a target exists (i.e. can be selected with the red targetting box etc.), but no object appears. If the target is set to Use Groundobject then the model appears (e.g. an artillery piece etc.) and can be destroyed, but the game engine doesn't acknowledge this and the red targetting box stays on a "destroyed" object. In the debrief after the mission the target is reported as undamaged, even if it had seemed to be destroyed. Behaviour seems to be back to normal after the ActiveDate passes. Definitely looks like a bug.

First let me say that I am absolutely blown away by the Falklands mod - the attention to detail is just superb. Many thanks to the mod team! However, I have turned up a couple of minor bugs. The first concerns the drop-tanks for the Mirage III: the campaign supply and loadouts are set up for non-camo'ed tanks, but the model is set for those with camo, so you can't load drop-tanks in the campaign. Easy fix - open MirageIIIEA_DATA.INI, find the entries with M3_RP1700C and change them to M3E_RP1700. The second concerns campaign target selection: flying Harrier GR3s for No 1 Squadron RAF in the campaign, I have been assigned targets in the British navy amphibious group. The ships in this group also opened fire on me, so this group seems to be treated as an enemy force (i.e. Argentinean). I think the problem is that it lies on the Argentinean side of the front-line - see below. Also, Port Howard is also set as being British-held at the start of the campaign. I know an SAS patrol set up an observation post here, but still, is this right? It has a AAA position and a supply dump (which I was assigned to bomb as Argentina), which seem unlikely to correspond to just an SAS patrol. Should it be Argentinean-held instead?