Sometimes missions are cancelled due to "lack of pilots". The view is that it should read "lack of aircraft".

The relationship between the number of aircraft flying or assigned to missions to the "available aircraft" is something of a mystery. One view that there are more planes in a squadron than actually stated because after a plane has landed, it is unavailable for some time before it is free to be used again. A plane in the frag order that has a particular pilot shown has been assigned to the mission and can't be unassigned to free it for another. I don't know if there is a way of cancelling the mission - I haven't found it if there is.

There is some truth in this I think, but it is not the whole story. I have had more than 24 planes from one squadron in the air at the beginning of a mission, although some flights are cancelled. And, without any re-supply, the total number of Flankers in the air added to the number I have shot down in the previous hour exceeded the total number of planes available to the Flanker squadron.

So I don't know what is going on. One possibility is that there may be a time lag between planes getting lost and getting recorded, so the generator will continue to task missions and they will continue to get flown.

If you are interested in generating specific types of missions, this is the best source.

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Eric Marlow
aka "Snacko"
Contributing Editor - COMBATSIM.COM
iBeta - Director of Technology

Do you mean the ATO or the FRAG list? I have seen no evidence that the priority missions slider affects the ATO, but it can affect the frag list, as long as the appropriate missions are being generated. But I know there is a debate here.

I've read the iBeta ATO explanation and it is very informative - keep up the good work. I suppose I just really, really wanted the hyperactivity (on both the DPRK and Combined Force sides) toned down a bit.

As Alex alludes to, what I'm really after is control of your squadrons 'Frag' order, in order to be able to reduce the number of times there are more aircraft in the air than there actually are on the squadron roster.

I've systematically played around with a lot of the variables in the Falcon4.Aii file to examin their long term effect on campaigns, but whilst I've managed to alter the number of missions fragged at any given time, and the number of priority missions (A & B priority) available, the results still seem to end up the same, namely:

More aircraft take off than is physically possible.

This lead me to wonder if the program was checking the number of pilots available as opposed to the number of planes available when generating the Frag.

I've seen an explanation from the Hex Codes crew on how the number of planes available at the start of the campaign may be varied. I'm wondering if a couple of bytes changes somewhere would yield less pilots in each squadron, and therefore cause the change i'm looking for.

Sorry for the long post, hope you get my point.

[This message has been edited by Yorkshire Tea (edited 01-10-2000).]

I discovered that I was totally mistaken about that situation where the frag shows nothing but CAPs. I wasn't paying attention to the fact that a particular squadron's specialty was air-to-air. And then bitching about CAPS.

It's the lack of pilots thing that gets me, because there usually ARE sufficent aircraft and pilots available. Apparently they just haven't been assigned. I figure this as a bug.