Loss of Bomber Drone during auto take off

[Iraqvet]

I have noticed this happens with the B-17's as well as the B-24's. Upon auto take off you hear a boom and you look back and one of your drones is gone. Does not happen every time but it does happen enough to notice.

Is anyone else having this problem?

[Slate]

  Yes had problem when taking off with formation of Lancs today. Looking in rear view the drone takes off in reverse and flies off into the sunset. Did not happen every time. Have film and will try to post.

[USRanger]

Hey there Iraqvet.  I was with the 2/187th OIF '03-'04.

Air Assault!

[Slate]

   Sorry for the crappy resolution. Don't have any good photo software on this old laptop.





You see the third lanc taking off backwards.

  Tagma map

  NE runway at A-190


Just tried it offline today 4/14/2010 and happened on 2nd takeoff. Wierd doesn't happen every time.

[Iraqvet]

Yeah I hope they get a patch for it. I am tired of getting kills on my bombers like that before I can even lift off..

[kingcobradude]

Ive had that happen to me too. I hate that

[Krusty]

During Red Storm scenario our bomber groups ran into a problem like that once.... Only it didn't happen from the exact same field later on. It happened during a very heavy part of the action with lots of bombs going off, lots of fighters engaged, and a heavy GV fight going on. During this time, we lost a lot of drones and wasted much time landing again to pick them up (it was a scenario, we needed all the bombs we could get on target!).

However, later after some of the heavy fighting went down to a dull roar, we were able to up from the same field with no problems.

Ever since then I have suspected that the server load/lag/congestion plays some role in losing a bomber drone on takeoff. When did you lose yours (Titanic Tuesday, perhaps?), and do you recall if it was laggy or perhaps just a really busy prime time for the server to be used?

[MachNix]

The problem is caused by a combination of elevation of the tile centers off the end of the runways and using Auto-Takeoff.

After some testing, the problem of loosing the #3 drone has a terrain elevation component as well as tile sub-type when using auto-takeoff.  If the center vertex (the blue plus sign) of the tile on which the drones sit has a difference in elevation between -13 and -3 feet (-13 <= deltaY <= -3 ) from the field elevation, I did not find a sub-type combination for that drone tile that would prevent the #3 drone from rolling backwards.  But I did not try every possible combination.  There where some combinations where the drone would roll backwards when that drone center vertex was at the same elevation as the field (deltaY=0).

On the Tagma terrain, the drone center vertex for the NE launch of A157 is 3 feet below the field elevation.  For the NE launch at A190, the drone center vertex is 5 feet below the field elevation.  The SW launch for A190 is 29 feet above the field and I did not loose any drones.

My plan is to check the drone center vertices and set the ones that are in the "trouble" range (-13 <= deltaY <= 0) to either -14 feet below or 1 foot above the field elevation, and not worry about the sub-types.

For the Tagma map, fields where this problem could happen are:
F01 F02 F04 F05 F07 F08 F09 F10 F12 F13 F16 F20 F21 F24 F28 F34 F35 F37 F38 F44
F53 F55 F56 F58 F59 F61 F62 F68 F77 F79 F82 F84 F89 F94 F95 F96 F101 F105 F108
F110 F126 F131 F141 F152 F153 F155 F156 F157 F158 F159 F162 F167 F168 F169 F179
F180 F190 F199 F202 F207 F208 F226 F228

A terrain update was sent to HT in August 2008 that corrected this problem but the update was not used.

MachNix

[Krusty]

Sometimes that causes it. Sometimes it just happens on its own. I don't mean they roll downhill or anything, you just lose them spawning or something funny. That's what I blame on server lag.

Note in my example we used the same field multiple times with different results.