First my apologies.. I've been off the game a bit the last week and a half.. had to deal with 2 funerals; an ex-wife in the hospital; a daughter in rehab and a birthday. A really crummy week.
On to the subject... I've been experimenting with the mission planner; and have put up 5 missions to date for the bishes in the MA as the mood and strategic situation dictated, and was stunned to have them all come off remarkably well. All accomplised the objectives, with minimum losses.
What startled me most was the amount of participation.. seemed to 'strike a cord' so to speak; and the missions all helped to reverse a defensive trend in Bishlandia, and we recovered our lost fields and had some fun.
Is this what is lacking in the MA?? Do we need more of these missions to end the neverending stalemate/attrition of MA dweebishness?
On using the mission planner I discovered a few things that could be changed that would make it a hell of a lot easier to get a mission on the planner quickly.. as it is now; it takes about 15 min to do one up, and another 10-15 min of lead time is required to staff it. That means the mission author needs to be looking at the strat as it WILL BE 30 min from the time he starts writing the mission. obviously; this snail pace of mission generation tends to cut down a hell of a lot on my flying time.. I spent more time writing the missions in the planner than I did flying.
So; here goes some observations and suggetions on the mission planner/editor....
1. Having access to the planner/editor while in FLIGHT (rtb'ing from last mission; setting up next) would make it easy to make more appropriate missions!
2. Stored/saved mission profiles create huge problems in timing... takes a fair amount of time to reopen each flight; reset it's times for start/launch, resave them and then resend the mission to the server. Every time I reworked a saved mission profile it failed to launch the pilots.. It simply put em in the tower, no plane. Wound up having to re-write fresh every mission... loses time; pilots lose intrest while wating. Issit bugged?
3. Waypoints.. no visual feed back during intial point placement. mission has to be 'saved'; reloaded, then reopened in edit mode to verify waypoints. This futzed me up for hours while learning to use the planner this week. In addition, can the Top-Down map room view be made to look DIRECTLY down on the map?? The current view offset makes it impossible to place waypoints correctly.
4. Mission start times/flight start times/field start#/field start runway stuff seems to have problems. The prime mission planner has a place to insert the mission start time/pilots may accept by times... then each and every flight has to have a start time; field start location, runway direction. Why not have the info from the master sheet AUTOMATICLY set the start time; field number; direction etc for ALL flights, and if any variance is needed, it CAN be done for that flight off it's own sheet. In other words; put the info for start/accept by times; field start location; RW direction all on the MASTER page; and changing the info here changes all the flights accordingly. BIG timesaver!
Oh.. and thanks Bishes. that was a pure blast the other night!!
Hang
