At-Sea Combat Rescue?

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At-Sea Combat Rescue? - 2/6/2016 8:09:49 PM

Araner

Posts: 50
Joined: 10/27/2014
Status: offline

I've been looking into ways to incorporate more realistic casualty evacuation procedures into my scenarios and would like to hear suggestions for scripts/events/actions etc... which would account for recovery of downed pilots/evacuation crews etc... when an aircraft or surface vessel is damaged or destroyed. As far as I can tell, most of the necessary database components are available in the form of radio beacons, life rafts, downed airmen units etc... The first method which occurs to me would be to configure an event which teleports a liferaft/beacon/downed pilot to a given location whenever a unit is destroyed. A condition could also be set which teleports a downed pilot unit if the crash is over land or a life raft if at sea. I'm not sure however, if it is possible to automatically teleport to the location where an attack has occured, or if it is possible to bundle a life raft/downed pilot together with a radio beacon as would happen in real life.

This also seems like the kind of thing that would be perfect for LUA, but I'd need some guidance with setting something like that up.

Of course, automatically adding a lifeboat is only half the battle... The real question is about how to actually configure a rescue mission... I'm guessing you could set up a land-based rescue by setting up a ferry mission to a landing zone, but I could only picture doing this manually. A sea-borne combat rescue is an entirely different animal however since AFAIK it would only fit into a support mission parameters...

Another situation to consider is how many survivors there would likely be in the case of a modern missile attack on a surface vessel. If one considers the amount of attention modern land forces place on casualty evacuation, then the loss of say, a DDG 51 would demand an immediate reaction in the form of rescue operations, medevacs, casualty/survivor searches etc... In the Falklands War the HMS Sheffield, and Coventry had about the same complement as on a modern DDG-51 (roughly 280 men) and each lost about 20 men while the other 260 had to be rescued. Thats a lot of lifeboats to account for in the open ocean!
In any case, this all relates to a larger issue of how best to account for the effect of human casualties as opposed to unit damage. I don't mean in some kind of "hidden cost of war" nonsense, but rather in terms of how scoring is calculated and in the overall gameplay. For example, why would the loss of a small UAV like the RQ-21 Raven be considered equal to the loss of say a C-130 full of troops? Even if the economic value of the hardware was closer in comparison, surely the loss of a planeload full of troops would have serious political and strategic repercussions far beyond the cost of the destroyed aircraft?

Post #: 1

RE: At-Sea Combat Rescue? - 2/7/2016 12:50:08 AM

Gunner98

Posts: 5508
Joined: 4/29/2005
From: The Great White North!
Status: offline

Araner

Have played around with this one a bit. I think that it could be slicker with Lua but I use the 'old fashioned' teleport method. General steps are:

-Set the unit in Side A, call it a merchant ship, average of 20-30 crew, one or two life boats.
-Set up another 'side' call it whatever, in this case Side B, make it blind, not playable etc
-In Side A, go to the other side of the globe, put your life boats and a radio beacon there. Label the LBd & RB appropriately
-Also while your there set up an Area and label the RPs 'Dump' or something like that
-Go back to the ship (I tend to use Ctl+# keys to jump around the map)
-Switch to Side B, God's eye ON
-Set a reference area Fixed Relative to the merchant ship
-Set up events:
----Ship Sunk
--------Trigger: Unit destroyed
--------Actions:
-Teleport all LBs & the RB to the area on Side B around the ship
-A message is always good to alert the player
----Rescue
--------Trigger: Rescue unit remains in area X min
--------Actions:
-Teleport the LBs & RB to the Dump area
-Give some points
-A message

A potential problem with this method is if the rescue unit crosses the ships relative area (which the player cannot see) and the 'unit remains in area' is too short, the 2nd event might fire and screw things up. So its good to make the area small.

The RB should be automatically detected, the LBs not

If you look in Northern Fury 3 - Dagger to the Heart, there are quite a few of these. Northern Fury 10.3 has some simpler ones.

Hope this helps

B

(in reply to Araner)

Post #: 2

RE: At-Sea Combat Rescue? - 2/7/2016 10:14:35 AM

mx1

Posts: 76
Joined: 1/16/2014
Status: offline

I would do it like this, assuming that you want to simulate SAR operation for "Side A" ship survivors and 'Side H' is controlled by human who actually performs SAR operation.

1. Set up event with trigger like 'on time'/'on random time' (simulating sinking due to natural disaster, sabotage etc.) or on 'unit destroyed' (if sinking is supposed to be a result of combat). There are following actions in this event:
a) deleting the ship (if trigger was not 'unit destroyed')
b) Lua script which adds life boats/beacons etc. to 'Side B (ship survivors)'. 'Side B' is not playable, neutral to 'Side A'. Location of units should be randomized in the vicinity of ship that sunk. Now IRL we don't know exact position of a ship that sunk so in order to simulate this 'the vicinity' depends on the specific scenario.
c) starting timer event (event which repeats every X minutes) - more on that later. Timer event is implemented by teleportation of 'Side C' (technical, nonplayable side) unit into some remote area, which activates event based on 'unit remains in the area' every X minutes.
2. Event 1 may signal (via message box/message) player ('side H') that ship has sunk and SAR should be launched.
3. Timer event randomly changes position of 'Side B' assets with Lua. This is to compensate for the lack of 'set unit speed' function in CMANO. So instead we would slighly change position of 'Side B' assets every X minutes - for a life boat adrift I would say it is 300m every 5 minutes.
4. There is an event 'on unit detected' which triggers when 'side B' asset is detected by 'Side H' (survivors found). This enables the rescue part of SAR opearation. This event creates area around 'side b' asset (adding RP) and stops timer event (so the asset no longer jumps around).
5. The actual rescue is an event triggered by 'unit remains in the area' where area is the area created in step 4 It deletes 'side B' asset rescued.
6. If step 4 does not happen within defined timeframe (lets say 3 days) 'side B' assets are deleted and SAR fails.

Regarding the scoring I would use Lua for that. At the start of the scenario you initialize variable X to the number of people on the ship. As part of action in step 1 above you assign some parts of it to the assets created. So for example we start with X=20, and then we create two boats with X1=6 and X2=8 (which means that 6 persons have perished during evacuation/sinking event). Timer event can change X1 and X2 to simulate additional losses - the longer survivors remain undetected the more of them die. This can be simple 'x% chance' on every time unit or more elaborate function to simulate things like depletion of resources. Xn variables can be further modified in step 5 to simulate additional losses during rescue part. Final score is sum(Xn)-X.

Lua scripts are simple but it would take some time to code and configure everything.
The above can be changed if 'side H' is computer controlled. In such case step 2 activates 'ASuW' patrol mission with SAR assets assigned to it. Step 4 would activate another 'ASuW' patrol mission but in the area of asset detected (this can be achieved by changing location of RP associated with second patrol mission) and would reassign asset which detected survivors (I am not sure this part, that is we would know from Lua which asset has detected 'side b' asset) from first patrol to another. Then step 5 would RTB asset from the second patrol.

(in reply to Gunner98)

Post #: 3

RE: At-Sea Combat Rescue? - 2/8/2016 12:50:21 PM

dippysea

Posts: 24
Joined: 5/13/2015
Status: offline

Araner, I created a new thread to answer your question. It has a scenario attached.

You can refine it by changing the function which created a wreck or Raft and adding beacon etc.

You can also add a delete statement to MissionFail and MissionPickup functions to remove the beacon etc ... creating a MissionTidy function that both call would work.

P.S. I would have added it to this thread, but had a problem posting (which I fixed by creating a text file attachment) ... but only after creating a new thread as test :-)

(in reply to mx1)

Post #: 4