Thanks for your suggestions sniperton.
Part one (mission start time) can easily be implemented by having several copies of the same mission that differ by start time only. The Server already has a random rotation, so they will pop up just randomly.
Part two unfortunately seems impossible.
There's no way to know the real remaining mission time.
Public pvp Servers showing the remaining time on their stats page can only do so because their missions have the very same duration every time they run.
In our case it's different, the mission duration strictly depends on what's happening on the mission, and there's no way to signal this to any outside application.
Mission Targets are a tricky thing. Currently you need to achieve 4 out of 6 goals, available goals are: Kill Howitzers, Kill Rocket Arty, Kill Train, Kill Level Bombing Target, Kill Vehicle Column, Kill 10 Tanks.
Another logical goal would be "kill <n> enemy aircraft", but the "Kill 10 Tanks" goal already taught us that there's no way to distinguish whether a player actually contributed to the achievement of that goal, or just AI.
Therefore essentially we are limited to goals where AI doesn't take care of.
We could make it 5 out of 6 goals to achieve, but I'm not sure how much that would add to the immersion.
Would be great if we would be able to count player activities only, but for the moment this is out of reach.
Mike