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[cbradbury]

I dislike using waypoints (and autopilot) in my missions – I like to ‘free fly’ as in real life. I also like to fly with all the map indicators off for the same reason. Recently this has become a problem, for which I have devised a solution that others may find useful. I assume that this will also work in other versions of Il2, but as I use BAT exclusively I have placed it in this forum.

I have been spending a lot of time flying the helicopters in BAT lately, and have designed an ‘ice station zebra’ type mission on the excellent north pole map. However, just as in real life, navigating over miles of ice with no landmarks makes finding a small base very difficult, to say the least.

I have never mastered the use of beacons, and as far as I am aware you need waypoints for them to work. So, how to find a miniscule base in a sea of ice?

The answer – use the ‘surface search radar’ element of the C&C mod! I thought of using the OBOE object, but this requires a bomb loadout before it will work, and a bomb loadout is not available for most of the BAT helicopters. Of course the C&C surface radar only detects ships, so it is necessary to give it a ship target near your base for the radar to work. This is how you do it:

I’m sure most of you already know the trick to get ships to travel on rivers – place your ship at sea in the mission, place a dummy object on land where you want your ship to be, then edit the mis file, copying the ship object to the dummy location.

What I do is use the ‘US Pilot1’ stationary ship object then move it inside a building at the polar base so that it is invisible. The C&C radar object will then detect that target and guide you to the base!


Yours,

Clive

[tomoose]

The YG beacon doesn't require a waypoint, just place it at your homebase.  You'll hear a morse signal and depending on what letter of the alphabet you hear you can easily determine which direction the transmission is coming from.
https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php?topic=40138.0

Hope this helps.

[western0221]

At first, Setup your Difficulty as "Misc --- Realistic Navigation --- ON".
With this setting, ADF equipped cockpits' compass become to show the direction of the chosen Non-Directional Beacon (NDB); not only YG Beacon tomoose says.

When the mission has the NDB on the side of a home airfield, ADF needle shows the direction of the home.
NDB and other beacons' position and their two letters codes are shown in mini-map also in briefing screen.

Use "Next Beacon / Previous Beacon" key to choose a beacon or not. Assign those functions on some keys you like in Controls screen before you fly.

[cbradbury]

Thank you for the information, gentlemen. However I have just discovered sputnikshock's GEE and Navaid mod which works brilliantly and solves my problem. The drawback with my solution was that the radar information was always on screen.

[whistler]

This is a very interesting topic where we all can learn new tricks.

The signal-flare object was greatly improved by Storebror a few expansions back.... Your Ice Station Zebra definitively needs to employ a flare guy!

[cbradbury]

How do you get the flare to work, Whistler? I have not had any success with it.

[ecf111]

The Navaid mod is awesome especially for aircraft that don't have an adf but are supposed to. I posted a short log section and question to see if anyone could take a look. I'm no log expert and I stopped testing the mod with BAT around the time of this post.

https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,18977.msg242411.html#msg242411
It seems to work ok but that log message comes up every 15 seconds, wasn't sure if it would break something.

Please let us know if you continue testing and any problems. I'm about to reload my wip campaigns with the mod and restart testing.

Thanks!

[Vampire_pilot]

C&C has the NAV feature:

Navigator (NAV)
The NAV object represents a navigator on board your aircraft, or a
ground station feeding you information on your current position (like
LORAN or GEE).
- How it works: Place anywhere. Every few minutes, the navigator will
report your map grid position.
- The NAV object is affected by weather. In clear weather, the
navigator is fairly reliable. In bad weather, he may only be counted
on to within 20 km or so.
NavError (1 = on. If activated, the navigator's margin of error will
increase with time. After two or three hours, his position fixes may
be off by as much as 50km.)

If you know the location of your target, this is a great tool for me.

a lot of modern jets (as western mentioned) have this feature per default

[cbradbury]

I use the NAV object a lot, too. As I don't often fly combat missions, I like to complicate things in cargo delivery missions, etc. As a result I usually turn the grid readout off in the HUD and just use the navigator as he makes mistakes.

[ecf111]

It would be neat to incorporate the NAVAID mod into C&C as well, but that's way beyond my scope...

[whistler]

How do you get the flare to work, Whistler? I have not had any success with it.

Hmnnn. Flares work, I have seen them recently in missions, but specifics were somehow lost when the Angels High - Service Pack topics were removed, if I recall correctly. It would be good to have the info recovered for further reference.

[cbradbury]

It would be neat to incorporate the NAVAID mod into C&C as well, but that's way beyond my scope...

NAVAID and C&C work together just fine. Surface search radar, the C&C NAV object etc, all work fine whilst still having NAVAID to call the location of the beacon(s) in the mission as well!