[Guide] How to spawn many cold start Hornets on the carrier

TL;DR version

• For Hornets (and maybe now even working with Tomcats?), spawn the first 5-6 aircraft normally.
  
• For the following ones, select a slot and go back and forth between that slot and “back to spectators” until you spawn cold on a cat.
  
• If you started on a cat, startup and move from the spawn point to the sixpack to allow additional Hornets to spawn.
  
• In the end of the article, there are funky tricks on how to avoid deck sliding.
  

Background

The carrier spawning is very limited, especially in multiplayer, only allowing you to spawn 5-6 aircraft. There is a fallback system that lets you spawn additional cold aircraft on the catapults. Unfortunately it’s bugged, making it unintuitive how to use it.

Why would you like to spawn cold? Well, it’s bad ass to see a whole package of 16-ish jets getting ready on the deck, hearing the engines starting etc. It’s simply a great way to kick off the squadron mission night.

Detailed instruction

Let’s say we are 12 Hornets in three flights (Alpha11-14, Bravo21-24 and Charlie31-34) that want to start cold. Follow this procedure:

1. Assign a spawn coordinator. In this example, you are the coordinator.
   
2. Keep everyone in the same voice channel for now. You will need to tell them what to do and when.
   
3. Unpause the server.
   
4. Tell Alpha11 to spawn. He’ll spawn on elevator 2 (starboard side).
   
5. When Alpha 11 is in, tell Alpha12 to spawn, then 13 and 14. Elevator 2 (starboard side) and 4 (port side) are now filled.
   
6. Spawn in Bravo21. He’ll come in on elevator 3 (starboard side, behind the tower).
   
7. Spawn in Bravo22. Now things are getting interesting... Sometimes he’ll end up on elevator 3. Sometimes he gets “Your flight is delayed”. If he’s okay, the next aircraft (Bravo23) will most definitely get “delayed” though. It doesn’t matter much.
   
8. From now on, all players will always get “Your flight is delayed”. They should then press Back to spectators, then try the same exact slot again (do not attempt switching to another flight). Usually they spawn in on attempt 2, sometimes a few more attempts are needed. Continue spawning one aircraft at a time until all four cats are occupied.
   
9. The guys spawning on the cats should not do the full startup. Just have them start the engines, and then asap in an orderly fashion taxi from the cat and park on the “sixpack” (that’s the parking slots behind Cat 2) and complete their setups over there.
   
10. After the cats have been vacated, spawn in four more aircraft. Same thing here, “Flight is delayed”, always, but just keep go Back to spectators and pick the same slot again. It will work. Taxi them to the sixpack. Rinse and repeat.
    

Notes

Why taxi to the sixpack? To be honest, technically it doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you get out of the way. For us, it’s a convenient way of doing it, because that way people always know where to go without having to be directed. It’s relatively easy to communicate this procedure to new players in your group. If you prefer, feel free to use all the other cool places on the deck.

Tomcats

Maybe this is fixed by now (see below). But last time I tried this in an actual multiplayer mission, Tomcats required special care. A bug caused a CTD if you pressed Back to spectator, which obviously is not good in this scenario. Another issue is the size of the aircraft. Many times, I have seen the Tomcats spawn in only 1 bird on each elevator. These two problems together means you can only count on spawning in 3 Tomcats. The only way of getting more in there was to add an extra carrier for the extra ones. This is what we did (don’t forget to disable TCN on the extra carrier if you go this route).

When writing this, I quickly tested again (but not on a crowded deck), and the F-14 did not CTD when pressing Back to spectators after Flight Delayed. So maybe, just maybe, the above method now works equally well for both Hornets and Tomcats. I know that Heatblur has been made aware of the problem, so maybe they’ve solved it? Great news in that case!

Deck sliding, what is it? Is it bad?

Deck sliding is caused by network lag and how the aircraft inherits (or not inherits) the movement of the carrier they are standing on. Even with minimal lag, the sliding can be very noticable. It’s common that aircraft suddenly slide into each other, cutting a wing off and being put on fire.

It seems to get worse when the carrier is moving fast. But, it’s not a good solution to simply have a slow moving boat. You want ~25 knots or so over the deck, and if there’s no wind, you need the carrier to move at this speed to create that wind. Maybe you’ll be okay with having 15 kts speed and 10 kts headwind, but in the end, as long as the carrier is moving at all, you will risk deck sliding. With 20 people spawning, you might not want to risk this.

How to avoid deck sliding (.miz included, yay!)

The solution we came up with (kudos to Mauritz, who managed to figure out how to accomplish this technically) was to have the carrier standing still when the mission starts, and then tell it to start moving through a radio menu F10 command. You simply press this when everyone has launched and the boat starts moving. Best of both worlds really. No deck sliding, but correct wind over deck when time comes for recovery. And no, there’s no problem cat launching the aircraft without headwind.

The only downside really is that it requires some mission editor setup. You’ll need to use the Mist lua file, call a script function, and setup some trigger stuff in the ME. I have attached an example miz of how to do it.

Basically, it works like this: The carrier has no route, so it’s standing still. Instead, a deactivated speedboat unit has the carrier’s route waypoints. When you activate the trigger through the radio menu, the route is copied to the carrier, so it starts moving. Maybe there’s an easier solution, but so far, I haven’t found any.

In the attached mission you have a main carrier setup like this. You also have a stationary backup carrier that you can despawn with F10 radio, Hornet and Tomcat flights (with synched preset lists), and a rescue helo using the same trick to start moving on command as the carrier. Feel free to use it as a template for your own carrier ops missions. Just don't forget to add tankers and AWACS.

Final notes

ED, I know you aren’t going to look into improving the current carrier before you have released the super carrier. Fair enough. I realize you need to prioritize certain stuff (the stuff that brings food to the table). If however, you perform any steps towards improving it, unless you have a fully working solution for a package-size multiplayer group, please at least don’t make this workaround impossible. We have spent countless evenings working out how to get this working, and it would feel horrible having to start from square 0 again. Currently, with this workaround, we are finally enjoying large-scale carrier ops and are having a blast with it! :)

DCSCarrierTrick.miz

mist_4_3_74.lua

Very well put together, should really help people get to grips with boat life, well done!

Really nice Guide .. goes straignt into the "Important Tips" folder :)

Thanks for sharing

Well done, will definitely incorporate some of these into our squadrons missions. Thanks!

Brilliant. Thank you for your hard work and for sharing your knowledge.

hey Bankler, our group tried this last night with 12 of us on the Stennis. A problem we had, was that once one of the first 6 jets starts spawning on the cats (instead of the parking spots), its impossible to get him to spawn anywhere other than a different cat. And then subsequent spawns all ignored the empty parking spot. This happened when we we had 1 empty parking spot available, and then when we tried again, with 3 empty spots available still.

Any ideas what causes that, or what we can do to fill that parking spot? We tried respawning that jet that prematurely ended up on the cat, but couldn't get him to take the parking even when choosing different spawn slots. Also, once the cats are all taken, the next spawn (which we hoped would take the parking spot), ended up blowing up on the cat.

Your insight would be appreciated!

Enjoying your case 1 training mission. Thanks!

hey Bankler, our group tried this last night with 12 of us on the Stennis. A problem we had, was that once one of the first 6 jets starts spawning on the cats (instead of the parking spots), its impossible to get him to spawn anywhere other than a different cat. And then subsequent spawns all ignored the empty parking spot. This happened when we we had 1 empty parking spot available, and then when we tried again, with 3 empty spots available still.

 

Any ideas what causes that, or what we can do to fill that parking spot? We tried respawning that jet that prematurely ended up on the cat, but couldn't get him to take the parking even when choosing different spawn slots. Also, once the cats are all taken, the next spawn (which we hoped would take the parking spot), ended up blowing up on the cat.

 

Your insight would be appreciated!

When the aircraft start spawning on the cats, they will continue to do that. You can't do anything about it. At some point, the spawning slots will reset and be available again, but (to my knowledge) this isn't something you can control. It typically happens when the deck is empty. I.e definetely not when you have 10 other aircraft spawned on deck.

So, as described in the OT, all the guys spawning on the cats will need to taxi away to make room for the next guys spawning. The first lucky few that spawned on the elevators may stand still where they are. Their slots will not open up anyway.

Peaches>> Thanks, glad you enjoy it!

Hey Bankler do you know how to spawn anywhere on the deck when you dont have anyone else. Trying to figure out because I keep spawning just in front of cat 1 and 2 and I want to spawn somewhere else