DCS Mission Talk - PVE Capture the Base Incursion

[fearlessfrog]

Ok, so SFROG3 Syria mission is still rolling on. When I get 20 mins or so I often jump in, as it’s nice to have something familiar to get some time in and throw stuff in the air. @BeachAV8R’s server is taking shape, but the mission on this one is just really easy to get in to.

Our main issue is really the Red CAP is fairly unrelenting. We do good stuff on reducing the SAM coverage, and get close to taking the nearby airport base (Bassel Al-Assad) but the CAP just keeps coming. When trying to mop up ground units or go full DEAD loadout it means we either need our own fighter CAP protection or we need to self protect - this means a mixed loadouts and getting less stuff done in the time. The fact that the Hornet radar is reduced and the -120C’s with a chaff fixation recently isn’t helping.

So we either need help (which means getting timezones organized etc) or a different set of tactics. One idea I had was to pull the dust cover off an old friend:

Yes, that’s 6 Phoenix missiles, or approximately 1500 new hospital clinics.

This actually works pretty well. Get up above the fleet at FL400, tell Jester to go TWS Auto and let fly the dogs of war. I sit there reading PC Pilot, and just hit weapons release 6 times. Here’s an in-action shot:

So the F-14 does means we can reach out and touch our Red CAP without much danger, but the downside is it is still pretty time intensive. Plus I sort of wanted to sit in an iHornet and not the gameboy powered Tomcat.

So, to recap the main mission:

• Capture Damascus, Hama, Al Qusayr, Beirut, Bassel Al-Assad, and Aleppo to unlock more spawn locations.
• Capture An Nasiriyah, Al Qusayr, Abu al-Duhur, Wujah Al Hajar, and Hama to stop Syrian CAP operations.
• Capture Hama to stop Syrian carrier strike operations

One tactic we can try is the 2nd point - not capture those airbases but damage them so that the CAP is less annoying, allowing us to then slowly capture bases by destroying ground units and SAMs.

What we need is a Deep Strike mission. I believe the word ‘Interdiction’ is probably appropriate about now.

So given the airbase list, and a refresher on the map (carrier group is west of Latakia):

We need to take out those five beautifully drawn circles.

How do we do it?

[BeachAV8R]

@fearlessfrog

How do we do it?

Dig a tunnel from Cyprus?

[BeachAV8R]

Oh man…I almost pulled that off…! Loaded up an Su-25T with those rocket propelled concrete penetrators along with some external fuel tanks…

Took off out of Incirlik and went low level southeast bound just hugging the terrain…

It was some pretty exciting low-level flying. I managed to avoid detection all the way down to about 10km north of Abu al-Duhur…which was my target airfield. I think that airfield spawns MiG-29s…

There was no interest in me until I was around 30km north maybe…trying to scoot as fast as I could toward the east side of Abu al-Duhur since I figured I could take a hard right turn, line up on the runway for my low level bomb pass…and escape to the north if I wasn’t shot down by the airfield defenses.

Unfortunately an F-14B sniffed me out. I was within sight of the airfield when he launched on me. Had his Phoenix missed I would have been able to complete the strike. I was probably only 60 seconds away from bomb release. Argh…!!

So…with an escort, I’m sure this would work. The only real problem is that the Su-25T maxes out at about 800 kph with that loadout - so it does take about fifteen minutes or so to make the run down there from Incirlik…so Hornets will be on station a bit earlier than that and might need to loiter until go time.

My EWR was chirping just with search radars…I was never locked up. And it didn’t go off when the F-14 launched on me - I saw the smoke trail from the missile firing at my high 1 o’clock…

[BeachAV8R]

The last minutes of the attack from my perspective…

Su-25T low level attack...

[fearlessfrog]

Getting killed in VR is a pretty visceral experience - always makes me jump a bit.

I’ll get up that Tomcat with all the phoenix’s from the boat and give you some top cover…

[fearlessfrog]

Good flights today @BeachAV8R and nice night landing. My wasting of Tomcats is getting to be a thing.

When it gets dark on that server, it gets really dark. Server restarts in about 3.5 hours (so 2021-05-18T22:35:00Z - when it does we can start fresh.

A plan of attack could be this:

Pink Mission: Wujab Al Hajar (WPT 13). We HARM it to death, with a CAP mix to self defend. Then either low level Mk84 on runway, or we just start to JDAM and Maverick the ground units. The latter will be good as we can then capture it. The SA-6 site is the main threat here.

Green Mission: The Crazy BeachAVR8 Ivan Su-25 run, with a ‘Fox 3 (Again) Tomcat’ coming in to annoy the CAP from the Latakia direction. The goal is just to bomb the runway.

That will give us 2 out of the 5 Red CAP bases, so a good start.

[fearlessfrog]

The people that run that server kindly made a couple of nice tweaks:

• The mission time now runs from 9AM to 9PM, so a lot longer in daylight before the 12 hour reset.

• The clouds are a bit more scattered, making ATFLIR work a bit easier up high.

The server has been reset and is on a new cycle.

I also asked about bombing runways as a way to stop RED CAP and currently, due to the bug in DCS where the AI gets stalled on the runways, they are actually air start spawning - which means for now until that is fixed in DCS we should probably only capture bases to help the mission. Good to know.

[BeachAV8R]

Great info…! I will drop in to Stoic’s Discord and say hello and reinforce what a great time we’ve been having (or did I read he is shutting that Discord off tomorrow?). Bummer about runway denials not having an affect on sorties…they are so much fun. Nice to have more daylight ops…that night landing was pretty terrifying. NVGs would have been helpful. Can’t imagine landing a Tomcat in the dark…

Taking that coastal airport would be a great foothold since it is pretty central to the rest of the map. Having land bases is nice for emergency landings, repair, and rearm…

Good change on the weather too…

Maybe I should have painted my Su-25T in a Syrian scheme and just tried to blend in. Darn shame I forgot my wingtip (Aphids?)…I think I could have bagged that F-16 after he missed me.

[BeachAV8R]

@fearlessfrog and I cooking up a plan…

Somebody in the hangar deck got a hold of the black paint… (@skatezilla)

After getting smoted (a word I like to use as if it were a real one) we regrouped with Plan B (or was it G?). @fearlessfrog would run interference lobbing Phoenixes while I’d scurry under the SA-6 umbrella for an Mk-84 smackdown.

It actually worked pretty well all things considering. He lured three enemies to their deaths…kept the heat off me…and I somehow managed to go low enough and pop up just high enough to put four bombs on the airfield. It was pitch black by then though (no NVGs)…and I have no idea if the bombs actually hit the runway (I really need to get TacView working).

Came back to the boat and it was pitch black. That is really unsettling. It got my “real pilot” nerves jangling a bit. No thanks. Caught a taxi-1 wire because I closed my eyes in terror.

I think I was holding on too tight…

[SkateZilla]

when I get time I need to load up the M.S. Liveries and Make sure they still work properly, some of the hornet’s UV Coordinates were changed.

[BeachAV8R]

We finally took an airbase…! @fearlessfrog - @Fridge - @beachav8r

We may have sacrificed a squadron of Hornets in the process…but…war is hell…

[Fridge]

Hey! I only lost one last night! Granted I spent a fortune in missed JDAM, LGB, and -120C shots

[DrZaius]

Hey y’all, I’m the server admin and creator of the SFROG missions, thanks to @fearlessfrog (no relation ) for pointing me at this thread, always a surprise to find out that people outside my little group of friends enjoy the missions we host!

I used to be a youtuber/twitcher, but that’s all behind me now and, as already mentioned in the thread, my discord is actually deactivating tonight which makes giving mission feedback difficult. I’m still on discord in the ED server, plus I’ll stop by here every now and again to see if y’all have feedback that would help the mission’s flow. Cheers!

Doc

[schurem]

We’re glad to have you doc!

[BeachAV8R]

Thanks for swinging by @DrZaius - we have been having a blast flying your mission on the StoicFrog server. I’ve learned so much about the Supercarrier and Hornet while flying the mission. It has a really nice layout and can cater to all difficulty levels and scales well from just a single player to having several friends join at once.

We were having a great time strategizing for the best way to keep the CAP off us while we were doing A2G work. It is a shame my suicidal Su-25T low-level run into one of the airport didn’t actually stop the aircraft from spawning…but I understand it is a basic DCS problem that has to be worked around - so you handled it with an elegant solution.

We will try not to spam you with questions - but we did manage to take that coastal airfield last night finally (Al Hajar). After destroying the last ground unit, it changed to having some blue units on it…but in the F10 map it just went to “blank” ownership…neither RED nor BLUE. So I’m guessing that is why were were unable to rearm or refuel once we “owned” it? I had participated in the taking of Hatay airfield up north on a previous run of the server mission and I’m pretty sure I was able to land and refuel/rearm there after that one turned BLUE - an idea why Al Hajar didn’t (or is there a repair airbase function that has to happen after X amount of time?)…

Anyway - thanks for adjusting the clouds up a bit…we really appreciate you tweaking it a bit for us (and the earlier mission start time). I still chuckle at all the little twists and turns as the custom sounds play… Great job on it - and we will check out the Caucasus one soon too!

Thanks for stopping by - we have a great group of friendly enthusiasts here and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Chris “BeachAV8R” Frishmuth (the one usually in the flaming Hornet)…

[DrZaius]

Re: Al Hajar - once the red units are destroyed and the blue units spawn, that should be sufficient for ownership to switch. If there are still red units in the sphere of influence around the base along with the blue units, the the base will refuse you rearm/refuel as it swaps from red to neutral instead of blue. My small group of flyers tend to fly Friday evenings, we’ll hop on and do some bug testing then and see if there’s a reproducible issue there, I see nothing obvious in the mission editor at a glance.

The mission was created for a ‘Hoggit-inspired-lite’ experience where we could have labels on and not be too worried about upsetting the DCS elite flyers. I’d say you’re about the right amount of seriousness for the mission at hand!

[BeachAV8R]

@DrZaius

If there are still red units in the sphere of influence around the base along with the blue units, the the base will refuse you rearm/refuel as it swaps from red to neutral instead of blue.

Ah…I’ll bet it is that SA-6 site nearby on the coast - we defanged it…but didn’t take out all the launchers…

[DrZaius]

Ah, good catch, that was indeed the problem. Uploaded a fix by moving the SA6 further away from Al Hajar

[schurem]

Might it be possible to put a trigger on the CAP spawn’s to check for runway availability? Block them from spawning when @BeachAV8R managed to crater the runway.

[DrZaius]

It’s possible, but I’d rather just lower the frequency of CAP and wait for a Syria ground spawn fix… which reminds me I haven’t tested it in a few patches so I should check it out this weekend and see if it’s actually still borked. Patch notes haven’t given me much hope but maybe it snuck in there…standby…

Right now, capturing the bases defined as CAP spawns in the briefing will remove at least 1 fighter from the CAP rotation for that zone. Reminder too that there are 3 zones with differing difficulty: spawn at incirlik for no CAP and easy times, spawn down south in Israel or Jordan for a moderate challenge with moderate CAP, and spawn on the carrier for hard CAP and the biggest challenge around Hama. Also, if you catch the map early enough, the Iranian Tomcats that defend around Hama are actually fired by an event that, if you beat the event, will prevent the tomcats from respawning and defending Hama, making things easier in the ‘Hard’ zone as well. Once the event has completed successfully, the only way to stop the tomcats from spawning as defenders is capturing Hama.