sigh This is true lol
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Look on the bright side. At least it isn’t a flaming wreck as a number of the Viggens I have flown have ended up…much to the chagrin of @Troll…just say’n 
I finally figured out the whole ship recce thing the Viggen can do. It is actually very cool. And getting a ship’s course / speed is always important if you hang to find it / sink it later.
So here is my idea for a set of 2 missions, possibly part of a campaign.
The focus is something we (USN) refer to as OTHT, Over The Horizon Targeting.
My idea is to fly a radar recce mission with the ECM pods. Fly around and track (get position & CRS/SPD) from various ships on radar. On RTB, plot out the ship tracks against the ELINT collected. The ELINT boxes may be large, however, the mission can be designed so that ELINT boxes should correlate to a single ship.
With that data, you can pick your “target” based on the track-ELINTmatch and go out on the next mission and, based on the OTHT, hit it with a couple of RB15s from over the horizon.
I’d like to do this “in game” as much as possible. The ELINT pops up on a knee board, and is saved to a file. But not the target tracks.
Does anybody know how I might “extract” them?
The easy solution is to write down the track info while still in the air…which is a viable solution, just not as cool.
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Have you seen this? ELINT POD in the DCS Viggen led to this Articles - Mudspike Forums to play with.
Also, the latest CombatFlite app has a ELINT importer I think.
CombatFlite: DCS Flight Planning Tool
EDIT: Oh, you meant the target tracks. Haven’t looked at those, so not sure. Apologies for wrong links.
Yes I have. The guy who invented the Viggen ELINT Test was a genius! 
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But what does ELINT mean and how is it significant?
I love the Viggen. It’s awesome that it has this ELINT thing, and I want to brag about it. I just have no idea of what it does, and why it is so special in DCS!
ELectronic INTelligence.
In this case it means figuring out what sort of radars are out there, and where they are, by zooming around in specific patterns.
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Great! So the Viggen can fly a reconnaissance mission and record that information for other planes to use in DCS? Yes?
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The viggen pilot can land, read the intel he gathered, and then pass those coordinates to other people, Yes.
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Er, how does that work in DCS? Through scripts? In multiplayer is the Viggen ELINT information available to all?
Edit: sorry this was probably explained up-post.
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The information is populated in a text file in your C:/Users/You/Saved Games/DCS_AJS37 folder. You read thevalues, and you can either type them out over chat or verbally pass them along via Teamspeak/Discord/SRS/whatevs.
Extremely low tech, very resistant to breaking 
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OMG that is AWESOME! Heatblur did that?
Talk about passion. How many people actually picked up on it?
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I recall it was a known quantity before or at release. HB didn’t exactly hide it. I’d wager it hasn’t seen much fan fair in the DCS community because without persistence between missions, it’s tricky to design a mission where such a feature is both fun and contributes meaningfully beyond the initial novelty.
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Awesome explanation. Thanks. Makes me wonder if ye ode thyme Tomcat operations will integrate with Viggen ELINT data. Suppose we will see…
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The Tomcat had the TARPS pod, so photo recon!
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That looks so much like a Robotech Varitech fighter that it hurts.
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The TARPS had 3 recce systems. From front to back:
The KS-87 camera, which could be placed in a forward slant angle (to provide photos of the run-in to a target) or straight down.
The KA-99 then KA-120 was a panoramic camera that took photos from one side to the other, only blocked by the fuel tanks. This was good to get off-set photography of targets.
The ADD-5 was an IR camera - a line-by-line sensor. IR is a great resource because it can tell you more that the visual spectrum can. For example, you might see the thermal shadows on an apron where a few aircraft were parked but recently flew away (the asphalt was a bit cooler were they had been). Since it is a line scanner, you can turn it on at the beginning of a recce run and see exactly where the aircraft flew.
BTW, the pod was bolted onto the jet. It could not be jettisoned. We intel types wanted to be sure the aircrew cam back with the imagery…just say’n.
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Great question. Perhaps assumed by some of us who do/used to do this for a living, but maybe not really explained. Let us correct that.
Multi-player is pretty strait forward. Go fly an ELINT recce mission. Plot the “take”. The pass along to your squadron mates where you think the SAMs, AAA, etc. are. Then they fly their missions accordingly. Also it can tell you what ships are out and steaming.
Single player is a bit different. In a campaign, one might fly an initial ELINT recce mission and depending on how well flown, be able to plot out air defenses. Then in the next mission, one might use this info to plot a flight plan that takes into account terrain masking and other ways to avoid an integrated air defense system (IADS). If the first mission was not flown well…and some air defense radars were not detected…it could be bad news.
In the real world, ELINT is a major element of the Intelligence Preparation of the Battle Space. SAMs–even “strategic” SAMs are moved. Radars turn on and off at different times. Basically anything an adversary can do to confuse the “picture”, they do. It is up to various sensors, like the Viggen’s ELINT pods, and folks like my former self, to continually put the “puzzle together” before aircrew go into harms way.
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What is the missile looking thing forward of the TARPS pod on the fuselage?