Can anyone make sense of how to translate this to Spring?

[MadRat]

http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc ... tTRDoc.pdf

This is a PDF file on Rule-Based Air Combat Manuevering, a subject NASA apparently spent a little time on figuring out. Seems like some of the basic principles would translate over to Spring although the more complicated stuff would probably not work so well. Things like plotting firing arcs and stuff might be possible, but is it practical?

[rattle]

no

[TradeMark]

way too complex for a game like this, do we really need more air lag?

[Peet]

http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc ... tTRDoc.pdf

This is a PDF file on Rule-Based Air Combat Manuevering, a subject NASA apparently spent a little time on figuring out. Seems like some of the basic principles would translate over to Spring although the more complicated stuff would probably not work so well. Things like plotting firing arcs and stuff might be possible, but is it practical?

Yes, we'll get right on implementing the contents of this 138 page document.

[Argh]

Most of that document can be simulated in Spring. Not simulated in a 1:1 manner, but that's what simulation is about, anyhow. For example, you can duplicate the expected-value concepts for strategic-level air combat very easily, using COB and HitByWeaponID... most of the detailed interactions between weapon systems and counter-measures could be simulated with Lua, although I'd be the first to say that this would be difficult and would not run fast enough for a game that qualified as, "fun" to anybody except for hard-core war sim fans, which is not Spring's primary audience.

In short, it's not that this kind of thing cannot be done. It's a matter of what level of detail you want to achieve.

Detailed air-combat maneuver simulation, for close-in combat (silly, tbh, because IRL, very little modern air combat has been fought at those ranges, and this is not likely to alter in the future, as lasers and stealthed RPVs take over interdiction duties, imo) is out of scope of the Spring project, short of a major rewrite of the flight code for aircraft, and would perform too slowly to produce a good end-user experience.

[Dragon45]

This is 20 years old. This document is probably outdated.