Was working on a new mission, and thought it might be nice to show some stages of the build.
As this is a convoy defense mission, we need a big area of water, and a convoy.
Map: Atlantic Summer.
Did some research on convoys, on their size, speed and build up.
So, this scared me, as I had to put 42 ships - of different types - in six columns, doing some zig-zags as well!
For now, I focused only on the convoy ships, not the escorts.
Decided to put all 42 ships on the map, as per image above. Gave each ship 2 waypoints, so they would be traveling behind each other.
Mind you, this picture has them traveling North, I choose to let them move east.
Now, as for the zig-zag...
One would normally manually plot a lead ship (ie the one in the top column) to some zig-zagging waypoints, then copy/paste the waypoints values into Ms-Excel, and apply some calculating to 'generate' the waypoints for the other ships.
On a normal map, the bottom left (SW) position is X=0, Y=0, and the top right (NE) has the highest coordinate values.
The top right of the first square (A0) is X=10.000 Y=10.000, so a difference in value of 1 means 1 meter distance.
Now that would make plotting with excel quite easy, subtract 1.000 from the Y of the first ship, and you have a ship positioned 1km to the south!
Too bad, I found out it does not work this way on a really big map, as suddenly, all the X and Y's are in the negatives, and they do no longer correspond with the simpel 10.000 per 10km rule. Even worse, giving a ship two waypoints would normally result into two lines in the mission file. On this map, six lines.
Of unknown origin.
So, I nearly caved there, I was sure I was not going to plot some 11 waypoints for each and every of the 42 ships!
Too much tedious work!
But, after some thinking, I found a solution: Plotted the lead ship of a columns position manually.
Then copied all of its waypoints and pasted them starting after the first waypoint for each and every other ship in that column.
So, the second WP of each following ship would be equal to the first of the lead ship. And so on. Result: they all follow eachother nicely in the zigs and zags.
By the time the second ship has reached the first one's initial WP, the first one had already moved towards its secondary WP.
(Sure, still had to plot 6x 11 WP's, and use paste for each ship, yet, it was at least doable.)
Results:
Okay, that's all for now.
More might follow, but I'm surely not gonna report on all details that were put into the mission, oh no...