Well, the cat is out of the bag. I have been contemplating making this one since the Mirage came out. It will be several firsts for me, regarding making a mission for MP and utilizing it as a basis to become familiar with scripts. Note on that; I do know how to program in a couple of languages, but I am not familiar with Lua, MiST or DCS scripting. Enough blurb...

Concept

I wanted to create a scenario that pitted the Mirage against the MiG-21 in as similar a fashion as the Arab-Israeli conflicts as possible, barring the historic preemptive obliteration of the Egyptian Air Force in the Six Day War, of course. I also thought it might be cool to put some emphasis on actually obtaining ground objectives by having to use CA. Also, the scenario concept is interesting, to me at any rate, as it is from a time period when CAS was not a perfected art (yes, I mean there were no A-10s, LOL!), and fast reaction, infantry portable IR SAMs were not available in the proliferation they became since, AFAIK. This creates a scenario in which the MiG-15 (standing in for the MiG-17) and the F-86 (standing in for the Mystère) can operate in ground attack and CAS roles with some thin hope of surviving. Opinions may differ, but I think they are both great, detailed add ons and deserve a showing in MP combat operations without the user thinking he's on a pointless, suicide mission.

Order of Battle

The focus is condensed to Egypt vs. Israel. Egypt is initially in a defensive role, Israel offensive. Independently of how players will actually make a session effective, this does mean that Egypt will have some fortifications they can fall back on during ground war operations, Israel will not.

Egypt holds Groom (main) and Creech, Israel holds Nellis (main) and McCarran.

Israel's ground force will be a loose representation of the 84th Division, consisting of the following units, in three groups;

48 x M60A3 Patton MBT
24 x Mobile ZU-23 AAA
20 x M113 APC
12 Artillery pieces (M109 Paladin)

Egypt's ground force represents the 4th Division, consisting of;

42 x T-55 MBT
24 x Mobile ZU-23 AAA
12 x BTR-80 APC
20 x Artillery pieces (Uragan MLRS and Gvozdika)
16 x Deployed RPG troops with associated defensive positions

All units have one wave of reserves that will be activated when 75% (Israel) or 66% (Egypt) of a given group is destroyed.

The only available SAMs are one battery of SA-3 (in absence of Guidelines) for Egypt, defending Groom Lake, and one battery of Hawks, defending Nellis.



Objective

For absolute victory of either side: The objective of the scenario for Israel is to capture both Creech and Groom. Egypt wins if Israel's ground forces suffer high enough attrition, and they manage to hold on to Creech and Groom.

All this is debatable, though. Any ideas for alternate victory conditions are welcome...

Scripts

Yeah, I am using the scenario to familiarize myself a bit with the DCS script engine. I do not want to use something as complex as CLTD, but the following are things I am contemplating / working on. Very early days yet...

Deploy RPG troops from APCs. Though I have had some valuable help doing this, there is more to it. All APCs will be able to deploy 4 pairs of RPG troops. However, the way I have it at the moment is with an individual script for each APC, which assigns it a radio item, and spawns two troops. It is inefficient, and complicated when the reserve APCs become active. What I need to do here is a unified script file that iterates through the units, determines which are APCs from either coalition, assigns them a radio item and flag to them (to count the troops as they are spawned). I am not at all sure yet how to iterate through the units...

Deploy fixed ZSU AAA sites and RPG troops from helicopters. Similar to the above. The difference from CLTD is that I only want a standard unit for loading on helicopters. They will automatically load if the helicopter spawns or when the helicopter lands empty of cargo at a base or designated loading point. A radio menu item will permit deployment of the units on board. A general flag of helicopter deployed units, per side, will limit exactly how many units are eventually deployed. I am thinking stocks, reserves and logistics simulation here, and not interminable supplies, and with that in mind, on to the next point...

Supplies

Yes, there are limited supplies and weapons in stock, as there would be in reality. It is hard cheese if you run out of one favorite weapon (though it does not exclude tweaking the mission). There are base warehouses, with some ready store stocks for aircraft, and separate linked, warehouses near each base for supply purposes as the ready ammo gets low. It gives the players the opportunity to create a strike on warehouses that will have an effect on the progress of the battle, which is what I believe was the intention of the feature. It is cool, and I want to use it.

Available weapons are;

Egypt:
R-3S AAM, RS-2US AAM.
SA-24, S-5M, S-8KOM, S-8OFP2, S-8OM, S-8 TSM, FAB-50, 100, 250 and 500 iron bombs, and BeTAB-500.

Israel:
Matra Magic II, GAR-8 (Note, I am thinking I should leave out the radar guided AAMs from the Mirage arsenal to offset the technological sensors gap between it and the MiG21, in this case, as we are not talking the REAL Mirage III, but the 2000).
HVAR, HYDRA 70, AN-M64, MK-20, MK-82.

Skins

Of course, this is optional for players if they are not actually stock skins. I found some for the Mirage and UH-1, and there's an F-86 South African skin that's acceptable (though I am finishing an IAF marked bare silver skin for the F-86 for this scenario). Skins for the MiG15, 21 and Mil-8 were stock on the install.











Anyway, I'm having fun with this. I am supremely under-confident that anyone would even want to play this one, with the beloved A-10s and F-15s missing, but I'll go along with it, if only as an exercise for myself.

Sorry for the wall of text! All comments welcome, please...

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!

Absolutely love it. Wish we had the real IIIC to work with, the 2000C isn't going to be much of a fair match for the Fishbed when the radar is finally working properly in 2.0. Still, I'm all for it. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Ah, I didn't see this before we were on TS earlier. Sure thing. I have several punctual questions about the DCS script engine and respect your ability with it and the ME in general highly.

And yeah, pyro. We need that Mirage III.

Sounds like quite a bit of fun!

AWESOME!

With some chatting to Tracer and Magnet about the scripting engine, I've got a much better idea how I might implement the required functions. Not an expert yet by any means, lol! But on the way to understanding the script engine now.

Thanks guys!

Went to do some work on this. Fired up 2.0. Accepted the update thinking it was a fixed one.

It wasn't.

MiG-21 broken.

Standing by...

Huh! The MiG-21 still seems to have some issues, but I have pressed on with the "attempts" at custom scripting for this scenario and got a couple of things working, albeit with rather cumbersome (as yet) implementation using a mixture of ME and DCS SE. Basically, I would like my simple functions to be in a single script file, which is what I am working towards, and figuring out how to search / find in "tables" - which for me equate more or less to dynamic arrays in C++.

Apart from a DCS scripting thread, we might consider starting a Lua programming primer thread, as it is clearly essential knowledge for DCS scripting, for those uninitiated, and a bit of a fragmented, confusing dark horse on web searches.

Of course, I have got sidetracked yet again and have ended up playing around with LOVE2 while familiarizing myself with C++ differences to Lua (sigh).

Ya, this scenario is turning into a learning exercise for me, above all else. Again, sorry for the delay, guys.

PS: Worse thing at the moment is a chronic lack of time due to other priorities.