Evil_Echo

SCUDs use kerosene/UDMH for fuel and IRFNA for the oxidizer. The combination is hypergolic, meaning they ignite on mixing. In all likelyhood a hole or two is going to result in a fire and shortly after a propellant explosion as the heat ruptures the tanks and the contents mix. The oxidizing properties of IRFNA increase with temperature, increasing both the violence of a fire and reactivity with biochem warhead materials in the area. As for 3rd-world nukes.... You just don't whittle a plutonium pit with a pocket knife, slap some leftover semtex around it, and then slide the assembly into a nose cose along with a cell-phone you borrowed from Achmed the Dead Terrorist. If you've managed to weaponise a physics package to the point it's small enough, light enough, and sturdy enough to fly on a missile it's likely to have plenty of fail-safe measures in it. The gist of this is still what I claimed earlier, if you fire on an armed scud it's likely to burn, blow up and that's it. There may be some localized contamination from traces of the warhead components, but not much compared to if the weapon had functioned properly.

No problem GossamerS, glad to be of help for patrons like you. Mando is a good partner, thoughtful and open to new ideas. So we bounce a lot of concepts and new code around at frequent intervals. He came up with the notion of the fallout console while I worked out the details of fallout decay. Together these ideas work much better than by themselves. One trick for you compliments of Mando, the fallout console driver has a parameter that defines the test of who can use it. Could be rank of soldier, or better yet possession of some item ( aka a "radiation meter" ). Play with that notion a bit in your missions. I've been tinkering with a campaign involving a nuclear battlefield, so far the results have been quite satisfactory. Using MMA tools, managed to craft a reasonable simulation of a SS-20. If you think a Scud is bad, try a 3 warhead MIRV. Can you say nuclear shotgun boys and girls? Sure, I knew you could...

Ego aside, how does this enhance combat?

Rounds that use shaped charges do not care much about range as long as you manage to hit the target. That said, some of the rocket launchers do need some adjustment in the sighting-in department. The M136 is meant to be a replacement for the LAW rocket and fill the niche for moderate fortifications and light armor. They require minimal training and can be carried in addition to other infantry weapons. SMAW and M2/M3 Gustaf are medium weapons, harder hitting. But with costs in ammo. Having a gunner assistant is almost required unless you intend to one-shot these systems. Javeling is the heavy anti-armor weapon. Basically you should need a dedicated 2-man team to operate this. A vehicle for transport is also recommended.

Max Power and NouberNou basically have it correct. You would ignite/explode the propellant, causing some damage to the local area. What would happen to the warhead... HE - burn/detonate. Nerve agent - mostly burn. Any traces of leftover RFNA oxidizer would destroy nerve agent or precursors. Biological - same as chemical. Nuclear. Fail-safe mechanisms should prevent a nuclear detonation, the HE on-board could explode and scatter components, leading to some local contamination. I would keep some distance from the scud, mostly to avoid hazards from the propellant and whatever traces of warhead components remain. Any long-term hazard would be localized and fairly minor.

The BIS functions module is a treasure, definitely worth using and has little cost aside from the waitUntil for it to warm up - true of most modules out there. Just yesterday was adding some light sources to hangars, buildings pointed in various directions. Use the fnc_RelPos call meant not having to mash about with a lot of trigometry, just focus on offsets from center of building and the the code spin the lights around to match building orientation.

I just set up a fire mission and use a very large dispersion. Less fuss with markers and far less scripting ( to use ).

Addendum on the posting about fallout console (nice pic btw :D). Fallout will now decay away over time. It takes a while, the half-life of I-131 is about 8 days. So there will be a global variable to artificially speed up just the decay rate. BigMorgan and GossamerS should likely add something like this to their mission init scripts. echo_fallout_decay_rate = 1440; A value of 1440 will make the decay scale to minutes instead of days, meaning the fallout zone will be safe about 1 hour after it forms. The new console will show you the value for a 10 minute exposure. The initial zone intensity will give you a dose of 8 Gray in that interval, high enough to kill you long-term and generate enough health issues that you're combat-ineffective in game. Correspondingly higher values will shorten the time to 'death', low values will lengthen the time. In Mando's example, anyone entering the area marked would have a life expectancy of about 2 minutes - best avoid that region until it cools down.

Look for the ECHO package, my IPC stuff and documentation is in there. It's on armaholic, a discussion thread in the complete mods section.

Sigh.... Time to phone AMD Sunnyvale office, switch to The Voice, and have a "discussion" with some VPs to get them at bit more motivated.

If it were me, I'd just swap out the gauges with versions that have simulation disabled - aka change the plane to a "busted" variant.

I know BIS has encouraged us to poke ATI about crossfire issues with OA and I have. But am confused why they cannot put more pressure on the ATI folks as well, could anyone explain that?

Isn't that what DAC does?

Anytime I see a posting stating BIS must add some feature that a mod implimented into the core program I cringe. Mostly over the demand part, being that one person's opinion is being jammed down the throat of community. Anyone who follows ACE knows that their stamina system is highly controversial. If you had to pick a topic that sorted ArmA into ACE haters vs admirers it's this one. That alone is reason enough to leave their system in a mod and not in the core of Arma. The slot system used by ArmA is artificial and somewhat arbitrary. So is the volume/weight system used by ACE to drive their stamina system. Don't quibble this point, I helped code the thing and know more of the internal details than many here. Those that follow ACE also know the stamina system has gone through numerous attempts to tune the thresholds and effects, it's been a struggle at curve-fitting for a long time. Those that love ACE recognise/accept those facts and enjoy the appearance of enhanced reality. Those that do not like ACE find the occasional oddity in stamina effects highly irrating and for them a potential game-wrecker. The point is that both methods are abstractions and in their own way both good and bad models of reality. Neither is superior to the other, just different. Let's leave the choice as it is, a choice - so that those that love one way or another can be happy at the flip of a switch.

Ok.... Then what about DX11 or whatever is the latest cool hotness at that time? Would that not help on some of the issues with LOD and particles?

To get around the limits of spawn and returning data I developed an interprocess communication ( IPC ) subsystem - using gamelogics and setVariable. Others have developed similar tech. Look into one of those for inspiration.

If you are willing to use CBA, there is a function for formatting numbers as you desire. http://dev-heaven.net/docs/cba/files/strings/fnc_formatNumber-sqf.html

Talking about the feature vs the gauge. You need to override the functionality of the ILS scripts. To do that you need to find the script names and replace them with your own.

Hard to judge what ST_Dux means by a fair amount of scripting. However, users of my ECHO package get some reasonably sophisticated automatic fire support for as little as 5 lines of sqf. Naturally you need more lines to get more features, but I've not seen any examples that took more than a page of code.

The difference between EE/MM air and groundburst is just the cloud that is rendered, fallout effects, and how impact moves items in blast zone. Damage due to blast, thermal flash, prompt neutron and gamma radiation all attenuate with distance. The damage algorithm always uses slant distance so the damage at ground zero is somewhat less with an airburst. Still would not count on surviving if a 5kt detonated directly over you at it's assigned altitude. Each of those effects attenuate at different rates and inflict damage in different ways depending on what kind of unit is involved. So you might end up still dead, but due to a different cause if an airburst hits you. Airbursts are good if you want to kill tank crews and not the tanks themselves, as long as the tank is not TOO close to ground zero.

Almost all tacticals are detonated above ground level. Ground bursts are quite close to ground level. The fireball dehydrates/vaporizes the soil nearby and the resulting dust gets pulled into the familiar mushroom cloud. That material gets contaminated with radiation products of the weapon, becoming a major component of fallout. Explode a weapon high enough up and no debris gets sucked in, resulting in a much cleaner burst and no column of debris rising up. You will still get a condensation cloud resembling the cap of a mushroom. A detonation very high up and all you get is a spherical burst. That would be the region for significant EMP generation - you need lower air density for that. The non-visual effects of a burst at optimal height ( just high enough to avoid fallout ) and a ground burst are similar - heat, radiation, pressure. The impact of the air blast is more downward, so objects fly about less. Here is a vid of a British test, an airburst of the type I'm describing. 2:00 is beginning of the explosion. zLFRIiflSgU The AN602 fireball radius was 4km, the top nearly reaching the altitude of the Tu-95V bomber that dropped it. It could have caused 3rd-degree flash burns 100km from the hypercenter and cloud base was 40km across. Superimpose those numbers on cherna and you might as well just cutText to a white screen and then call endMission. There are limits of what fits on the maps and what the game can render. My weapons effects can scale up much further without problem but the graphics engine starts to choke around 15kt. If the tech improves then larger weapons become feasible.

That is a good suggestion. Think we should do that. You already can set the mode via scripts or in init line of the launcher. Having the same capability in the GUI just makes sense. Something in the reloading "station" might make sense as well. My weapons support adjustable yield ( within limits - don't get visions of 1MT explosions ). Would you folks want dial-a-yield, say 1-15 kt range? Nah, you are just providing good feedback. If you were unreasonable I'd let you know.

Thank you!

Tell ya what, I'll look into making a global variable you can set to adjust decay rate of fallout. Then people can go uber-realistic if they wish and less so if mission play demands such.

Fallout would be my side of things. 5-6 ground bursts can be nasty. Hope you had some NBC-rated vehicles to get around in. I use mostly air-bursts in missions with a lot of nukes, they are easier on your GPU, clean, and correct from at least the US doctrine POV. 1. Real fallout takes weeks to decay to safe levels. I could put a timer in for that, but experience has shown me very few missions last that long. For the same reason I had the lethal dosage levels set where they are - 6 Gray would render you combat ineffective. You might live, but will be out of the fight for weeks at best. 2. I believe we can change the transparency of the marker. Will see about that and if we can will adjust it. Additionally, IFF Mando and I can manage some further magic down the road we could remove the marker altogether. Two ideas are to give you some radiation detection gear and/or add a slight "glow" to the terrain ( mostly visible at night - blue light). N.B. The radiation dose in overlapping zones is culmulative, so two will drop the LD time to 5 minutes, three to 3-1/3, etc. Smart deployal of a couple of ground bursts can easily establish a lethal zone no leg infantry could traverse. Just be sure you know the prevailing winds because the fallout pattern does take wind into account while it's coming down.