Mid-air and naval refuelling

General discussion related to the game goes here.

Moderators: Balthagor, Legend, Moderators

Post Reply
irfanahmed1979
Major
Posts: 162
Joined: Dec 29 2013
Human: Yes
Location: Lahore, Pakistan

Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by irfanahmed1979 »

How do I order a KA-6 carrier tanker to refuel a flight of F-4C Phantom tactical bombers?

The same question for naval refueling how is it achieved? How do I load the fleet oilers with fuel and then order them to refuel a ship or a battle group of ships?
Hundane
General
Posts: 1858
Joined: Sep 11 2008

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Hundane »

They must be in the same or adjacent hex to refuel.

Ships and aircraft will fill up with supplies in any friendly hex.
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

Refueling units give their own fuel or they have a separate tank for their "clients"?

Transport units contain their fuel in the same tank with ammo?
User avatar
number47
General
Posts: 2655
Joined: Sep 15 2011
Human: Yes
Location: X:913 Y:185

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by number47 »

georgios wrote:Refueling units give their own fuel or they have a separate tank for their "clients"?

Transport units contain their fuel in the same tank with ammo?
Air tankers give their own fuel while refueling. Transport planes can't refuel airplanes but in case of land units, yes they deliver both fuel and ammo.
"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."
- General George Patton Jr
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

Forget air refuelling. It is a special case.

For all cases: land and naval resupply transport units carry both fuel and ammo? How much fuel and how much ammo? Fuel is counted in bbl and ammo in tones. But cargo capacity is in tones, not in bbl's..
Kellick
Captain
Posts: 107
Joined: Oct 16 2013
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Kellick »

Fuel & ammo both come out of cargo. A barrel of oil is about 138.8 kg (sources vary, and of course the only 1 important is what BG used, I remember Balth saying it in a thread or 3 but I don't remember when, probably in 2020 discussion) so a little over 7 barrels per ton of cargo or a ton of ammo.
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

So the fuel value seen on game charts is the weight of the volume written as cargo capacity in default.unit file?

Units load themselves with supplies counted in tons an can be used as fuel to travel the given distance before out of fuel or as ammo to fight the given combat hours. But what exactly is this combat time? In this time the unit fires an amount of military goods. With what rate of fire is this done?

And what relation has combat time and ammo fired in it with the attack values? Is it expected that units doing high damage consume fast large amounts of supply?
Kellick
Captain
Posts: 107
Joined: Oct 16 2013
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Kellick »

georgios wrote:So the fuel value seen on game charts is the weight of the volume written as cargo capacity in default.unit file?

Units load themselves with supplies counted in tons an can be used as fuel to travel the given distance before out of fuel or as ammo to fight the given combat hours. But what exactly is this combat time? In this time the unit fires an amount of military goods. With what rate of fire is this done?

And what relation has combat time and ammo fired in it with the attack values? Is it expected that units doing high damage consume fast large amounts of supply?
No, the fuel value in the unit file & seen ingame on the unit card is in barrels.
Cargo capacity is in military goods (Balth just confirmed this in a reply to you in a different thread as well)
His response also gave a bit more info that I was unaware of, namely how goods in cargo are converted to fuel and that there is a lot of waste...that does kinda already account for what you would like to do with converting oil to fuel, although in an abstract way.

(Non-cargo) units load themselves with ammo out of military goods in tons, and fuel out of oil in barrels (if I understood Balth correctly he was only speaking of cargo being converted to fuel and not fuel loaded directly from supply...but maybe it is converted all the time)

Combat time and ammo work like range and fuel. So ammo/combat time=ammo consumed per hour. Sometimes but not always. From the game engine view I think that is it. The only relation (I'm pretty sure, someone correct me if I'm wrong) to damage here is that if you are out of ammo you can't do any damage ;)
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

I completely can't understand what conversion of fuel in military goods you talk about..

Please tell me the whole flow of goods from the stockpile to their finally consumption in the battlefield..

If military goods are converted in petroleum why my production chart shows that I have military consumption of petroleum?

I have already petroleum consumption from military goods industry?

Is there double cost of petroleum?


As for the other topic: how many rounds fires a unit per hour? Or how many "health" points removes per hour from target along with it's attack value?
Kellick
Captain
Posts: 107
Joined: Oct 16 2013
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Kellick »

Ok, so oil is produced by the various production facilities. All numbers for oil are in barrels (bbl)
Also I am going to ignore the effects of various tech for the purpose of this discussion, but don't forget if your numbers don't match up in game that you have to look at the sum of relevant tech effects in effect. Some places in the game the figures will update to reflect them (range for instance) and some will not (base production for a facility is always shown as the raw base...and I'm going to guess that is at 100% supply, not more, not less...since level of supply has a huge effect on production and of course facility on your own native loyal soil)
It goes into your petroleum stock which is your national pool.

So you will use it for production of various goods - electric (if you use oil fired plants), industrial goods, military goods, population use. If you go to petroleum production and click the 5th tab over on the bottom right, it will show you "consumption and usage" (yeah, that's kinda redundant since consumption and usage are the same thing, but anyway...) So yes, in a way military goods use oil twice since there is oil used to make IG, and there are IG used to make military goods along with oil used to make them as well. I don't see an issue with that.

There is also a line for "Military" as well (although if none of your units are moving/refueling it might not show any and if they are all reserved it probably won't show any...if you're that interested you can do the tests and share the results).

Let's take the M113A1, fuel cap 2.23 bbl range 483 km. 483/2.23=216.5919282511211.
So if your M113A1 moves about 216km it is going to use 1 bbl of oil. There are 54 in a typical battalion, so that btn is going to use 54 bbl to move 216km.
Generally a unit is only going to go half it's range before it stops for fuel, this is easily observed with an air unit which is going to try to return to base at that point, regardless of orders. I am not positive about land and sea units but they likely do the same, it's just harder to observe (and again I'm not interested enough to check it myself, just trying to point you in the right direction).

So units will fuel themselves out of the supply infrastructure if they are in supply. AFAIK they load oil directly in bbl and ammo as military goods in tons. So that btn of M113A1 will load up 120.42 bbl of oil and 54 tons of MG (they carry 1 ton of ammo each).

Now if they are completely out of supply and you bring a cargo plane or truck to them, they will take 54 tons out of the cargo as MG for ammo. I always assumed they would take however many bbl of oil make up a ton out of cargo as well but in light of what Balthagor said recently that is incorrect. So they convert however many tons of MG needed into oil, and you get however many bbl of oil are used to make 1 ton of MG per ton of MG converted. The rest of the MG is lost. To figure out exactly how much oil that is, you need to look at the production info for MG. I also don't know if that includes the oil used in the IG used to make the MG, but I somehow doubt it.

Make sense?

You can't really define a round in SR, and for the scale of the game it really isn't important. A unit fires X tons per hour, like I explained in the last post. Supposedly it's initiative also determines how many volleys that ammo is fired in, but I don't think any of us fully understand the combat system. I know every time I think I understand all the variables (and there are a lot) George or Balthagor will drop some new piece of info in a discussion (like one Hullu, Fistalis and I were having about tanks and artillery) that I had no clue about.

Almost all units mount a variety of weapon systems. Our example M113 has a (going from memory so I am probably off on the specifics, but close enough for our example) 25mm autocannon, a 7.62mm machinegun, a grenade launcher. The troops it carries have rifles, pistols, grenades, some more machineguns, some RPG/recoilless rifles/shoulder-fired SAM/etc. All these things are factored into whatever calculations BG uses to decide what the units attack values & range should be for each of the types of damage in the game. So small arms make up their close combat attack value, heavier AP weapons their soft target, main gun hard target, etc. I'm sure there is some cross-over as well. It's a very complicated thing to decide an arbitrary attack value based on all these factors. Most of those formula are either lost in time or just not something BG is willing to share (I've asked) and so I think what Balth does these days is go by what is already there and tries to fit new units into the range of existing values by what similar units already done are capable of...but that's all speculation on my part.

Now units only have 1 ammo pool and it is used for all their weapons. Same for their initiative and I believe attacks per period of time. So there is no way to say "this many tons of ammo are for AA, this many for the main gun, this much for small arms, etc". Also the different weapons will fire at different rates. Again the game engine has no way to model that. The unit's initiative/reaction time is probably some kind of average, but again it's an arbitrary value that has to be set for the game engine to work.

Defense values are arrived at in a similar way I imagine. The armor thickness, maneuverability of the unit, commonly accepted perception of the units effectiveness, etc. Again it's a very arbitrary value that has to be quantified for the game engine but that there isn't a real-world rating for AFAIK (sure we can rate X armor at Y thickness against weapon Z at A range but that doesn't really help us overly much here).

So in combat the relevant attack value is compared to the relevant defense value of the target, all (I don't feel like going into them all, there are a lot...and of course I don't know the exact order they are applied in or the underlying code) modifiers applied, and then whatever is left is applied as damage to the unit (also don't forget everything gets multiplied by the number of pieces in a unit). There are a lot of threads in the older forums (2020, 2010) that go into a bit more detail, but again a lot of them are speculation and players sharing their experiences. BG has been involved in the discussions but they haven't handed anyone all the answers AFAIK (sometimes George has to go through his spaghetti code to remember it himself...he's been at this a LONG time).

Sometimes it takes a lot of experimentation and discussion to figure out exactly how stuff in the game works (or to get George's attention...and remember a man only has so many hours in a day, and anyone who says they have enough time to get everything done they want to do is seriously lacking in ambition and/or drinking buddies :P so this isn't a let's all point fingers at George thing, it's just a why things are the way they are thing). No one could understand why no matter what you did the AI just would not use its submarines. Ruges especially did a tremendous amount of experimentation, but it wasn't until we got George attention to take a look and say "oh yeah, this is broken...here let me go fix that" nothing could be done about it.
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

>consumption and usage" (yeah, that's kinda redundant since consumption and usage are the same thing, but anyway...)

no, it has meaning. they mean consumption of raw materials and usage of the product.

>So yes, in a way military goods use oil twice since there is oil used to make IG, and there are IG used to make military goods >along with oil used to make them as well

I have modded it so petroleum is consumed only at the industry level. I divided global industrial production with petroleum consumed in manufacturing to find how much petroleum is needed for a ton of goods. Then industry goods are manufactured in military goods without any more inputs. only a standard cost added.

>There is also a line for "Military" as well (although if none of your units are moving/refueling it might not show any and if they >are all reserved it probably won't show any...if you're that interested you can do the tests and share the results).

It is totally sure that if units are not moving, military petroleum consumption is zero.

My next question is if military unit petroleum needs can be changed so they will consume something else, for example military goods as they do when resupplying abroad..

I have reason for asking it. I want to separate engine petroleum from crude petroleum produced by terrain. Units must drain their fuel from a refinery, not from oil wells...
User avatar
Balthagor
Supreme Ruler
Posts: 22083
Joined: Jun 04 2002
Human: Yes
Location: BattleGoat Studios

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Balthagor »

georgios wrote:...My next question is if military unit petroleum needs can be changed so they will consume something else, for example military goods as they do when resupplying abroad...
I do not know of any way to do this. What is consumed for fuel is hard coded.
Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com
Kellick
Captain
Posts: 107
Joined: Oct 16 2013
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Kellick »

LOL, yeah I realized later usage meant consumption in a different way than consumption (anyone else who may be confused, you just need to look at the tab closely and it makes sense), so it isn't as redundant as it seems.

Georgios, let me play Devil's advocate and ask you: Why bother? Does it really add any play value? Already the way it is with units resupplying from cargo and the oil that is lost in the conversion process abstracts refinerys. Granted units loading out of the normal supply chain it doesn't, but the great thing about the supply system in SR is that it makes logistics very relevant (which is important, as the old cliche goes "amateurs study strategy and tactics; experts study logistics" )without making the game just about logistics (because we can leave the boring crap to the experts). There was a discussion about separating vehicle production from troop production and I forget who said it (and I can't seem to find the discussion, probably because Balth is always moving threads around; can we stop that and just start a new topic and say "for background info, refer to this old topic here, linky" ??? I mean seriously WTF some of us here are old and getting senile and it doesn't help...as bad as my wife moving my stuff around :P ), but it was something like "I want to feel like a supreme ruler, not a supreme vehicle accountant", which is a very good quote.
georgios
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 600
Joined: Aug 13 2012
Human: Yes

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by georgios »

The new play value will be the new balance between regions.

My real aim is to make a new commodity, refined petroleum. Unit fuel must undergo treatment before used in the vehicles. This will make industrialization big concern of a player. Undeveloped countries which just have oil fields will be not capable to fuel any units without having an ally with industrial infrastructure.


By the way, I just found that the famous russian unit "TOS buratino" is totally missing from game.
User avatar
Balthagor
Supreme Ruler
Posts: 22083
Joined: Jun 04 2002
Human: Yes
Location: BattleGoat Studios

Re: Mid-air and naval refuelling

Post by Balthagor »

georgios wrote:...By the way, I just found that the famous russian unit "TOS buratino" is totally missing from game.
there are less than 30 of them in the world. It is a minor unit.
Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com
Post Reply

Return to “General Discussion - SRCW”