A flyable GST?

[Verdun1916]

Originally Posted by Cloyd

There is one MOD plane that I know of (the Grumman Duck) that resolves this issue. It can land on water or land. I assume that if the modders can do it, TD could do it too. Yes? No?

Cloyd

I don't think there is any problem to make a seaplane that can land both on water and on land. The Catalinas/Nomads had retractable landing gear like most other land based aircraft. However you would need a separate key-command for the wingtip pontoons so you can use them without lowering your landing gear.

However...the difficult part I think might be the AI and to be able to get that to be able to act the correct way in the correct situation. That is making the AI know when to lower the landing gear or when to lower the wingtip pontoons depending on if it's supposed to land on land or water. I'm not sure how the already present AI PBN Nomad works when it come to landing and taking of on water compared to on land. I think it can only handle water landings and take-off's but I'm not sure. I will have to check that out.

But I'm not a programmer so this is just my thoughts on the matter and I might be wrong here.

EDIT: I did a little test with the stock AI PBN Nomad. I Used the Norway map and set the British seaplane airbase as take of point for it and the big airbase to the south of it as final waypoint and landing point to see if the Nomad would try to land there. But it seems that the AI was smart enough to realize something was afot so after reaching it's last mid-air waypoint it automatically landed back at the seaplane base instead of the land base I had designated as it's landing point.

So maybe a solution would be to have two versions of seaplanes that was historically capable of landing both on water and land. One version for water take-offs and landings only and one for land take-offs and landings only. If it's not possible to make a version that can handle both, both player and AI wise.