20130420: For the last few days I have been flying a refueling sortie, as GA006, from around noon until around 6 or 7 pm, in the Victor, by Alex Park, from LFPY (GMap) due South, until around Toulouse, then due North back to Paris, usually around 12,00 feet, travelling at 220 knots, and have been joined by a few others wanting to 'challenge' their flying skills.
The callsigns jano, N-TSKT, JackyB, SE-JG, F-JJTH, ECP-BLK, ECP-STK were among them, in various aircraft, lightning, f-14b, Mirage, m2000, A-10, a4, A-6E, Citation-II among them. Sorry if I missed some callsigns or aricraft but it got quite busy at times.
There are some blips in the multiplay code which add to the difficulty, and perhaps make it impossible at this stage, but there are some ideas on trying to fix this. See the external links below.
At times I also flew a second Victor as GA007, as observer and photgrapher, and below are some of the shots taken. Sometimes it is necessary to use a 3rd aircraft, since using F3 - take screen shot - either in the tanker or the aircraft to be refueled, really disturbs the fgfs mp packet flow, and the aircraft will slide back or forward - the so called rubber-band effect! And this can happen at other times, where the 'reason' is not so obvious.
Luckily for us there is presently NO collision detection between your aircraft and the multiplay generated aricraft, so you can not have a crash, so be brave and just push in ;=)) This would be another interesting future code fix to really add to the realism.
Note: These are full size images taken in full screen mode, so the images can take some time to load...
GA006 sorties - Images taken by GA006
GA007 sorties - Images taken by GA007
Some external links:
http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19756
On capturing and replaying the session:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Network_tools_usage
And on the PAF forum:
http://equipe-flightgear.forumactif.com/t1096p15-vol-en-formation-avec-un-fg-patche#20638
Some previous videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWn6_RFp97Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGHRDrc_n98
Some (older) wikis about air-to-air refueling:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Aerial_refueling
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Implement_aerial_refueling_capability
It seems some work has been done to try to 'patch' the multiplayer code to improve the
situation, but this latest code is not yet in the FlightGear source. A link to information
about this patch:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Mp-patch
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Improving_real_close_formation_flight
In general formation flying, and in particular refueling takes a LOT of practice. And to really get into it you may need to modify your joystick configuration file, to tweak the sensitivity and dead spot...
If you have Google Earth installed fgtracker_4604556.kml is the pretty boring track of the last flight of GA006. The tracks of all refueling sorties can be seen at http://mpserver15.flightgear.org/modules/fgtracker/ as can ALL flights using mpserver14, or any other FGMS server with tracker enabled and connected to mpserver15 tracker client.
HAVE FUN ;=))