DCS ACIS
Console

What it is

The ACIS is the operator console of an E-2C Hawkeye, brought into the application as a page of its own. It takes the mission telemetry and shows it as the person sitting behind the radar would see it: a rectangular PPI reaching the corners, grey land on black sea, a fan sweep fading backwards, yellow hooks and a two-column CRO readout.

It lives in the same application as Mission Tracker, Live View, GCI Scope, ATC, JTAC and Briefing Builder, and is reached from gcidemo.

Why the E-2C and not the E-3

The mode is called ACIS because it is the only radar aircraft display of which public screenshots exist: a JHU APL article written by the people who programmed it. Official photographs of E-3 consoles always have the screen blacked out.

The rule was simple: where it can be copied it is copied, where it cannot it says so. Sea #74756D and land #000108 are values measured on the screenshots, like the 45-degree fan and the alpha on the leading edge. Raw returns separate from tracks, position error, ESM, CEC and Link 16 remain dark keys, with the reason in the tooltip: that is also the real behaviour of a VAB page with unassigned positions.

From a GCI mode to a page of its own

It was born as the GCI Scope’s Sentry mode, three skins of the Modern engine. It was a half measure: the look of an E-3 console with the GCI’s panels, and two roads to the same thing to keep aligned.

The reason for the move is layout, not palette. The ACIS has a menu bar, the CRO on the left, the VAB matrix, the panel bar and the PPI in all the rest; the GCI sizes its scope by measuring its own panels. Overlaying the two geometries meant fighting hundreds of rules written for amber phosphor. So the GCI went back to being what the acronym says, ground control, and the ACIS got its own page.

The sensor, not omniscience

What sets it apart from a map is that the picture ends where the antenna ends. With the mission script the detected list is computed by DCS, terrain and ECM included, and wins over any formula. Without it, the sensor’s declared range and the radar horizon apply.

On the real server a dedicated mission cannot be loaded, and on Export.lua telemetry alone a contact behind a mountain stayed on the picture. There is now an elevation model per theatre and line of sight is actually traced, with the Earth bulge at 4/3 of the radius. Each cell keeps its highest point, because for masking the ridge is what counts; isolated spikes in the source are removed, because an invented mountain hides a contact and nobody understands why. From an A-10 over the Golan fifteen low contacts disappear and the high ones remain.

The status line always declares whether coverage comes from the simulator or from the calculation: an estimate must not look like data.

Returns, tracks and identity

A new return is a dot. After two antenna turns the tracker opens the track and gives it a number, and if the contact answers on the datalink it attaches identity and callsign. Otherwise the console knows only the track number, as it does on board.

The datalink arrives separately: DCS does not expose a unit’s transponder, but it does expose the DLINK detection method, and the mission script queries the sensors a second time with that alone. It is not an IFF, it is the identification level, which is what an IFF exists to give. A bar under the symbol says that contact is known through the network rather than through our own radar.

The actual IFF comes from SRS, as LotATC does: a line in the CRO, a blinking ring on IDENT, friendly on Mode 4 with your side’s key.

The picture

Translate detaches the picture from the aircraft: press it, point, and the PPI stays there while the aircraft goes its own way; the TRANSLATED line says how far off centre you are and is also the button to return. The scale changes in steps, the wheel zooms in and out. The aircraft hosting the console is drawn, circle with a dot and one-minute vector, but it is not a contact: no number, no hooking.

Two hooks give the BRAA between tracks, one alone gives the bullseye: that is the readout’s real rule. Declare opens a panel with the five identities, Drop says what it removed and with no hook puts everything back on the picture. Every key leaves a response, because a console that seems to do nothing is worse than none at all.

Transmit opens the station’s radio on the same SRS bridge as the GCI: bridge absent, ready, ON NET with the frequency, RX with whoever is talking, TX. Below, how many are connected on the frequency, which is the number that actually matters: they are the ones who hear you.

The map

The coastlines the project had always used were hand-drawn polylines, open strokes that cannot be filled. Land now comes from Natural Earth 1:10m for all thirteen theatres: closed rings of landmass, lakes and borders, simplified with Douglas-Peucker. Photographic tiles remain allowed as an optional backdrop, not as the base: here the reference is flat grey land on black sea, and a raster cannot switch one layer on at a time, which is what the original’s Geo Ctrl does.

Access

Open at gcidemo.alessandrosimonitto.it/acis, with the demo notice on first entry. Like the GCI and the ATC it also opens from a session token link, and a user tied to a session is redirected there on their own.