JATF Briefing
Builder

Kneeboards become a tool of their own, and the JATF channels at REV.04 (v1.63 and v1.121.1). The pages for the DCS kneeboard now come out of Kneeboards, which opens from the Kneeboards tab here and makes one page per seat in the flight, with the summary and a threat chart with the SAM rings. The common channel grid follows JATF-FREQ-01 at revision 04.

The briefing arrives from Mission Control (v1.49). The faction controller releases it from the campaign, and here it is born already compiled for their side: from the .miz extract saved with the campaign and from the plan's packages, with the task said the way it is said on the radio, the TOT window and the card with targets and coordinates. Released again it updates and keeps whatever had been corrected by hand, and flights are not assigned to packages on their own, as with the import. One side's briefing is seen only by that side, management and the administrator, on every route, logo, images and validator included.

Printing laid out to A4, and the PDF in English. The PDF was not paginated: it now has continuation sheets with a header and a footer, paragraphs cut at the page end, images in a known box and scaled down when needed, long lines wrapped, a table of contents with real page numbers and the kneeboard to scale inside its frame. The document comes out in English, the language people fly in, and the kneeboard data also appears in the general part, so whoever does not have their own sheet in front of them still finds it. The findings sheet prints only on request.

The modern kneeboard gets a skin of its own (Sep 2026). The two profiles used to differ only in whether the laser block was present, and the modern one came out with the same typewriter look as the Cold War. They are now two skins rather than two generators: structure, layout and data stay the same, what changes is how they are drawn. Cold War remains black ink on paper, no fills, thick rules; the modern one follows contemporary data cards, with a reversed header carrying the crest, a grey label column and thin rules.

A findings sheet at the end of the PDF, and a light header on the printed page. A black band at the top of every sheet was wasted ink: the reverse stays on the kneeboard, which is read in the cockpit, while the sheet gets a white header with a rule under it. The PDF now closes with the findings grouped by severity, each with its remedy beside it, at the end because it serves whoever builds the mission rather than whoever flies it. There is a switch to leave it out of the pilots' copy, but it goes into the PDF regardless, otherwise the problems stay on screen only.

Threats extracted from the mission by the game's own criteria, not from group names. It looks at the Air Defence category and the MANPADS attribute, matching the unit type against a table of 110 systems with class (short, medium and long range SAM, AAA, MANPADS) and real range, generated from the datamine. On a real mission it recognises SA-11 Buk at 27 NM, Tor at 6.5, Tunguska, Pantsir and Igla. The RWR symbol is deliberately left blank: it depends on the module displaying it, and printing the wrong one is worse than leaving the field empty.

A logo field for the briefing, with the JATF crest as the default. Empty means the standard crest, and whatever draws the sheet asks for the logo without needing to know whether it is the default or an uploaded one; for internal missions another can be loaded, valid for that briefing alone. On the kneeboard the logo has to be embedded as a data URI, because an SVG rasterised to PNG pulls no external resources: the crest is 3100x3093 and in base64 would weigh more than the whole kneeboard, so it is reduced to 256px through the browser canvas, with no server-side resizing.

The same visual identity as the rest of the site, plus two fixes. The page used a palette of its own and changed colour compared to Analyzer and Live Tracker: it now takes the same tokens, the same fonts and the same nav bar, from which there was previously no way back except the browser button. The interface stays dark while the document stays light, because the page is the workbench and the sheet is what goes to print. Also fixed: the admin password change, which failed without saying so, and a duplicate key in the flight model that turned a text field into an object.

First version of the Briefing Builder, the application's fifth tool. The .miz parser, a canonical model with origin classes, the JATF grid and validator, a deterministic assigner, derived views and the two outputs (package PDF, PNG kneeboard per flight). The points still open are declared inside the interface rather than left unsaid: the grid is only partly filled in, the channels and projection constants are marked unverified, and the table translating an airfield's identifier into its name, the one needed to prefill departure, arrival and alternate, is missing.