DCS
Kneeboards
The pages DCS shows on the kneeboard in flight, made for every seat in the flight: the summary with your own row highlighted and the times at each waypoint, and the threat page with a chart drawn by SECTOR, the route and the SAM rings. They come out in a ZIP ready to copy into the Kneeboard folder, with a file saying where to put it.
What it is
Kneeboards prepares the pages DCS shows on the kneeboard in flight, the one strapped to the pilot’s thigh, from the game’s Kneeboard folder. For each seat in the flight there is a summary and a threat page, in a ZIP ready to copy.
It lives inside SECTOR, the group’s DCS tools application, and is reached from gcidemo. It used to be part of the Briefing Builder and became a tool of its own, because it was also needed by whoever flies a Mission Control package without a printed briefing.
Two ways in, the same kneeboard
- From the Briefing Builder, with the flights, routes and threats put there by whoever prepares the briefing.
- From Mission Control, from a package’s card, for whoever flies it. The pages are made on the spot, so they are always current, and carry only the SAMs the side knows of: a kneeboard showing a threat the side has not yet discovered would hand over information nobody has in flight.
The pilot picks the seat. SECTOR does not know who sits where: a package’s sign-ups are users, the aircraft rows are written by whoever does the briefing, and pretending to know would print somebody else’s kneeboard.
The seat summary
One page per seat, with the callsign at the top and your own row highlighted in the flight table, with your own aircraft’s loadout. Then the waypoints: for each point altitude, speed, true heading, distance, leg duration and passing time, in Zulu where the theatre has its own offset. Heading and distance are computed in the .miz’s own metres, where the numbers are already the right ones.
Where the Mission Editor has an ETA of zero or one that goes backwards, the time stays blank rather than inventing one.
The threats
Above, the chart; below, the table. The chart is drawn by SECTOR, with no maps from the internet: coastlines, lakes and borders, terrain in bands with contour lines, towns and airfields, the route with arrows in the direction of flight, the targets, the bullseye, the scale and north. Every SAM site is a numbered diamond with the ring of its maximum range.
The chart crops itself to the route, the targets and the sites within 25 miles, and a farther site that reaches the route comes in with its ring clipped at the edge. The projection was verified theatre by theatre against the Mission Editor, because a ring a few miles off on a kneeboard is worse than no ring at all.
The ZIP
The pages are 1536×2048 PNGs, in the briefing’s skin, Cold War or modern. The ZIP is built in the browser, with no libraries, and inside it there is a file saying which DCS folder to put it in, which is otherwise the question that always arrives in chat.
Access
Open at gcidemo.alessandrosimonitto.it/cosciali, with the demo’s data.