DCS Mission
Tracker

The dynamic campaign, and three new modules (v1.62 to v1.150). In three weeks SECTOR went from 1.58 to 1.150, and the thread is one: a campaign that lives on its own. Inside the DCS mission an engine runs a ground war, sector by sector, with each side's forces sent by an automatic director or by a person spending the side's credits, and the front moving forward when a battlefield is won. Three modules grew around it: the Campaign Manager, where the game master sets the scenario, that is forces, names, aircraft, costs and cut-off date; the Faction Command, from which each side commands its war, artillery and convoys included; and Kneeboards, which prints the kneeboard for every seat in the flight. Each has its own page here on the site. A campaign can also be born from scratch, with the .miz written by SECTOR on one of eleven theatres and loaded onto the server at the press of a button.

The Editor becomes a Mission Editor in the browser (v1.83 to v1.147). Born to move groups and routes, it now does almost everything the DCS Mission Editor does, and does it the way it does: trigger zones and rules, scripts in the .miz, weather with the cloud presets and DCS's real models, briefing, options enforced on players, goals, statics, warehouses with the Resource Manager, FARPs and grass strips, waypoint actions for vehicles and ships, Combined Arms roles. Then the flights: routes, loadouts pylon by pylon, slot radio presets, en-route tasks, orbits and escorts, and a CombatFlite-style flight plan with magnetic heading and times, which also shows where the route crosses into SAM and EWR rings. AWACS and tankers go in with one click. The map carries DCS's real roads, railways and airfields. It remains reserved to administrators, so it does not have a public page yet.

A tower that listens, and a helper for Duccio (v1.143 and v1.144). The first piece of the automatic tower listens to one or two tower frequencies on SRS and transcribes every transmission, who speaks, how long and what they say, with faster-whisper on the server's CPU. It does not transmit anything yet: for now it is there to collect real transcripts from an evening and to measure what it costs the server, which has no graphics card. Duccio can lean on TypeSafe's Jev to pick the right guide entry and say "I don't know" when the question is not about SECTOR: it is optional and off by default, because switching it on means sending pilots' questions off the server.

A Home to come in by, and the same bar everywhere (v1.53 and v1.56). At / there is now the SECTOR Control Center: the group's logos in the centre, then one card per module in the TACTICAL (Live, GCI, ACIS, ATC, JTAC), INTEL (Mission Control, Briefing Builder, Analyzer) and TOOLS (Comms, Tools, Docs) groups. An entry that will not open stays dimmed and says why, login, section or level, worked out by the server with the same rules as the routes. The cards use this site's photographs with the two-colour dither, and hovering over one a scan line, like the radar sweep, uncovers the photograph in colour. The Analyzer has moved to /analyzer, and links shared before arrive there with their parameters. Every group picks its logos and colours from the panel, and the top bar is the same on every page, with a slide-out menu and the mission state.

Duccio, and the guide in four languages (v1.52 and v1.54). Duccio is the mascot, a pilot chick in a helmet, called up like the old Office assistant: you ask it something and it takes you to the guide entry or gives a simple answer, with no artificial intelligence. It answers in the page's language, starting from the entries of the module it is asked from, and to "what does this page do" it answers with that page's guide. The search is a BM25 index written in Python: SQLite FTS5, tried first, made long sections win over the ones that actually answered. The guide is meanwhile translated into English, French and German, and has a new group of tactical deep-dives: IFF and transponder, the 9-line, radio procedures, departure and approach, carrier operations, target identification and threat evaluation.

Scenarios: eleven real wars to build believable campaigns (v1.57). Tools gains a Scenarios tab, with the wars the group's library of monographs covers and DCS can play, from Suez 1956 to Ethiopia-Eritrea 1998-2000, by way of the Six-Day War, Yom Kippur, Linebacker, the Ogaden, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, the Gulf of Sidra and the Gulf War. Each card gives the period, the theatre, the DCS map with its coverage, the forces of both sides, the events with their mission type, campaign ideas and a PvE and PvP difficulty index derived from the force ratio. Every figure carries the source's code and the PDF page, numbers stay as the source gives them and discrepancies between sources are declared, not settled by eye.

Sixty-four aircraft and the ships traced, and a program that stays with the group (v1.48 and v1.55). After the aircraft came the ships: Nimitz, Tarawa and Forrestal traced from photographs and profiles, and the demo escorts, while the aircraft traced from drawings went up to sixty-four, each with the drawing's source and licence. SECTOR is proprietary software, and the gap was distribution: servers cloned the development repository with all its history, tests and working notes. Servers now receive a release package, with only what is needed to run it and a history made of releases, and the server tells crawlers to stay out, with the text and data mining reservation provided by Article 4 of EU Directive 2019/790.

Coming soon: the mission Editor (v1.58). The first phase of an editor inside SECTOR: the group's missions in a versioned library, opened on the map and edited by several people at once, with groups, routes, radios and activations moved and changed, copy and paste even across theatres, and radar and SAM coverage computed with the terrain. The file stays the Mission Editor's own: whatever is not touched comes back identical byte for byte. For now it belongs to the administrator, and on the demo guests see COMING SOON.

Mission Control, the ninth tool, and a debrief that says whether you were in range (v1.44 and v1.43). Mission Control holds a campaign together from one mission to the next, with the target board, the packages and the front line: it has a page of its own. In the analyzer, the Weapon engagement zones checkbox draws the four zones as lobes coming out of the shooter's nose, WEZ if the missile arrives with the target flying straight on, MOR if any closer the escape turn is not enough, MAR if not even the abort is, NEZ if there is no way out. The calculation actually flies the missile rather than drawing a circle: the zones are as wide as the missile launches off-boresight and as long as it reaches, with the heading and speed of that instant. A box says it in words, for defence and for attack, and every shot in the recording gets its verdict: out of range, a turn would have done, an abort was needed, no escape.

Aircraft are no longer dots, anywhere (from v1.31 to v1.47). The Hangar's models are no longer built from dimensions alone: they are traced from scale three-view drawings, by a program that reads the outlines off the drawing (spine and belly from the side view, wings and tailplanes from the plan, dihedral and thickness from the front view) and asks the operator a single question. Forty-seven types traced, within 2% on length and span, each with its drawing and its licence declared. The same silhouettes became the icons on the Live map and on the ATC and ACIS scopes, and the models in the 3D views: debrief, Live, ATC and ACIS look at the same world, with the theatre's terrain and the satellite laid over it, carriers with their published dimensions and the deck at the right height, and ground vehicles recognised by family.

The guide moves into the application, and the demo starts fighting (v1.36 and v1.39 to v1.41). The guide lived in the repository's wiki, but the repository is private and on GitHub Free only public repositories have a wiki: whoever used SECTOR never saw the guide. It is now /docs inside the application, with a search across everything, links between pages without reloading, and printable quick-reference sheets for GCI, ACIS and ATC. The demo, meanwhile, has stopped being choreography: every weapon has a class with speed, time of flight and probability of hitting, and the outcome is decided at the pass with the geometry of that moment, so chaff makes one miss, flares deceive an infrared seeker and a shot at the edge of the envelope arrives with no energy. Whoever is engaged goes evasive when they would actually notice, two fighters close by have a dogfight, and the sample missions are three in rotation, Syria, the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus.

The project is called SECTOR (v1.21). Sector Operations for DCS World: in 1940 the British air defence, the Dowding system, divided the sky into sectors, and every sector had its own operations room, with the plotting table at the centre, the squadron state board on the wall and the sector controller on the balcony, who scrambled the fighters and guided them by radio with a heading, an altitude and a range. That is where ground-controlled interception was born, and it is what this program does: the picture (Live), those who read it and guide (GCI, ACIS), the tower (ATC), those who call the aircraft in from the ground (JTAC), the briefing before and the debrief after. The folder, the Docker image and the firewall rule keep the old name, so an existing installation updates without touching anything.

The interface in four languages, and signing in with Discord (v1.22 and v1.24). A common translation system with the catalogues in a file, Italian and English on every page, then French and German as a first draft, declared as such and with a page explaining to translators how to correct it. Discord sign-in is OAuth2 with permissions taken from the server's roles, mapped from the panel: the role belongs to the application rather than to the server, with the option to follow it, and the bot rechecks on a long interval. Local users remain as a fallback. Roles are defined by the group, with a level, sections per activity and the coalition filtering the feed server-side, which is the point: a red visitor must not receive the blue picture and then have the browser hide it.

Two new tools, Comms and Hangar, and 3D models in the debrief (v1.26 and v1.29). Comms is the course, the guide, the exercise and the prompter for controller communications, taken from the ACC manual. The Hangar sits in Tools: 83 aircraft rebuilt from their dimensions, with free orbit and a data card carrying the datamine's numbers beside Wikipedia. The same models take the place of the dots in the debrief, with weapons by class and propellers and rotodomes properly oriented. Tools also gained the two calculators born on this site, SAM threat and missile lethality, hooked to the datamine's real range and to the mission feed.

A security review across seven areas, and a DCS server that no longer falls over (v1.27 and v1.28). The mission script and the hook were bringing the DCS server down: fixed. Then a pass over everything else, area by area, with the fixes tried rather than merely written: bzip2 and lzma zip bombs refused by the analyzer, the briefing's Lua parser without backtracking and with ceilings, the ATC's coalition filter applied to tankers and ships too, the token compared in constant time, the client IP read from CF-Connecting-IP only behind a trusted proxy, a malformed packet that no longer kills the UDP thread. And user data leaves the repository: airport cards, radio plan and channels live in a separate folder, with a backup before every update and a restore from the panel.

Two new tools, JTAC and ACIS, and a version read from one place. The E-2C console leaves the GCI and becomes a page of its own, /acis, and the JTAC (/jtac) compiles check-in, game plan and 9-line from the mission feed: the application now has seven tools. The program version lives in one place in app.py and is served from /api/config: hand-written in the HTML it had stayed at 1.2 while the program moved on for months, and it is now also the way to know which version is running on the server without logging in (1.13.1 today, with a tag on every push that ships something).

Users, roles and sections instead of a single password. Three levels: admin opens everything, user operates and uploads files in the enabled sections, visitor only looks. The role says what you can do, the list of sections says where, and keeping them apart avoids inventing a new role for every exception. Passwords are written nowhere, only the scrypt hash, and a missing user and a wrong password give the same answer in the same time. A user can be tied to an operator session: opening GCI, ATC or ACIS with no parameters redirects to that session's token. Token links keep opening as visitor, because that is how the group hands the tools around, and breaking it to tighten permissions would be a bad trade.

The debrief in 3D, with four cameras and the theatre's ground. Free, Follow, Action (frames only the aircraft alive at the scrubber instant, with a four-mile floor, because two half-hour tracks make an engagement tiny) and Cockpit, the only one in true perspective: the attitude is the recorded one, in a turn the horizon banks as it banked then, which is why the scene does not rotate with the mouse. Missile and bomb trajectories were already in the file and are coloured by outcome. Under the routes sits the real terrain, from the same elevation model ACIS and GCI use for radar masking; the ACMI does not say which theatre, so it is found from the centroid of the routes. With "Scene" the ground units, flares, chaff and bursts appear too: 150 KB on a 1.5 MB report, because thirty points each are enough for the forty vehicles that actually move.

The summary split by side, friendly fire made visible, gun kills read rather than guessed. Adding the two sides together, every kill is also somebody else's loss and the K/D always came out around one: there is now a card per side, and the side is the ACMI's Color, not its Coalition, which depends on who exported the file. Blue on blue was invisible by construction; the wingman is now looked at too, with half the radius and the rule that if an enemy is among those who hit, the kill is his, and friendly fire sits in its own list without entering the kills. Recent files do carry the shells (1310 in the sample), so a gun kill is no longer estimated from two aircraft being close: the round is followed. Rounds with no aircraft behind them are ground fire and are shown apart. Labelled ground kills, ground units filterable by type, a two-aircraft comparison with square-root range scale and aspect, an altitude profile, a link to a moment, and a sample mission for whoever arrives without an .acmi.

Installation and security: the DCS sandbox stays closed. The mission script no longer opens sockets: it queues the packets and a hook in the GUI environment collects them and sends them over UDP, the same road SRS and Tacview take, so MissionScripting.lua is no longer touched (earlier versions asked to desanitise it, and the JATF server refused, rightly). install.bat installs the DCS scripts, finds Saved Games where it is not usually kept, and works without git. An https mode with the certificate in the tracker or Caddy in front. Transponder and IFF come from SRS, as LotATC does, because DCS does not expose them to scripts; AI units declare theirs in the unit name with the same syntax, and the squawk shows on the GCI, on the ACIS, on the ATC strip and in the Live popup.

The application hosting the tracker gained a fifth tool, the Briefing Builder, which compiles JATF briefings starting from the mission's .miz file. The tracker itself is unchanged: it remains post-flight debriefing over ACMIs, and the two tools share the application, the server and the login, not the data.

Step-by-step install guide for self-hosting the tracker: Python and Flask on Windows, LAN startup, changing the admin password and publishing to the Internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel, with the app configured behind a proxy (secure session cookies, HSTS) and a minimum security checklist for public exposure.

Integrated into the site's DCS World Tools page. Remote access via virtual machine with authentication.

Rate limiting on ACMI uploads and API endpoint protection. Upload cap at 100 MB input, 512 MB decompressed.

First working version: ACMI parsing, pilot stats, kill ranking, route map.