SECTOR

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.