1.4.2

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install; existing settings are kept.

This release adds the Command section, a new section of BMS Companion for editing campaigns, TEs and their
theater data on the PC. The Mission section now follows you between the PC, the browser and Android; Mission weather
gains a weather-type map and a vertical profile; kneeboards are shown first on their page and can follow the map
style; the fuel plan works out Bingo, Joker and playtime; and the PC program can start with Windows.

Command section (PC window)

A new section for editing Falcon BMS campaigns, TEs and trainings, and the theater data they use. It is a rail entry
between Mission and Reference in the PC window (while it reads Falcon BMS on that PC) and opens any campaign,
TE or training save of every theater: Open… lists each theater's campaign folder with BMS's own files marked, the
recent files, Windows' file dialog, or a file dropped on the window.

This is the first release of the Command section; some issues may still turn up. Keep a copy of a campaign you value
before editing it. If you find a bug, please report it on GitHub
(https://github.com/Scorpion-41/Falcon-BMS-Companion/issues) or in the forum thread, with the save and what you did.

• Workspace. A map of the theater with every side's objectives, units, routes, links, front lines and air-defence
  rings; layers and filters on the left, each with its legend; the inspector of whatever is selected on the right;
  the page's table in a drawer below. Side panels and the drawer fold and resize, and every row of buttons wraps on a
  small window. Pages: Map, Units, ATO, Objectives, Teams, Campaign, Pilots, Checks, Stats and Files.
• Map. BMS's own icons or the app's symbols (a shape per objective type and aircraft role, battalion, brigade and
  division marks), with fewer symbols when zoomed out. Tools: Select, Area, Move, Clone, Link +, Link −, Owner and
  Ruler, plus Find (name or CampId) and Save picture…; a hover box and a right-click menu for every kind of item.
• BMS chart. Falcon BMS's own 2D campaign map, read from the install (nothing shipped), is a map style here and on
  every map of the app while the PC can read it.
• Tables. Units with BMS's squadron patches, team flags, callsigns, home base, elements, times, UHF/VHF and state;
  the ATO as a package and flight tree; Objectives with their changes in the save. Sortable, with key columns kept in
  place, a right-click menu per row, and Export CSV… of units and objectives. Team and country flags are from
  flag-icons (MIT licence), credited under About → Credits.
• Flights. Callsign, mission, aircraft, seats and pilots, laser code, fuel, skins; waypoints with times
  recalculated from locked points; loadouts per hardpoint limited to the aircraft's legal stores.
• Packages, squadrons and ground units. Packages; squadrons with base moves (their flights follow), roster,
  aircraft type, the 48 pilots and stores; battalions, brigades and task forces (a carrier's move takes its
  squadrons). Add, clone and delete with new ids, free callsigns and free pilots, and every reference cleaned up.
  Bulk operations: resupply all, full rosters, reset spotting, move a team's units to another, change every unit of a
  class, and air defences on every objective of a type.
• Objectives. In a save, what BMS records: owner, supply, fuel, losses and building damage. A campaign start can
  be edited in full after Edit BMS's campaign start, which backs the file up once: name, class, owner, priority,
  position, links (costs fitted to the theater's own, auto-link), radar coverage worked out from the terrain, and
  adding or deleting objectives, with a warning naming the saves that use that start.
• Teams. Stances between teams, name, colour and flag, experience, priorities, ground and air actions, the air
  tasking requests and airbase schedules; adding a team.
• Campaign. The header: clock, start and end, campaign period, bullseye, TE settings; Shift Times for every
  time in the save; the squadron list; the territory (occupation) map, shown and painted; events; primary objectives.
• Pilots and callsigns checked against the squadrons and flights, with recount and clear.
• Checks. One report of ids, references, rosters, objective changes BMS would not read, links, air-defence spots,
  callsign usage and team settings, each with a Fix button, and Fix all.
• Stats per team and type.
• Files. The theater's campaign database files, one table each: Stations+Ils.dat (out-of-band frequencies in
  red, each ILS slot named by the runway end it serves), RadioMap.dat, TePlanes.lst, TeUnits.lst,
  TeNavalUnits.lst, InvalidAcTypes.XML, every MissionData_*.xml and CampObjData.XML. Unedited rows are
  written back unchanged; each file is backed up once before its first write, with Restore BMS's original.
• Saving safely.
  • Save as a copy is the default; Overwrite is a separate choice that always asks first and is refused when
    the file changed on disk since it was read.
  • BMS's own files — campaign starts, the TEs and trainings that ship with BMS, add-on missions — are recognised
    from the install itself and only ever saved as a copy (This file is mine marks a file of your own that was
    taken for BMS's).
  • The first time a theater's campaign folder is opened, BMS's files there are copied once into
    BMS Companion Backup\Command\ in the BMS folder, with a README on restoring them by hand.
  • Every file is written the way Falcon BMS's own save writes it, then read back and verified before it replaces
    the old one; a file saved without edits is identical to the original.
  • Every edit can be undone and redone.

Mission section on every device

• Follows you between devices. The Mission section's settings and choices (map style and layers, weather, Taxi,
  fuel plan, kneeboard view, target pictures, Files tab), the Planner's work on the flight (DataCard boxes, Briefing
  text, Performance, attack inputs, unsaved DTC edits) and where you were (tab, Planner page, open window) are kept
  on the PC and taken over by the PC window, the browser and Android, the last change winning. The page you were on
  is taken over when you switch to a device, never while you use it, and a box being typed in is never overwritten.
  The Dashboard keeps its own layout on each device.
• Planning on the PC carries over. The Planner's open flight and seat, the Upd Kneeboard plan and the Steps are
  kept on the PC, so a tablet or browser opened after planning on the PC continues the same flight.

Mission weather

• Weather type is the default fill: Sunny, Fair, Poor and Inclement in their own colours. New fills: Cloud base,
  Cloud size, Towering cumulus, Shower and Fog altitude (Clouds is now Cloud coverage). The cloud circles are an
  optional overlay, off by default.
• Vertical profile. A strip under the map along the route from take-off to landing, 0-40,000 ft: the weather
  type, fog, cloud base, towering cumulus, precipitation, the ground and the planned altitude; a tap or drag sets a
  cursor ringed on the map. Draw line draws the profile along a line of your own.
• On short windows the fill choices take one line and the profile starts folded, so the map keeps most of the height.

Kneeboards

• Viewing first. Mission → Kneeboards opens on Kneeboards for this mission: In the cockpit shows what BMS
  will show in 3D, read from the page files themselves, each half with who wrote it and whether it belongs to this
  mission or an earlier one; html_brief's pages and the EZBoards tables are views beside it. A tap opens a large
  viewer (zoom, swipe or arrow keys through the pages). Making the kneeboards follows below.
• Kneeboards Dashboard card showing the cockpit pages one at a time.
• Route map in your map style. Upd Kneeboard's route map follows the map's style, labels and layers (the
  Planner's Map page in WDP mode, the Mission map in EZBoards mode), including Satellite, Topographic and BMS chart.
• Weather map page. A new Upd Kneeboard page: the Mission weather map with your fill and overlays, its legend,
  and the take-off, target and landing figures.
• Upd Kneeboard's pages work from the flight open in the Planner, without Populate from Planner.

Maps

• Your own jet is larger and white with a dark outline and a heading line on every map and style, so it is no
  longer confused with the route. Jet size Small, Medium or Large (Mission map chip, kneeboard menu, VR map board
  option).

Fuel plan

• Bingo, Joker and playtime worked out from the route: burns per nautical mile (higher on low legs), the divert
  to the alternate, a VMC or IMC allowance and a reserve, worked back from the landing to give the minimum fuel at
  every steerpoint. Before a tanker the plan keeps enough to come home if the tanker is not there. Playtime over the
  target in minutes of afterburner and at 350 kt. In 3D the jet's fuel is held against the minimum where it is (on
  plan, Joker, Bingo, below minimum). On the Briefing page, as a Dashboard card and as a Noteboard block; every
  figure can be set.
• Fill Bingo/Joker on the DataCard when the Planner has the same flight open.

PC program

• Start with Windows and Start minimized (Start-up and closing card, server page and Setup; both off by
  default). A shortcut set to start minimized, start /min and --minimized now open the window minimized on the
  taskbar, and a second start brings the running window to the front.

Planner

• Sharper text. On the PC the Planner draws its text in Arial, WDP's own font, fully hinted and placed on whole
  pixels, ...

1.4.1 — Noteboard, Upd Kneeboard in both modes, BMS installs, runway lengths, ILS fix

1.4.1 (BMS 4.38) — October 2026

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install; existing settings are kept.

This release adds a Noteboard for the cockpit kneeboard and Upd Kneeboard in both mission modes, quick switching
between several Falcon BMS installs, runway lengths in the airfield Info box, Mission weather colour scales and a
Sun & Moon block, and asks before Open mission… clears lines and PPTs.

Kneeboards

• Upd Kneeboard in both modes. Mission → Kneeboards has Upd Kneeboard and Edit notes in EZBoards mode as
  well as WDP mode. In EZBoards mode it becomes available once EZBoards has made its pages for the printed briefing
  (straight away when EZBoards is not set up). The halves EZBoards writes (page 1 on a stock setup) show as EZBoards'
  own pages and are never printed over; the default set adds a Noteboard, Target pictures, the route map and the
  departure chart on the next free pages, drawn from the printed briefing. The Planner's pages (DataCard, Coordination
  Card, its Briefing and Weather, target list, schedule, attack profile) are offered in WDP mode only, and each mode
  keeps its own page plan.
• Noteboard. A kneeboard page composed from blocks: free notes (a blank page when it is the only block), laser
  codes (TGP and LST from the callsign file, wingman and buddy codes typed), figures such as joker, bingo and push time,
  the comm ladder and the steerpoints. Blocks are added, ordered and removed in the Upd Kneeboard window beside the
  printed page; two Noteboards can share one page. The notes are kept on the PC per flight, shared by every device,
  and Keep for the next mission carries them on.
• Notes VR board. A VR kneeboard tab shows Noteboard 1, Noteboard 2 or both, updated as they are edited.

Setup

• Several Falcon BMS installs. Every Falcon BMS version in the Windows registry is listed by itself, other folders
  can be added, and one tap switches the install in use, from the server page or any device's Setup page. A switch
  reads everything again from the new folder; unsaved Planner edits are dropped so nothing is saved into the other
  install, and notes are kept per install. The install in use is named in the Mission section's source line when more
  than one is listed. Older BMS versions are not specially supported.

Airfields

• Runway lengths in the Info box. Each runway's length in feet and metres, with its width, under the coordinates
  on the airfield page and in the Mission map's airfield card. The figures are BMS's own runway outlines and match
  BMS's ground charts to within 3 ft.

Mission weather

• Colour scales. Clouds, Precipitation, Pressure, Wind speed, Temperature and Visibility each fill the map with
  their own colour scale and a labelled scale bar. Cloud cover runs from a pale veil to dark slate; rain, showers and
  snow are told apart by colour and pattern; pressure and wind speed are colour fields with isobars and wind barbs
  over them. The legend explains the cloud symbols: the share of the circle filled is the sky covered (FEW, SCT, BKN,
  OVC), the number the cloud base in hundreds of feet, ▲ towering cumulus. Smooth blends the fills between cells.
• Sun & Moon. Sunrise, sunset, civil twilight, moonrise, moonset and the moon's phase for the mission's date at
  the take-off field, in local and Zulu time, with BMS's own printed sunrise and sunset beside them; one line of it on
  the Briefing's and Dashboard's Weather card. BMS draws the moon from the same date, so the phase shown is the
  one in the sim.

Planner

• Open mission… asks before it clears. The first time it would clear lines, PPTs and Open 1/Open 2 steerpoints
  left from earlier missions, the Planner asks Clear them or Keep them; the answer becomes the default for
  every device and can be changed, or asked again, under Options → Settings…. With Keep, they also stay when a new
  mission is printed or the mission mode is switched.

Fixed

• Upd Kneeboard's Target pictures page listed nothing in WDP mode until Populate from Planner had been pressed,
  and targets could only be added on the Briefing page. It now takes the flight open in the Planner and has its own
  Add….
• The control tower was missing from the ground charts of Songwhan, Yonghung, Kilchu and Okpyongni highway strips and
  of Larissa, Andravida, Agrinio, Aktion, Istrana, Kalamata and Sigonella, among 26 fields; 27 towers added.
• Sangwon highway strip was shown as a second "Songwhan" (a comment in BMS's station file); Kilchu, Tanchon and
  Hyangsan are now listed as highway strips.
• The Planner's steps, guide and tooltips told the pilot to press FLY or COMMIT in BMS; the button that enters the
  cockpit is TAKEOFF.
• The 2A18 (D-30) howitzer was listed under SAM launchers in the target pictures' Add list.
• ILS frequencies were assigned to the wrong runway ends at many fields: Cheongju's single ILS showed on 06R instead
  of 24L, and Gimpo's and Incheon's four were each on another end. BMS groups a field's runway ends by runway number
  and swaps the two ends within each group; the airfield pages, the DataCard and the DTC's ILS now follow it (checked
  against BMS's own code and its theater documents, 226 runway/frequency pairs). Credit to Havhingstor, who found
  the rule by decompiling Mission Commander and documented it in a GitHub issue; this fix is built on that work.
• At 121 Balkans runway ends, some in the Falklands, and Skopje and Tanagra in Hellas, a runway end carried its
  opposite end's name (Aviano's 050° end was called 23) and its ATC pattern; each end now takes its own.
• Runway lengths came from an estimate that was often far short of BMS's runways (Souda 8,800 ft against 10,990,
  Hatzor 5,950 against 7,928; Hellas a median 1,700 ft short). Every runway now takes BMS's own length and width, so
  the Planner's Performance page (take-off and landing distance available), the airfield pages and the VR runway
  table are corrected.

1.4.0 — Mission weather, target pictures, deeper maps, airfield card

1.4.0 (BMS 4.38) — October 2026

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install; existing settings are kept.

This release adds a Mission weather page, target pictures drawn from Falcon BMS's own 3-D models and a Files tab;
the maps zoom much further, gain a topographic style and draw each airfield's diagram; the Planner's DataCard handles
tankers, conformal tanks, bingo and joker.

Mission

• Mission weather. The Weather tab opens on a new Mission weather page, on every device: the weather of the
  save BMS flies, drawn over the theater with the route and airfields. Under Map Model it shows the save's map and,
  with Maps Auto Update, the update maps through the flight on a time line marking take-off, target and landing.
  Layers: clouds, precipitation, visibility, temperature, wind at any of BMS's ten levels, and isobars; a tap gives a
  cell's full column. Probabilistic and Deterministic weather is shown as the type BMS applies to the whole theater,
  with the four types' tables. The Weather card's MAP button opens the page; the generator is the tab's second
  page, Make weather.
• Target pictures. A Target pictures card on the Briefing shows the flight's enemy targets, each threat system of
  the briefing with its radars and the other vehicles of its battalion, and spotted enemy ships, drawn by the PC from
  Falcon BMS's own 3-D models in two views (front right and rear left, from above, as a targeting pod sees them). Only
  what an enemy team holds is listed: never the take-off, landing or alternate field, nor anything of the flight's own
  or an allied side. The pictures are in black and white, like a targeting pod image. Add picks any vehicle, ship
  or building from a list by category; the red ✕ on each entry removes it, and Reload restores the mission's own
  list. Additions and removals are kept per mission on each device. Pictures are drawn on demand and kept in a 50 MB
  cache on the PC. Works in both mission modes.
• Files tab. Opens text files and logs, HTML pages, pictures and PDFs on the BMS PC from any device, read only,
  several at once as tabs. Programs and scripts are never served. It can be hidden under Setup → Mission pages.
• Airfield card on the map. A tap on an airfield on the Mission map — its symbol, its name, or anywhere on its
  diagram when zoomed in — opens a compact card at once: ICAO, runways with their lengths, bearing and range from the
  jet and the bullseye, the flight's steerpoints on the field, coordinates and elevation, and every frequency in divert
  order (tap to copy), with a small chart of the field (runways and pavement only) on a tablet or PC and Airfield
  page › for the rest. It floats over the map on a tablet or PC and is a sheet on a phone; a tap elsewhere or ✕
  closes it.
• DED highlighting. The Dashboard's DED card draws highlighted fields in inverse video, as the cockpit does, and
  shows the Pilot Fault List below the DED while it lists a fault.
• Approach frequency. The Airbases card (Dashboard and Briefing) and the map's airfield card list the approach
  frequency with tower and ground.
• Version number in the PC window's title, on the server page, on the Setup page and in the browser tab.

Planner

• Conformal fuel tanks. The Loadout window has a CFT switch for jets that can carry them: the tanks' 3,060 lb
  of fuel, their weight and drag count in the Performance page and in the DataCard's take-off and block fuel. A save's
  aircraft start with or without them as BMS loaded them, seat by seat.
• Tankers on the DataCard. The Tanker 1/Tanker 2 lists offer every tanker of your side, those on station during
  the flight first; a row's notes give each tanker's time on station. The Map page's tanker, AWACS and JSTARS cards
  have Put on DataCard as Tanker 1 / Tanker 2 / AWACS / JSTARS.
• Bingo and Joker. JOKER is worked out as BINGO + 500 lb, as the BMS User Manual defines it, unless typed. The
  route's bingo (the DataCard's Min Fuel at the turn for home) is shown in the BINGO box's tip; emptying the box uses
  it.
• Upd Kneeboard pages. Two new kinds: Airport Schedule (the DataCard's departures from your field) and Route
  map, dark (light inks on a dark map, for sun glare).
• Target pictures on the kneeboard. An Upd Kneeboard page kind with up to four of the mission's targets on a half
  page, two views each, as on the Briefing's Target pictures card; the targets are ticked per half (by default the
  next four of the card's list) and kept with the plan.
• Briefing page text. Situation, Intel, Mission Objective and Notes are all set at one size: a long line wraps onto
  the next lines instead of being shrunk, on screen and on the kneeboard page. Typing wraps as in a word processor:
  the word that no longer fits moves to the next line and the caret follows, deleting pulls text back up, and
  Backspace at the start of a line joins it to the line above.

Maps

• Deeper zoom. Every theater map zooms down to about half a metre a pixel, enough to see the terrain round a
  runway. The first levels are built into the app; the deeper ones are drawn by the PC program from Falcon BMS's own
  files: the height map for Relief, Dark, Chart and Topographic, and BMS's photoreal textures, down to its
  high-resolution airbase imagery, for Satellite, laid where the sim lays its terrain, so an airfield's runways sit on
  the runways in the imagery (where BMS's imagery has them: Mount Pleasant's are painted out of the Falklands'
  textures).
  • On demand, on every device. On a phone, tablet or browser the PC program streams these levels to the device
    as the map is zoomed and panned, only for the part on screen, and the map sharpens as they arrive; nothing has to
    be downloaded or set up first, and nothing comes from the internet or is stored on the device.
  • Without the PC. With the PC off or out of reach, the map works as before on the levels built into the app
    (down to about 125 m a pixel; 250 m in the Falklands, twice the size), enlarged past them.
• Topographic style. A fifth map style: contour lines whose interval follows the zoom (labelled in feet),
  hillshade and water, from BMS's height map. Its first levels are in the app (about 13 MB for the five terrains).
• Airfield diagrams. Zoomed in, each airfield is drawn as its ground chart (asphalt, runways with their numbers,
  taxiways with their letters, shelters and buildings) in place of its symbol, on the Reference map, the Mission map
  and the Planner's Map page.

Reference and Threats

• Threat pictures. Each air-defence and ship page under Reference → Threats shows the system and the vehicles of
  its battalion drawn from BMS's 3-D models, with the same views and targeting-pod look as the Briefing's card, in a
  card folded until opened.
• North up on ground charts. The Taxi page and an airfield's chart have an N button, lit while the chart is
  north up, that puts north at the top as on the map and undoes a two-finger turn.
• Reference map. The Topographic style, the deeper zoom and the airfield diagrams above; a place found by the
  search is centred and marked.

Fixed

• Upd Kneeboard's Target list pages printed empty rows instead of the list.
• Upd Kneeboard could print the Coordination Card's left half without the card's printed form (title, headings and
  grid) when the form's picture had not finished loading; a page is now captured only once all of it has drawn.
• The DataCard's Tanker 1/Tanker 2 lists offered only "No tanker" for a flight later in the day than the save's
  planned tanker tracks.
• Tanker and AWACS tracks of the other side were drawn on the Mission map and the Planner's Map page and offered to
  the DataCard; only those of your side and its allies (the campaign's team table) are shown now.
• Weather read from a save (WDP mode's weather block, the DataCard's ATIS and weather list) gave a sunny day a
  5,000 ft cloud base; it is now the high layer BMS prints, and WDP mode's block has the contrail layer row.
• A suggestion in the Reference map's search could not be picked with the mouse. Suggestions can now be clicked or
  tapped, ↓/↑ move through them and Enter picks the highlighted one.
• Airfield elevations and the ground under a point (the attack pages' ELEV, the Map page's readout, the PC's map
  tiles) now include BMS's terrain levelling at airbases (TerrainRelatedData/TLD_*.TPB); Hellas fields such as
  Graf Ignatievo were up to 490 ft too low. Credit to oakdesign, who found the cause and documented BMS's
  terrain-levelling files in a GitHub issue; this fix is built on that work. Ground heights are now also read at the
  true position on BMS's terrain, which up to 1.3.9 was up to 880 ft away in a theater's north-east.

1.3.9 — Lines and PPTs through BMS's DTC, Open 1/2 from the map, towers and cables, Reference photos

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install; existing settings are kept.

This release reworks how the Planner's lines, threat rings and steerpoints reach the jet, adds towers, arresting
cables and free rotation to the ground charts, and replaces many Reference pictures with checked photographs.

Lines, PPTs and steerpoints: from the Planner to the HSD

Falcon BMS keeps the HSD's four lines, the threat rings (PPTs), the precision targets and the Open 1/Open 2
steerpoints (STPT 81-99) in two places: the pilot's callsign file (User\Config\<callsign>.ini) and, in a
campaign, the save's mission file (Data\Campaign\<save name>.ini). In a campaign, the DTC window's LOAD reads
lines, PPTs and targets from the mission file; SAVE writes BMS's copy to both files; FLY writes BMS's copy to
the callsign file. In 1.3.8 the Planner wrote only the callsign file, so LOAD followed by SAVE replaced what had been
planned with the mission file's contents, and lines and threat rings disappeared from BMS and from the Planner.

How it works in 1.3.9:

• Open mission… starts clean. When Open mission… or Pick a flight plans another flight, every line, PPT and
  Open 1/Open 2 steerpoint is removed from the callsign file and the save's mission file. Kept: the route, precision
  and Recon targets (STPT 15-22), weapon targets, what the Planner already saved for that flight, and everything in a
  TE's or a training's own file. The setting Start each opened mission with clean lines, PPTs and Open 1/2
  steerpoints (Planner → Options → Settings) is on by default; turn it off to keep lines drawn in BMS from mission to
  mission.
• The maps suggest; the pilot chooses. After opening, the Mission map still draws the briefed threats and the
  tanker and AWACS tracks, and the Planner's Map page offers each as a one-tap Add as PPT or Add as line.
  Nothing is added to the DTC until the pilot adds it.
• Save to DTC writes both files. Lines, PPTs and target steerpoints go to the callsign file and the open save's
  mission file, so BMS's LOAD finds them.
• Then in BMS: open the DTC window, press LOAD, check the tabs, press SAVE, then FLY. FLY without LOAD
  writes BMS's earlier copy over the callsign file. In the cockpit, a line shows on the HSD while its LINE1-4 option
  is selected on the HSD control page.
• Until the next Open mission… everything stays as saved, including the pilot's own additions. A PRINT or a mode
  switch removes only items the Planner saved for other flights.

Planner

• Open 1 and Open 2 from the Map page. Add to Open bank… on any point, airfield, threat or navaid places it in
  STPT 81-99 with a chosen slot and steerpoint type. An airfield goes in as Land with its name and elevation, ready as
  an alternate; the point appears on the DTC page's Open 1/Open 2 tab and is saved with Save to DTC.
• Upd Kneeboard's Mission set is three pages: Briefing and Weather, the DataCard, then the Coordination Card
  (pages 1-3 in WDP mode; the first three pages EZBoards does not use in EZBoards mode). An unchanged plan from an
  earlier version is laid again in the new order; a plan changed by hand is kept.

Ground charts and airfields

• Control towers are drawn as their shape from above, from each tower's BMS 3D model, with a TWR label that
  never covers a spot number.
• Arresting cables are drawn across the runway where BMS places them and listed with their distance from each
  runway end, on the Taxi page and in the airfield page's runway cards. BMS does not identify the type of gear.
• Turning the chart. Two buttons turn the field to fill the screen or by 90°, and two fingers turn it freely on a
  touch screen; labels stay upright and the north arrow returns the chart to north up. Held upright, the chart opens
  turned to fill the page, and a carrier's deck always does (bow up or across).
• Larger chart in portrait. On a tablet or phone held upright the chart takes most of the page; the clearance and
  ramp spots sit in a panel below it that can be dragged up or folded away.
• Nothing drawn over the chart. The field's name, runways, cables and ramp details are a card under the chart.
• Hide your own jet. My jet on the Mission map and the Taxi page hides the ownship symbol; Ownship box
  hides the ownship figures beside the map.
• Reference on wide screens. Picking an airfield folds the list away so the airfield uses the full width; the back
  arrow brings the list back with its search intact. A frequency the field does not have reads "none".

Reference

• Photographs. Many aircraft, helicopters, air defences and stores, including most that had no picture, show a
  higher-resolution photograph of the same type and air arm from Wikimedia Commons (public domain or Creative
  Commons), with a credit line under it; About → Credits lists every photograph with its author and licence.
• Pictures match their own entry. An entry shows the picture BMS links to it, one of the same type in the same air
  arm's markings, or none; it no longer borrows another nation's or variant's. The add-on theaters' own TacRef pictures
  are included.
• Arsenal. BMS's empty placeholder slots ("*free", "--Free Slot--") no longer appear. The search field stays at the
  top of every Reference list. A store's page shows its picture, Tactical reference and General info first, then
  Carried by as a folded tree of aircraft families. An aircraft's theater variant is chosen from a drop-down, and
  its stations wrap instead of running off the card.

Fixed

• Lines and PPTs disappeared after LOAD and SAVE in BMS's DTC window in a campaign (see above).
• The DataCard's Alt column showed the ground elevation under each steerpoint instead of its planned altitude
  whenever the cartridge held the route; the Performance page's cruise altitude and fuel figures followed it.
• Hellenic F-16s showed a Turkish F-16 in the Reference section, and several other entries showed another type's
  or nation's picture.

1.3.8 — WDP for Falcon BMS 4.38.1, two mission modes, MFDs, weather, radio log

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install; existing settings are kept.

This release adds WDP for Falcon BMS 4.38.1, a port of Falcas's Weapon Delivery Planner that runs on the PC,
Android and in the browser on BMS 4.38.1's own data, and a choice of source for the Mission section: EZBoards mode
(BMS's printed briefing) or WDP mode (the flight planned in the Planner). It also adds live MFDs, Dashboard pages,
a weather generator, carrier decks drawn from BMS's models, a Radio page with automatic taxi, and a Reference section.

---

New: EZBoards mode and WDP mode

• Mode switch. EZBoards | WDP at the top of the Mission section and on Setup selects where the section's data
  comes from. The choice is kept on the PC and applies to every device and VR board; a line under the switch names
  the current source.
• EZBoards mode (the default). The Mission section shows the briefing BMS prints at PRINT, and EZBoards makes
  the cockpit kneeboards, as before. The Planner is locked in this mode.
• WDP mode. The Mission section shows the flight planned in the Planner — route, targets, loadout, package, tanker
  and AWACS tracks, radios, the saved cartridge, the attack and the save's weather — as taken by Populate from
  Planner. When BMS printed a briefing of the same flight, that briefing is used, so the flight reads the same in
  both modes.
• Populate from Planner runs only when pressed (Planner toolbar, Save to DTC menu, Kneeboards page, and the
  Mission pages before the first Populate). Unsaved Planner edits prompt to save first. The result is kept on the PC
  across restarts.
• EZBoards and the HTML Briefing tool are paused in WDP mode, since both write the cockpit pages the Planner
  writes. Their buttons are disabled with the reason; the EZBoards setting is kept for EZBoards mode.
• Each new mission starts clean. When a new mission begins (a PRINT of another flight, or another flight opened or
  populated in the Planner), lines, PPTs, targets and nav offsets the Planner saved for an earlier flight are removed
  from the cartridge and the TE's mission file, provided they are unchanged. A mode switch does the same, and restores
  BMS's own cockpit pages where the other mode's tool wrote them for an earlier flight. Values changed since by BMS or
  the pilot are kept. Load the DTC in BMS as usual afterwards.

New: WDP for Falcon BMS 4.38.1 — Mission → Planner

A port of Falcas's Weapon Delivery Planner with every control in its original place, using BMS 4.38.1's
airports, radios, HARM codes, PPT types, aircraft, stores, pylons and racks. It is available in WDP mode on every
device and works through the PC, which holds the saves, the cartridge and the kneeboard pages.

Typical order: in BMS, save the DTC and the mission, then PRINT; in the Planner, Open mission…, plan, Save
to DTC; in BMS, LOAD and SAVE the DTC; then Populate from Planner and Upd Kneeboard, and FLY.

• Open mission… and Pick a flight. Campaign, TE and training saves of every installed theater, newest first, with
  search and a list of recent files. BMS's campaign starts are listed but never opened. Pick a flight shows the save's
  full ATO by team and package, then the seat. WDP's question "Did you save Precision STPT in the DTC for THIS
  flight?" decides whether steerpoints come from the save (No, the default) or from the cartridge (Yes).
• Steps and Guide. Steps lists the ten steps from BMS to the cockpit and marks the current one. The Guide covers
  every page, planning on a phone or in a browser, and multiplayer; it can be read without a PC link.
• DataCard, Coordination Card and Briefing. WDP's card filled from the save: airbases, flight plan with times and
  fuel, targets, support flights, comm card, Link 16, ATIS, Config rows, laser codes and bullseye. Situation, intel,
  ROE and emergency procedures come from the printed briefing of the same flight, or are worded from the save as BMS
  words them. Weather is read from the save's own weather file at the departure, target and landing fields;
  Reload WX reads any weather map. The card stays on the planned flight; other flights are planned with Pick a
  flight.
• Map (new page). The cartridge as the HSD will show it, unsaved edits included, beside what the mission provides
  and the cartridge does not yet hold (tracks, threats, fields). A tap adds an item to the DTC; Move and Take
  out edit placed items. Includes an HSD preview and WDP's MAP tab: lat/long grid, bullseye rings, airfields by
  side, a readout of position, ground height and magnetic variation, Measure, Auto PPT, Clear PPT, Clear Lines, Change
  Area and Save Map.
• DTC. All sixteen tabs, filled from the cartridge, with BMS 4.38.1's defaults and HARM codes. From mission…
  on nine tabs fills a tab from the mission: tracks as lines, support aircraft and spotted threats as PPTs, the flight
  plan, targets, TACAN, ILS, the comm plan, laser codes and HARM tables. Clear All lists what it would remove and asks
  first.
• Attack: Pop-up, HADB and TOSS in one tab, with a rail beside the page to switch between them. TGT STPT
  selects the target and, in VIP mode, IP STPT the IP (VRP needs no IP; HADB plans from a VRP only). IP STPT at
  the VRP places a steerpoint at the VRP and plans the attack as VIP from it. Save to DTC on an attack page also
  fills the DataCard's Delivery section once the cartridge is saved, so the card and the cartridge agree. The attack last changed
  is drawn the same way on every map (Planner Map page, kneeboard attack page, Mission map after Populate). Target
  elevation comes from BMS's height map, and every ELEV can be typed.
• Performance. Take-off, climb, cruise and refusal from WDP's engine tables for all five engines, with BMS's
  pylons and racks and the mission's weather. A new Loadout window with a grouped store list, search, Mirror and
  totals writes the DataCard's Config rows.
• ATO Targets. WDP's ATO Target List: every target of the side's flights, in sortable Units and Objectives lists
  with latitude and longitude.
• Save to DTC. One toolbar button for every page, showing the number of unsaved edits; WDP's own cartridge buttons
  remain on their pages. As in WDP, the cartridge is written directly, without a backup, and only the changed lines
  are touched. With a TE open, the TE's mission file is written as well, since BMS loads it over the cartridge.
• Upd Kneeboard. Writes BMS's cockpit kneeboard pages, keeping each file's format and the half not printed. The
  default set is the DataCard and Coordination Card on pages 1-2 in WDP mode (2-3 in EZBoards mode). Other pages:
  briefing and weather, target list, route map, attack profile, ground charts of the departure, arrival and alternate,
  or a picture file (.jpg, .png, .bmp, .dds). Each page shows which tool wrote it, and BMS's original can be
  restored.
• Options. Settings (BMS folder and theater, weather files, Planner folders, tooltips, auto-load of the last
  mission) and About WDP. Every control has a tooltip.
• Files. File buttons always work on the BMS PC: Windows' own dialog on the PC, a folder browser on other
  devices. Files use WDP's formats and are kept in User\BMS Companion Planner inside the BMS folder, laid out like
  WDP's program folder.
• Touch and window sizes. Pages scale to the window and never scroll. By finger, a text box is edited in a bar
  above the keyboard with − / +, Next and Done; other controls open large editors. With a mouse, every tab and toolbar
  button stays visible in windows from 1024 pixels wide.
• Compared with WDP 3.7.24 (details in docs/WDP-PORT.md):
  • The same as WDP: pages and controls laid out as in WDP; the attack geometry, ballistics and performance tables
    give WDP's results, checked against WDP itself; latitude and longitude as WDP prints them, which match BMS's own
    ACMI recordings and AIPs to within 2 m.
  • Corrected: BMS 4.38 weather files (.twx version 8) could not be read; some training and TE missions did not
    load; precision steerpoints were lost or shifted on save, and a campaign save cleared BMS's route; ILS
    frequencies below 109.00 were altered; HARM codes were missing or wrong; IFF codes lost leading zeros; offset aim
    points on steerpoints 24-25 were never read back; a cartridge could carry VIP and VRP lines for one attack;
    the card's TGT in HUD ignored the check's result; TOSS VIP bearings had north and east swapped; pressure altitude
    had the wrong sign; HADB and TOSS heights assumed a sea-level target; the ATO Target List printed no
    coordinates; Korea TvT had none either.
  • New in the Planner: runs on the PC, Android and in a browser; BMS 4.38.1 data throughout; Open mission… and
    Pick a flight from any device; the Map page; From mission… on the DTC tabs; the Attack rail, IP STPT and IP STPT
    at the VRP; Save to DTC filling the DataCard; the Loadout window; Upd Kneeboard keeping each page's format, with
    pictures; Populate from Planner; Steps and the Guide; a TE's mission file written with the cartridge.
  • WDP's Threats and Munition pages are not included; the Reference section covers them.
• Credit. The Planner is a port of Falcas's Weapon Delivery Planner (WDP) to Falcon BMS 4.38.1; its pages, attack
  geometry, ballistics and performance planning are his work. He is credited on every Planner page, in About and in
  the Guide.

New: one mission picture on every map

The Mission map, the VR map board and the Planner's Map page draw the same mission: route and steerpoints, tanker and
AWACS tracks, PPT rings, the mission's threats, departure, arrival and alternate fields, the bullseye and, in ...

1.3.7 — Taxi ground charts, Config, carrier decks

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install — everything you have set up carries over.

Two big new things — a Taxi page with a ground chart for every airfield in the sim, and a Config section that edits Falcon BMS's own settings files — plus a general tidy-up of where things live.

---

New: Taxi — a ground chart for every airfield BMS flies

What it is. A new page in the Mission section, next to Map, and the same chart under Airfields for any field in any theater. It shows you the airfield from above: the runways, every taxiway with its letter, the hold short points, the pavement, the buildings, and every parking spot with the number BMS gives it. 1,840 charted airfields across all nineteen theaters, drawn in the app itself — no Falcon BMS install needed on your phone or tablet.

Where the charts come from. They are not drawings, and they are not the pictures in BMS's docs folder. Every chart is generated from Falcon BMS's own game files: the airfield data the sim itself uses to taxi its AI aircraft, and — for the asphalt — the airfield's actual 3D model, read straight out of the game. So what you see is the field as the sim has it: the taxiways run where the sim drives, the aprons and dispersals are the real shapes with straight edges and square corners, and the parking numbers are the ones the tower gives you. They were checked field by field against the parking charts the theaters ship, which print a latitude and longitude for every spot.

How to use it.

1. Open Mission → Taxi (or Airfields → any field → Ground chart → Open).
2. If Falcon BMS is running, the page already knows where you are: it opens on your field and shows the spot you spawned on.
3. Press the RWY button for the runway in use. (In a mission it is usually chosen for you — the sim parks you on the half of the ramp nearest the active runway, so the spot you are sitting on tells the app which one it is.)
4. Pick your parking spot — tap it on the chart, or tap its number in the list.
5. Read the clearance: "Taxi to runway 26 via B, A, H. Hold short runway 26." The way is drawn on the chart in blue, with the turn at each junction and the distance of every leg written out beside it.
6. Landing instead? Press Taxi in and pick the spot you have been given; it draws the way in from the runway.

Press the same RWY button again to clear it and put the chart back to plain. Nothing is drawn until you ask for it, so looking a field up before a flight shows you the field, not somebody else's clearance.

The rest of it.

• Day or night chart, whichever suits the light you are flying in, remembered between launches.
• Zoom with the wheel, a pinch, or the buttons on the chart.
• You can see which spots have a roof — a hardened shelter or a hangar is drawn as a bay you taxi into nose-first, open ramp as a thin stand box. The clearance says which kind you are leaving from or heading to.
• Taxiway letters sit where BMS puts its own signs, on yellow boards like the real thing, and the spot numbers move aside and draw a line back to their spot rather than piling up on each other.
• Works with nothing running. Tap a spot, pick a runway, read the clearance — all of it works from an armchair with BMS closed.
• And it is on your kneeboard in VR. The same charts are two of the VR board kinds — see In the headset below.

New: Carriers are charted too

Every deck in the sim — the Nimitz class and Enterprise, Kuznetsov and Liaoning, Hermes, the Invincibles and Ark Royal, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, Clemenceau, 25 de Mayo, Tarawa, Wasp and Ocean — 133 decks across the theaters, 51 distinct ships.

Falcon BMS publishes nothing usable for a carrier: its deck points run a mile past the bow because the approach path is in the same list, and its "runways" are that approach path, a catapult, and sometimes a rectangle of no width at all. So a carrier is drawn from the published dimensions of the real ship: the flight deck outline with its angled-deck sponson, the landing area at its real angle, the catapults, the ski jump where the class has one, and the island on the starboard side. BMS supplies the one thing only it knows — where the ship is and which way it lies.

A carrier page is just the deck and the day/night switch. There is no ramp, no runway button and no taxi route on it, because a carrier steams into wind: the runway BMS names it and the numbers it gives its deck spots turn with the ship.

New: Config — Falcon BMS's own settings, with three profiles

What it is. Falcon BMS keeps several hundred settings in a text file its own screens never show you. This page lists all of them, tells you what each one does, and writes only the ones you change.

It is off until you ask for it: Setup → Mission pages → Show the Config section. It then appears as a section of its own, on the PC, in the browser and on a tablet alike — so you can change a setting from the sofa for the flight about to start.

How to use it.

1. Turn it on in Setup, then open Config.
2. Press Click to Back Up and Enable. Your Falcon BMS User.cfg is copied into a BackUp folder beside it. That copy is taken once and never replaced, so there is always a way back to exactly what you had.
3. Three profiles are laid down at the same time. Profile 1 is a copy of what you already had; 2 and 3 start empty, which in a config file means every setting at its Falcon BMS default.
4. Pick a file (User, or VR if you fly in a headset) and a profile, and change what you like. Switches for switches, a list for the settings that take named choices, a box for the rest.
5. Search by name or by what a setting does — the box never scrolls away, and the group you are looking at stays under it.
6. Press ⋯ to make a profile the one BMS reads, to copy one profile's settings into another, or to put a profile back to your original file.

What it shows you. The settings your file actually holds are listed first and marked; everything else is shown dim at its Falcon BMS default. Change one and it moves up into the first list — which is exactly what it does in the file, because a setting left at its default is not written at all. 219 settings, grouped (VR, graphics, terrain, cockpit and avionics, views, sound, multiplayer, campaign), each described in BMS's own words, read out of the stock config the version ships with — so the list is right for the version you have.

What it never touches. The lines your BMS launcher writes at the end of the file: they are shown, carried across untouched when you switch profiles, and anything new is written above them. Nothing outside User/Config is written at all, and no file is written over in place — the new one is written beside it and moved across, so a failed write can never leave you with half a config. If Windows will not let it write (Falcon BMS in Program Files, say), the page tells you so in a sentence you can act on.

There is a red warning on that page and it is meant: these are Falcon BMS's own settings, and a wrong one can stop BMS starting. That is what the backup is for.

In the headset

The new ground charts are on your kneeboards too — two new board kinds you can put on any OpenKneeboard tab.

• Live taxi board. It draws the field you are actually standing on, briefed or not, with your jet on it and what is ahead of you up the page — the chart turns with you, the way you read the world through the canopy. Its pages are zoom steps, so the next page and previous page buttons you already have bound zoom the chart in and out: from the whole field down to a couple of stands either side. There is no mouse in VR, so a bound button is the only control there is. Airborne, the board says so and waits for you to land.
• Ground chart board (this replaces the old Airfield plates board). One page per runway end, drawn from the field's own data instead of the pictures in BMS's docs folder, with your own position marked on it. Flip pages with the same buttons. It is the chart to read before start-up or on the way in; the way to taxi is the Live taxi board's job. (The instrument charts board is untouched.)
• Ground charts turn to fit the page. A kneeboard is far taller than it is wide and most airfields are long and thin, so the field is turned to whatever angle fills the page — a runway lying east-west is drawn upright, at roughly twice the size. The north arrow says which way it ended up; heading-up and north-up are still there.
• Both boards are dark by default and have a Configure button on their row: day or night, and which way up.
• Radio presets stand out: a channel is boxed — C15 — beside its frequency instead of running together as one number.
• The hostile picture reads at a glance: BRAA off your own jet in red, the bullseye call in cyan, with bearing, range and altitude each in their own weight.
• The weather is a table. It used to read "Fair Fair Fair" with nothing to say which was which; now each figure sits under the part of the flight it belongs to.
• Your airfields are on the briefing board: departure, recovery and alternate, each with its TACAN, tower, ground and approach frequencies, and every runway with its true heading, length and ILS.
• No live picture? The map says so in the middle of the page, where you can read it in VR: press F in the cockpit to start ACMI recording, and the notice leaves the moment traffic arrives.

Elsewhere

• The Airfields page shows the chart instead of offering it: the field is drawn on the page at the size it takes to recognise the place, and tapping it opens the full chart.
• The app is 52 MB smaller. The flat pictures of the ground, parking and end-of-runway charts from ...

1.3.5 - friend and foe by alliance, airfield symbols, brighter VR map

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. Update from About → Download, then Install — everything you have set up carries over.

Friend and foe, by alliance

• Allies from other nations are friendly. BMS reports an aircraft's country, not its side, so an American jet flying for Greece used to be drawn as an enemy. The app now reads who is allied with whom from the campaign itself — in every theater.
• Neutrals are neither: drawn as a square in their own colour, and no longer counted as threats in the Picture, the Dashboard, VR boards or the AWACS page.
• Your wingmen stand out in lime green: you in amber, your flight in lime, the rest of your side in blue.

The map

• Airfields look like airfields — a ring with the field's runways drawn across it at their real headings. Your home base is solid, your alternate an open ring, every other field small and faint. They are drawn above everything else on the map, so a steerpoint or an aircraft on the field no longer hides them.
• Readable on every map style. The live map on a VR board was drawn in the board's muted paper colours and sank into the terrain. Symbols and labels now take their colours from the ground they are on: light on the relief, satellite and dark styles, and dark with a white outline on the chart, where white labels with a dark blur behind them were unreadable. The rest of the board keeps its paper look.

Fixed

• Tanker and AWACS showed as a circle instead of their planned track in campaign packs such as Hellas WCP, which borrow their aircraft from another theater. The app now finds them there.
• Tankers and AWACS from other times of day could appear as if they were on station during your mission.

1.3.4 - SAM rings, planned tanker tracks, a tidier Mission section

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. iPhone, iPad and any other browser need nothing installed — they open the PC's address. Installing over 1.3.3 keeps everything you have set up.

The map knows where the threats and the tankers are

• Air defences, with the reach of each system drawn round them. The systems your briefing names are matched against the app's own threat reference, so an SA-6 draws its 13 nm and a Shilka its mile and a half. Hostile red, your own side blue, one marker per site rather than one per launcher. Tap one for its range, BRAA and bullseye. What the campaign has not briefed you on stays off the map.
• The tanker and AWACS tracks the campaign actually planned. BMS publishes no flight plan for anyone else's aircraft, so BMS Companion reads the mission it is flying and draws the leg the tanker holds on as a twelve-mile corridor, with the transit thin behind it. Only the ones airborne while you are; several if there are several; the one assigned to your flight drawn boldly and labelled with its TACAN ("Texaco1 · TCN 92Y"). The file is only read, and only believed when it also contains your own flight plan.
• One switch for all of it. SAMs covers the briefed sites and your own DTC threat rings together.

The Mission section, tidied

• Six pages instead of nine, and nothing lost. The Flight page is gone — ownship, RWR, DED and the picture were each already a Dashboard card, so it was a second copy of a screen you had arranged yourself. The cards stay, and the new In flight layout lays them out the way that page did, in one tap.
• One Kneeboards page for everything you print or pin in the headset: the BMS kneeboards, the VR boards and the HTML Briefing pages, which used to be a page, a page and a card on Briefing. It opens by saying what to do in BMS — print the briefing, save the DTC — states whether this mission's kneeboards exist and whether they were made automatically, and keeps Generate now underneath as the fallback it is. HTML Briefing starts folded away and stays however you leave it.
• The AWACS page is off until you ask for it, in Setup → Mission pages.
• Your Dashboard is untouched: every card, every layout, exactly as you left it — with a Customize Dashboard button across the top of it now, because the small "Edit" in the corner was read by nobody and that page is the one thing in the app you build yourself.

Updating from inside the app

• You decide when it installs. Download fetches the new version and stops there, saying so; the button then reads Install, and only that closes BMS Companion and hands the file to Windows. Nothing installs itself while you are in the middle of a mission.
• A download that is already on the disk is used. It says which version is waiting, and the installer is deleted once the new version runs.
• Fixed: the installer used to close itself. The MSI closes any running copy first — by process tree, which included the installer itself when it had been started from inside the app. It closes the app alone now.
• Fixed: an interrupted update downloaded everything again. The MSI was clearing the update folder mid-install, which is where the file it was installing from sat.

What this PC needs, checked for you

The first run of a new version says whether the optional runtimes are there — .NET 8 for EZBoards, WebView2 and OpenKneeboard for the VR boards — and each missing one has a button to its maker's own page. Nothing is installed on your behalf.

Fixed

• "Generate kneeboards" said it had failed when it had worked — a run was judged by a line the stock EZBOARDS.BAT prints, so anyone who had rewritten that file got an error every time while their boards were written perfectly well. The exit code decides now.
• Browsing for the EZBoards folder threw an exception. The dialog no longer goes anywhere near the Windows shell.
• Planned tracks sat a quarter of a mile out. A campaign waypoint is a grid cell and the aircraft flies to the middle of it; the corner was being used. Measured against 381 known airfields, the error is now zero.

Every build from here on

Installable straight from About → check for updates, and keeps what you have set up: Dashboard cards and layouts, favourites, VR boards, folded sections and the BMS, EZBoards, HTML Briefing and screenshot folders all carry across.

1.3.3 New features and bug fixes.

Changelog

1.3.3 (BMS 4.38) — September 2026

Everything since 1.3.1. The headline is VR kneeboards: BMS Companion now serves numbered boards that OpenKneeboard shows on your knee in the cockpit, with your own controller buttons turning the pages. Alongside that: instrument charts for Korea and the Falklands, the kneeboard exported by BMS's HTML Briefing tool shown inside the app and in VR, updating from inside the app, ACMI clean-up, and a long list of fixes — the Android 9/10 crash, the folder picker that closed the PC app, and every installer problem reported since 1.3.

Files: BMS-Companion-PC.msi (or the portable .zip) for the PC that runs Falcon BMS, BMS-Companion.apk for Android. iPhone, iPad and any other browser need nothing installed — they open the PC's address. The APK and the PC package are larger this time: the instrument charts are bundled so they work with no connection and no BMS installed.

---

New: VR kneeboards through OpenKneeboard

A board is one page of BMS Companion served at its own address — http://<your-pc>:47474/kneeboard/1, /kneeboard/2 and so on — showing exactly one thing: the live map, the briefing, the flight plan, the comm ladder, your airfield plates, the hostile picture. You add each address to OpenKneeboard as a Web Dashboard tab, and OpenKneeboard puts it on your knee in the headset.

OpenKneeboard is required for the in-cockpit part, and it is free. It also works outside VR — it can draw the same kneeboard into the flat 2D window — so this is worth setting up even if you do not fly in a headset.

How to set it up

1. On the BMS PC, open BMS Companion → Mission → VR boards.
2. Add a board for each thing you want on your knee, and choose what it shows from the drop-down. Each row hands you its address; Copy address puts it on the clipboard, Preview opens it in a window shaped like the board so you can see it before the headset goes on.
3. In OpenKneeboard: Settings → Tabs → Add a tab → Web Dashboard, paste the address, and give the tab a name. The name is filled in for you — the page arrives titled BMS KB 1 (Live map), BMS KB 4 (Briefing) and so on, so a stack of tabs is readable at a glance.
4. One tab per board. Repeat for each row.
5. In OpenKneeboard: Settings → Input → your controller → Bindings, and bind Next page, Previous page, Next tab and Previous tab. Toggle visibility and Recentre are worth having too.

Why there are no buttons on a board. OpenKneeboard supports graphics tablets and nothing else in game — its own documentation says "Mice are not supported in-game" — so a board covered in controls would be a board you cannot use. Everything a finger would have done is decided beforehand on the PC, and the only interaction in the cockpit is your own next page / previous page binding. BMS Companion publishes each board's sheets to OpenKneeboard as pages, so that binding walks through them with nothing to aim at.

• The pages come round again. OpenKneeboard stops at the last page it was handed; turn past the last sheet on a BMS Companion board and the first one comes back, in either direction, for as long as you keep pressing.
• On a map board, next page is the zoom. A map is one sheet, so the page binding steps through five zooms instead — the whole theater down to close enough to read a taxiway, and round again.
• A small panel names what you turned to for a couple of seconds after every press — the chart, the section, or the zoom step ("Zoom · Wide") — then fades. In a headset it is the only confirmation that the button did what you meant.
• What a board can show: live map (with its own style, zoom, layers and towns), briefing, flight plan, comms ladder, tankers & AWACS, mission threats, HARM/ALIC codes, airfield plates, instrument charts, hostile picture, and the HTML Briefing kneeboard.
• They follow the mission. The chart boards show the field this mission takes off from, the threat board has a page for each system the briefing names, the briefing board is this briefing. Print a new briefing and the boards fill themselves in; Rebuild pages forces it.
• Set once, for every board: day or night ink, and the print size (Small / Normal / Large / Very large). A board is drawn at its full resolution whichever you pick.

How the boards read. The page is set like a kneeboard, not like a web page: the sheet's name is large in the board's accent ink, section headings carry a bar of that ink, and the figures you reach for — TACAN channel, UHF, VHF, bullseye — sit in raised boxes, found by shape rather than by reading. Tables are ruled, with every other row shaded. Every page keeps a margin from the tablet's frame, and the page counter is a faint number in the corner instead of a strip taken off the board.

New: the kneeboard from BMS's HTML Briefing tool, in the app and in VR

Falcon BMS ships UOAF's HTML Briefing tool in Tools\html_brief_win. It is a separate program: you run it yourself and press its own export button, and it writes a kneeboard as PDF (or PNG) pages. BMS Companion does not replace it and does not automate it — it reads what that tool last exported and shows those pages:

• Mission → Briefing → HTML Briefing generated kneeboard: the exported pages as cards; tap one to open it in the chart viewer, with zoom, arrows, swipe and Esc.
• As a VR board: choose HTML Briefing kneeboards for any board and its pages are one OpenKneeboard tab away, turned with your page binding.
• Run HTML Briefing on that same card starts the tool on the BMS PC — a shortcut, nothing more, because the tool has no headless export. You still press export in its window.
• The card says when BMS has printed a newer briefing than the export, so you are never reading last flight's pages by accident.
• If you do not use that tool, ignore the card. Nothing else depends on it.

Setup: BMS Companion finds the tool in your BMS install automatically. If you keep it somewhere else, set Settings → Falcon BMS settings → HTML Briefing folder. Nothing in that folder is ever written or changed.

New: instrument charts (Korea and the Falklands)

The approach, departure and arrival plates those theaters ship as PDFs are now in the app, beside the BMS ground plates: Instrument charts on any airfield page, and an Instrument charts VR board that follows your departure field.

• 244 charts, 988 pages, rendered at 150 dpi so they stay sharp when you zoom.
• Every chart is named for what it is — 09L · ILS or LOC/DME, 09L · RNAV (GPS), DRAGGIN departure — with the runway first, so one runway's charts sit together.
• 145 blank pages are dropped, and 176 sideways pages are turned upright for you, decided from the printed table itself rather than guessed.
• The arrows carry on into the next chart, and round: an airfield's eight approach plates read straight through without closing anything.
• Only Korea and the Falklands ship instrument charts. Other theaters have none — that is BMS, not the app — and their airfield pages show the BMS ground and parking plates as before.
• This is why the downloads are bigger. The charts are bundled rather than fetched, so they work on a tablet with no network and on a PC with no BMS installed.

New: updating from inside the app

About (at the bottom of the Home screen) checks for a newer version on Android, on the PC and in the browser.

• What's new shows the release notes of every version between yours and the newest.
• Download and install shows how much has arrived of how much, the transfer rate and the time left (131 MB of 277 MB · 6.4 MB/s · 2 min 8 s left). The Windows app hands the installer to Windows; the Android app hands the APK to Android, which asks once for permission to install apps.
• Nothing is installed without being checked against the checksum the release publishes; a download that does not match is thrown away.
• An interrupted download is not a wasted one — the part already fetched is kept and verified on the next attempt.

New: clearing ACMI recordings

Flying with the AWACS picture on means BMS is recording, and User\Acmi grows by a file a flight. Settings → Falcon BMS settings now shows how many recordings there are and how much room they take, with Clear (to Recycle Bin) beside it — to the Recycle Bin, so a tape you wanted back is a right-click away. BMS's own .vhs training tapes are never touched.

New: the kneeboard layout, and the board as an object

Open the browser version at /kneeboard and the page is laid out for a kneeboard: the content gets the whole board, a small ☰ opens the sections, the page's own options sit behind ⋯, and both fade when the mouse stops.

• Printed, not displayed: warm paper, black ink, hairline rules, serif headings, and one muted family of inks so nothing on the board is brighter than anything else in a lit cockpit.
• A day/night button, remembered between flights.
• ☰ → Print size and ☰ → Board shape (5:8 kneeboard, 3:4, tall, square, landscape). OpenKneeboard reshapes the tab to the shape the page asks for.
• A keyboard on the page when you tap a search field, so you can search with the mouse while wearing a helmet.
• The Dashboard on a board is laid out for the board: the cards take the lines they need and the map takes all the rest.

New: smaller things

• A-Z strip down the side of the Airfields and Encyclopedia lists: tap or drag it to jump.
• About: what BMS Companion is, the version you are running, the repository, the releases page — and Credits naming Benchmark Sims and the Falcon BMS team, EZBoards, OpenKneeboard and Tacview.
• Chart viewer: big page buttons, ...

1.3.1: client mode and firewall fixes, fewer duplicate towns, much less memory

BMS Companion 1.3.1 (Falcon BMS 4.38)

Fixes and a much smaller memory footprint, on top of 1.3.

Fixes

• "Use this PC as a client" on the server page did nothing but show an error. It now switches to the full app and opens Mission → Setup with On another PC selected, ready for Find BMS PC.
• "Allow through Windows Firewall" did nothing. The rules are now added properly (one administrator prompt), the button reports progress and the result, and the checklist turns green. If Windows refuses, the button says so and names the ports to open by hand (TCP 47474, UDP 47475).
• Towns appearing twice on the map: a city is often several campaign objectives with the same name, which put the same label on the map two or three times. Objectives of one name closer than 25 nm are now one town. Same names further apart are kept: they are different towns (Greece really does have several Pyrgos).

Less memory

• PC: about 270 MB on the server page and 340–380 MB in the full app, where 1.3 used 450 MB and more the longer you browsed. The Java heap is capped and hands memory back to Windows, the image cache is a quarter of its old size, the map keeps only the tiles it needs, and screenshot previews and the browser's gzip cache are bounded.
• Android: the image cache is now sized from the memory the device gives the app (at most 40 MB instead of a fixed 96 MB), the map keeps fewer tiles, and cached images are released when Android asks for memory back.
• Old tablets and phones: on devices with little memory the maps load half-size tiles automatically: slightly softer, about a third less memory in total (measured 289 MB → 215 MB on a test tablet).
• Browser: the same smaller caches.

Downloads

Same three files as 1.3 (the BMS PC always needs BMS-Companion-PC.msi, or the portable BMS-Companion-PC.zip; Android gets BMS-Companion.apk; iPhone, iPad and browsers need nothing). See Which files do I need?.

Upgrading: install over 1.3 (PC settings, Android favorites and layouts are kept).

Unofficial fan project, not affiliated with Benchmark Sims. EZBoards is by Logic. Map borders and names: Natural Earth (public domain).