Cargo

Cargo

Loading

Walk up to the vehicle, not the aircraft. The load action sits on the thing being loaded and works out which aircraft you mean.

The aircraft has to be close, and it has to be able to take that load. A jet refusing a truck is the correct answer, not a bug.

CARP picks one of three mechanisms, in this order:

Mechanism	When	What it uses
Vehicle-in-vehicle	The aircraft declares VehicleTransport	The engine's own ramp, capacity and bookkeeping — so any mod that configured it gets its author's behaviour
USAF	The aircraft has a USAF load position in its config	That position only. It does not need the USAF mod installed
CARP	Anything else	Derives the hold from the bounding box

A derived hold is fine, because nothing ballistic depends on where a load sits — it rides attached until release, and the release point is what the solver is calibrated against. A mission maker can override the hold with TLB_CARP_loadPos; see Mission Making.

The four cargo sources

CARP drops loads from four places, and all four drop the same way:

Loaded by	Notes
CARP's own load action	Walk to the vehicle → Load into aircraft
The USAF cargo system	Optional mod; its loads are recognised
ACE cargo	Objects only. ACE's virtual class-name entries cannot be dropped — there is no object to drop
Vehicle-in-vehicle	The engine's own carriage

A vehicle that Zeus has merely placed inside a fuselage is carried by nothing and cannot be dropped. Load it with one of the four.

The panel's CARGO line shows what CARP can actually see. If something is aboard but not listed, it is not loaded.

Stacking order

Loads stack forward from the ramp and come out back to front. The one nearest the ramp is the first one out.

That is not cosmetic. The manifest is last-in-first-out at release, so the order you packed the aircraft is the order the stick leaves in, and for guided cargo it is also the order the loads are spaced along the run-in.

Sticks

Set the CARGO number on the panel and one pass drops that many.

They come out at a measured interval — 0.588 s between releases, which is airframe independent — and string out along the run-in in packing order.

With guided cargo on, each load additionally gets its own slot along the run-in so they do not all steer onto the same point and land on top of each other. Spacing is Stick Spacing, 35 m by default.

You cannot unload in the air

Above 3 m the unload action refuses. This is deliberate and it is not going to change: unloading at altitude can open the canopy next to the tail.

The drop is the only way cargo leaves a flying aircraft.

The load action lives on the cargo (walk up to the truck). The unload action lives on the aircraft.

Smoke

The SMOKE button on the panel marks each released load with a coloured smoke shell on the way down, so the people on the DZ can see it coming.

One shell per load, however many players are watching — it is created once, on the machine that owns the cargo.

Dropping

See the Pilot Guide. In short: lock the run-in, arm guidance, and either arm AUTO DROP or release on the cue yourself.

Auto drop refuses a pass that is outside the release gate, and says which limit failed.

Who performs the release

The release runs where the cargo is local. On a dedicated server that is usually the server, which is why the mod has to be loaded there — see Crew and Multiplayer.

By default CARP runs the entire release sequence itself and does not need the USAF mod. The Use USAF Release Sequence setting hands a USAF aircraft's drop back to the USAF mod instead; it exists so the two paths can be compared, not because you need it.