Guided Cargo

Guided Cargo (JPADS)

The canopy steers itself onto the drop zone after it opens, which takes most of the wind error out of the problem.

Switch it on with the JPADS button on the panel, not in Addon Options. It is shared with the crew, because it belongs to the drop rather than to you.

Off by default.

What it does

Zero wind	0.76 m
10 m/s wind	1.15 m

Both bulk-validated — and both measured with the steering running on a client. On a dedicated server the canopy is usually flown by the server, at the server's frame rate, and that case is unmeasured. See Accuracy.

How it behaves

It waits before it steers. The load decelerates from about 140 m/s to near nothing over roughly five seconds while the canopy inflates, and that deceleration is the forward throw the release point is computed around. Steering during it deleted about 70 m of along travel when this was first tried. So it holds off until the canopy is open and settled — gated on descent rate, not on a timer or an altitude.

It flies the wind, not the bearing. The command is the wind plus a clamped correction toward where it needs to be. Steering by "point at the target and go" cannot fly against wind at all, so the load sails past the aim point as its own steering term shrinks.

It eases off at the end. Below Stop Steering At (25 m) the steering term tapers to zero while the wind term is kept in full, so the load rides the air mass down instead of arriving sideways at its glide speed. Tapering the wind term too would have it fighting the air all the way to the ground, which is the opposite of gentle.

It never touches vertical speed, and never repositions a load. It only ever sets horizontal velocity.

In a stick

Every guided load steers onto the DZ — so without slots, four loads land on top of each other, and guidance would actively undo the spread a stick already has.

So each load gets a deterministic slot along the locked run-in, in release order, centred on the DZ and spaced by Stick Spacing (35 m). That is the axis the stick is already strung out along, so each canopy flies the smallest separating correction.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• No run-in lock, or a single load, means no slot — just the small random scatter.
• The stick size is taken from the CARGO count you set, not from counting the hold. By the time a canopy is steering, the load has already left the manifest, so what remains is what you chose not to drop. An unknown stick gets no slot at all, because a wrong offset is far worse than no offset.

Limits

The canopy cannot fly upwind faster than its glide speed (Canopy Glide Speed, 12 m/s). Above about 12 m/s of wind, accuracy degrades for that reason and no other. Raising the glide speed pushes the limit out; it does not remove it.

On a server

The steering runs where the canopy lives, which on a dedicated server is usually the server, not the pilot.

Three things follow, and they are the reason guided cargo did nothing on servers before v0.8.1:

• A steering job is published to every machine when a load leaves, carrying the crew's DZ and the pilot's guided-cargo settings — because those settings are client-scoped and would read their defaults on a server. It is delivered so that a player joining mid-descent gets it too.
• Exactly one machine publishes, chosen by a rule every client computes the same way from the crew list: the pilot if a player is flying, otherwise the human crew member with the lowest UID.
• Every machine computes the readout, but only the machine that owns the canopy sets its velocity. So a pilot whose canopy the server is flying sees a true closing error rather than a message about whose object it is.

The commanding machine stamps a heartbeat once a second. That is what lets the HUD tell JPADS REMOTE (another machine is flying it correctly) apart from UNSTEERED — NO OWNER (no machine can fly it). From the cockpit those would otherwise look identical.

Settings

All under Settings → Guided Cargo.

Setting	Default	Why you would change it
Canopy Glide Speed	12 m/s	Raise it for a canopy that should beat more wind.
Aim Scatter	2 m	Random offset so a load does not sit exactly on the aim point.
Stop Steering At	25 m	Higher makes the last phase gentler; lower chases the aim point longer.
Stick Spacing	35 m	Distance between guided loads along the run-in. 0 aims every load at the DZ.
Steering Release AGL	3 m	Where steering stops entirely.
Steering Engage Descent Rate	12 m/s	The gate that keeps it from steering during inflation. Do not raise this casually.

Reading the HUD

The PKG row and the guided-cargo messages are covered on The HUD.