Combat SAR

Combat SAR

Combat SAR (combat search and rescue) makes a downed pilot worth flying for. In stock Retribution an ejection is a flat loss: the airframe is gone and the aviator is written off. This fork turns that moment into a mission. When a human pilot ejects in the operating area, you can launch a rescue — a CH-47 goes in, lands at the survivor, picks them up, and flies them home. Deliver them to any friendly field and the campaign spares that aviator at debrief: you still lose the jet, but the experienced pilot returns to the squadron instead of being killed off.

It is a bespoke flight type (FlightType.COMBAT_SAR) built on the MOOSE CSAR runtime engine, and it is distinct from the SCAR SOF-recovery CSAR task (see SOF and Commander Capture) — though, as below, a Combat SAR helo can also extract a stranded SOF team.

In-game-pass status: the whole feature is built, wired, and passes CI, but it has not yet had a cockpit pass. Checklist rows G8–G13 and H2 are all currently UNTESTED. Treat it as flight-ready but unvalidated — everything below describes how it is built to work.

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The rescue package: Jolly Green, King, and Sandy

Combat SAR is flown as a three-part package, modeled on real combat-SAR doctrine. The rescuer (Jolly Green) and the King are the Combat SAR flight types below; the Sandy escort is FlightType.SCAR — see SCAR for how Sandy is flown.

Element	Airframe	Role
Jolly Green (rescuer)	CH-47Fbl1 (the player-flyable ED Chinook)	Flies in, lands, boards the survivor, and delivers them to any friendly field or FARP. Carries a door-gun fit (port + starboard M60D) for self-protection on the ingress.
King	C-130J-30	Flies the overhead HC-130 "King" on-scene-command orbit: lights the homing beacon and runs the survivor locator. It never lands at a crash site.
Sandy ×2–4	A-10C / AH-64D	RESCAP escort (FlightType.SCAR): protect the survivor, suppress the threats around them, walk Jolly in. See SCAR.

The rescuer holds near the FLOT, not at AWACS depth — its racetrack sits just outside FLOT SHORAD/MANPAD reach (a short ~15 NM threat buffer) on a tight helo-sized orbit, so a slow helo is actually within reach of an ejection instead of 80 NM back. (Earlier builds parked it at the tanker/AWACS standoff; that was fixed so the rescue can reach a deep ejection in time.) Its loiter altitude is clamped to the campaign's helicopter combat altitude automatically — you do not tune it.

An AI CH-47D is the fallback rescuer (no weapon stations). The King is overhead presence and command, not a tanker — the C-130 cannot act as a DCS aerial-refueling tanker, and the Chinook couldn't take fuel from it anyway, so the King role is deliberately never wired into the refueling system.

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How a rescue works, step by step

1. A human pilot ejects in the area. The MOOSE CSAR engine catches the ejection event and spawns the downed pilot on the ground with a beacon. (It only reacts to human ejections and only to ejections — not AI, not ordinary crashes — unless the AI standing alert is on; see below.)
2. The King lights an air-tracking TACAN beacon. This is the single homing solution: it follows the King's moving orbit, and every rescue helo carries a TACAN receiver. (An ADF radio beacon was considered and deliberately dropped — MOOSE's radio beacon is fixed-point, so chasing a moving King with it would buy nothing over the TACAN.)
3. The King's crew can press an F10 Combat SAR → LARS — Locate Survivors button. LARS reads the live downed-pilot table and reports each active survivor nearest-first: position, plus bearing and range from the King — exactly the readout the crew relays to the helo.
4. The CH-47 homes on the King's TACAN, flies to the survivor, lands (or hovers at the pickup height), boards them, and delivers them to a friendly field/FARP.

The whole pickup is driven through the helo's own F10 CSAR menu, which MOOSE adds to any human helo in the mission. Plugin options let you tune the feel:

Plugin option	Default	Effect
autosmoke	off	Auto-pop smoke at the survivor
loadDistance	75 m	How close the helo must be to board the survivor
rescueHoverHeight	20 m	Hover height that counts as a pickup if you don't land
messageTime	15 s	How long CSAR radio messages stay on screen

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The enemy capture race

A rescue is a race, not a milk run. When a pilot goes down, the enemy may send a snatch party to seize the survivor before you can pull them out:

1. On a downed-pilot spawn there's a chance an enemy infantry party appears a short distance away (red smoke + a MAYDAY cue) and walks straight at the survivor. The King smokes/marks and calls it so the Sandy escort can engage.
2. Kill the party and the pilot is safe for pickup as normal.
3. Let it reach the survivor and dwell there un-rescued, and the pilot is CAPTURED — taken off the rescue board and held as a POW.

Six plugin tunables control the race (captureEnabled / captureChance / captureSpawnDistance / captureRange / captureDwell / capturePartySize), so you can dial how often and how aggressive the snatch attempts are.

If captured: the POW recovery loop

A captured pilot is not killed at debrief — they become a POW held at the nearest enemy airfield, surfaced next turn as a recoverable objective offering CSAR. You get the aviator back two ways:

• Fly a surviving CSAR raid at the holding field, or
• Recapture the holding airfield with the ground war.

Either frees the pilot (they stay in the squadron). A POW left too long is on a 4-turn clock — abandon them past it and the aviator is killed for good. So a capture turns one rescue into a multi-turn problem you can still win.

Rescue scoring — the payoff

The point of a rescue is to save the pilot, so the loop closes inside the campaign model:

• When the helo boards a survivor, the engine records that pilot's original ejected aircraft (by the exact unit name DCS reports in its crash/kill event).
• On a successful delivery to a friendly field, those pilots are credited.
• At debrief, each credited pilot's loss is resolved so the airframe is still attrited but the aviator survives — the kill on that pilot is skipped.

Two properties make this safe:

• You have to actually bring them home. A rescue helo shot down with survivors aboard never reaches the delivery, so those pilots are never credited.
• Fail-safe. If nothing is rescued, the result is identical to today's behavior — the pilot dies. An empty rescue list is exactly the pre-scoring outcome.

See Squadrons and Pilots for why keeping an experienced aviator matters over a campaign.

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AI standing alert (optional)

By default Combat SAR is something you plan and fly. You can also enable an AI standing alert with the auto_combat_sar setting (HQ automation page, default OFF). With it on:

• the planner auto-plans the package per turn for blue — King + Jolly Green + 1 Sandy — so the escorted alert is up before the first losses; and
• the rescue helo air-starts on station near the FLOT (a slow helo spooling up from a rear field never reaches a deep ejection in time); and
• the AI rescue is flown by the MOOSE AICSAR engine, which spawns its own rescue helo from the alert's home FARP and delivers there. (The earlier "commandeer an orbiting AI helo" path was dropped after a playtest showed MOOSE CSAR only tracks AI ejections and never actually flies an AI helo.) AICSAR stands itself down the moment a player crews a rescue helo, so it never competes with the player-flown path.

Airframe scarcity self-limits the alert: no rescue helo available, no orbit planned. Combat SAR is blue-only — the engine is built for blue, so a red Combat SAR would just fly an inert orbit and is never auto-tasked.

v1 limitations (pending the in-game pass): an AI auto-rescue does not yet credit the spare-pilot scoring (it spawns an anonymous clone, losing the original pilot's identity), and a player ejecting from a fixed-wing with no human helo up can be double-handled by both engines (a cosmetic double-spawn).

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Extracting a stranded SOF team

The rescue substrate can also extract a stranded SOF team in-mission (boarding it as a MOOSE CASEVAC pickup exactly like a downed pilot, distinct from the dedicated FlightType.CSAR air-assault recovery, routed by a SOFRESCUE name prefix so the two channels never double-count).

Currently dormant. This serviced the old SCAR commander-capture loop, which was retired with the SCAR armor hunt on 2026-06-27 — no in-mission trigger strands a SOF team today, so this path doesn't fire in the shipped build. The Python plumbing remains. See SOF and Commander Capture for the status.

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Settings reference

Setting / option	Default	Effect
FlightType.COMBAT_SAR	player-selectable	Plan a rescuer (CH-47) or King (C-130) orbit by hand
auto_combat_sar	OFF	AI standing alert: auto-plans a Combat SAR orbit per turn and makes AI ejections rescuable
King beacon	TACAN-only	Air-tracking TACAN the helo homes on; F10 LARS reports survivor positions
loadDistance / rescueHoverHeight / autosmoke / messageTime	75 m / 20 m / off / 15 s	CSAR pickup feel (plugin options)

Tips

• Put a King up if you can. The helo can be rescued without one, but the TACAN homing and LARS readout make finding the survivor far less of a needle-in-a-haystack.
• Bring escorts. The rescuer orbits behind the rings but the pickup itself often pushes toward the fight; the door guns are for self-defense, not for clearing a hot LZ.
• Deliver to the nearest friendly field or FARP — allowFARPRescue is on, so you do not need a dedicated MASH; any friendly airfield/FARP scores the save.

See also

• SCAR
• SOF and Commander Capture
• Squadrons and Pilots
• Air Defense and the Air War
• Mission planning