Combat SAR

Combat SAR

Combat SAR makes a downed pilot worth flying for. When a human pilot ejects in the operating area, you can mount a rescue: a CH-47 goes in, picks the survivor up, and brings them home. If you deliver them to a friendly field, the campaign spares that aviator at debrief — the airframe is still lost, but the experienced pilot returns to the squadron instead of being killed off. It turns an ejection from a flat loss into a gameplay loop.

This is a bespoke pilot-rescue flight type (FlightType.COMBAT_SAR), and it is distinct from the SCAR SOF-recovery CSAR (SCAR) — though, as below, a Combat SAR helo can also extract a stranded SOF team.

The package: rescuer + King

Combat SAR is flown as a two-element idea, both player-selectable:

Element	Airframe	Role
Rescuer	CH-47Fbl1 (the playable ED Chinook)	Orbits near the FLOT behind the threat rings; flies in, lands, picks up the survivor, and delivers them to any friendly field/FARP. Carries a door-gun loadout (port + starboard M60D) for self-protection on the way in.
King	C-130J-30	Flies the overhead HC-130 "King" on-scene-command orbit, lighting the homing beacon and running the survivor locator.

An AI CH-47D is the fallback rescuer (no weapon stations). The King C-130 is overhead presence and command, not a tanker — it is never wired into aerial refueling.

How a rescue works

1. A human pilot ejects in the area. MOOSE CSAR (the runtime engine) spawns the downed pilot with a beacon.
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 we use has a TACAN receiver. (An ADF radio beacon was considered and dropped: MOOSE's radio beacon is fixed-point and the King is a mover, so it would gain nothing over the TACAN.)
3. The King also carries an F10 Combat SAR → LARS button (LARS = survivor locator). It reads the live downed-pilot table and reports each active survivor's position and bearing/range from the King, for the crew to relay.
4. The CH-47 homes on the King's TACAN, flies in, lands, boards the survivor, and delivers them to a friendly field.

Rescue scoring — the payoff

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

• When the helo lands and boards a survivor, the engine remembers that pilot's original ejected aircraft.
• 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 — loss.pilot.kill() is skipped for them.

A helo shot down with survivors aboard never reaches the delivery, so those pilots are (correctly) never credited — you have to actually bring them home. The scoring is fail-safe: if nothing is rescued, behavior is exactly as it is today (the pilot dies).

AI standing alert (optional)

By default, Combat SAR is a thing you plan and fly. You can also enable an AI standing alert with the auto_combat_sar setting (HQ automation, default OFF). With it on, the planner auto-plans one Combat SAR orbit per turn for blue, and the engine is told it may commandeer an orbiting AI CH-47 — which also makes AI ejections rescuable, not just human ones.

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.

Extracting a stranded SOF team

The same rescue helo can extract a stranded SCAR SOF team in-mission. The generator emits each on-map "downed SOF team" and the plugin spawns it as a MOOSE CASEVAC ground pickup at its strand point; the helo boards and delivers it just like a downed pilot. The campaign credits the recovery — refunding the bought team — alongside (not replacing) the dedicated FlightType.CSAR air-assault recovery. A team recovered by both paths still refunds only once. See SCAR for how teams get stranded in the first place.

The pilot-sparing channel and the SOF-recovery channel are kept distinct (routed by name), so there is no double-counting and no double ejection-handling.

Settings reference

Setting	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

In-game pass status

Combat SAR is built (the rescue engine, AI alert, King TACAN/LARS, rescue scoring, SOF-team extraction, the armed Chinook and flyable King, and the task kneeboard) and passes CI, but the in-mission behavior has not yet had a cockpit pass. The relevant checklist rows are all currently untested:

• G8 — pilot rescue (CH-47 + MOOSE CSAR)
• G9 — AI standing alert (auto_combat_sar)
• G10 — King TACAN beacon + LARS
• G11 — rescue scoring (pilot spared at debrief)
• G12 — Combat SAR extracts a stranded SOF team
• G13 — airframes (armed Chinook + flyable King)
• H2 — Combat SAR task kneeboard

Treat the feature as flight-ready but unvalidated until those rows are cleared.

See also

• SCAR
• Squadrons and Pilots
• Mission planning