TARPS Reconnaissance

TARPS Reconnaissance

In this fork, reconnaissance is a real job with a real payoff. Enemy sites can be on your map without their composition, strength, or damage state being known, and a struck target keeps showing alive until someone confirms the kill (see Fog of War and Reconnaissance). TARPS is the player task that resolves that uncertainty: an F-14 flies a photo-recon pass and what it photographs comes back into the campaign as confirmed intelligence.

TARPS stands for the Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance Pod System — the real F-14 recon pod. Here it is a dedicated flight type (FlightType.TARPS) backed by the TARS (Tactical Air Recon System) runtime engine, which films what the jet overflies and feeds the results into the campaign's battle-damage picture at debrief.

In-game-pass status: TARS is default ON and code-complete, but the Lua can't run in CI so it still warrants a cockpit pass — confirm the F10 film menu unlocks with the shipped F-14 TARPS payload, overfly a struck enemy site, land, and check the BDA map confirms exactly the photographed units.

---

Why fly it

Two fog rules in the campaign make recon worth the sortie:

• Battle-damage lag. When you strike an enemy site, your map keeps showing those units alive until a recon pass confirms the kill. Without confirmation you are guessing whether the SAM you bombed is actually dead.
• Recon intel-fog. A newly-seen enemy site appears as a targetable marker — position, category, allegiance — but its unit types, counts, and threat/detection rings stay hidden until it is attacked, scouted, or has a unit destroyed.

A TARPS overflight is the clean way to lift both: photograph a site you just hit to confirm the BDA, or photograph a freshly-discovered site to learn what is actually there before you commit a strike package to it.

The AI planner and threat math always use full ground truth, so flying (or skipping) TARPS never disadvantages the auto-planner — the fog is a player-facing information layer only.

---

The aircraft and pod

All F-14 variants carry the {F14-TARPS} pod on station 6, fitted by the Retribution TARPS payload. That payload pairs the pod with a per-variant self-defense fit (a mix of AIM-54/AIM-7 and AIM-9 wingtips depending on the variant) so the recon bird can defend itself but is not a striker.

The TARPS jet is weaponless against the ground by design. Its flight plan uses a recon ingress, not a strike ingress, so the AI doesn't get bombing tasks dumped on it — without that, the AI would fly an aborting attack pattern and never cleanly cross the target. The target waypoint is a flyover, so the jet actually overflies the site instead of turning back at the ingress point.

If you ever see the F10 film menu fail to unlock, it is almost always a stale weapon CLSID in the loadout — DCS rejects the whole payload and silently drops the pod with it. See Custom Loadouts for the CLSID-currency gotcha.

---

Flying a TARPS pass

1. Get tasked. Either build a FlightType.TARPS package by hand, or let the auto-planner append one (below). The flight plan is a single overflight waypoint set roughly 5 minutes behind the strikers so the photos catch the post-strike state.
2. Overfly the target. Cross the site at the planned waypoint — the pass is a flyover, not an attack run. TARS films ground and naval objects in the camera footprint (air contacts are not filmed).
3. Land at a friendly base. TARS processes the film during the landing debrief — you have to recover the jet for the intelligence to count. A photographed site whose jet never lands is not confirmed.
4. Read the result. Each photographed unit is resolved back to its site, and that site's confirmed battle-damage snaps to truth: the map now shows what is really alive or dead there.

The discipline is simple: photograph it, then bring the film home.

---

Auto-planned TARPS follow-up

The auto-planner can append a single TARPS sortie to Strike and DEAD packages against high-value targets (air defenses, factories, command posts, bridges), controlled by the auto_add_tarps_recon setting (Campaign Doctrine, default ON):

• The recon bird overflies the target about 5 minutes behind the strikers for a post-strike BDA pass.
• It requires a TARPS-capable squadron in range. If none is available the recon flight is simply skipped — the strike is never scrubbed for lack of a recon escort.

This is what makes BDA mostly take care of itself on packages you would fly anyway: hit the SAM, and the trailing F-14 confirms whether it actually died.

---

The TARS engine (under the hood)

TARS is MOOSE's Ops.TARS module, vendored into the plugin set and driven by a 414th init script. A few facts worth knowing:

• It feeds confirmed BDA, not just "a flight overflew the target." When TARS processes a captured object at the landing debrief, the bridge records that unit and its life value, and the campaign confirms battle damage for exactly the units photographed.
• It runs in addition to the legacy geometric overflight reveal, so turning the plugin off changes nothing about how TARPS behaves — the engine is purely additive.
• It is filtered for a Retribution theater. Two stock TARS defaults are overridden: the USA/USSR name filter (which Retribution unit names never match) is disabled, and the ammo whitelist is opened up (default) so the shipped F-14 TARPS payload doesn't get refused and lock the film menu.
• Scoring/markers are coalition-local, and there is an optional SRS readout.

Settings reference

Setting	Default	Effect
auto_add_tarps_recon	ON	Auto-planner appends a TARPS recon flight to Strike/DEAD packages against high-value targets, ~5 min behind the strikers
recon_intel_fog	ON	The intel-fog that TARPS lifts: enemy site composition hidden until scouted (see Fog of War and Reconnaissance)
TARS plugin	ON	The film-and-debrief engine that turns photos into confirmed BDA; off = plain geometric overflight reveal

See also

• Fog of War and Reconnaissance
• Mission planning
• Air Defense and the Air War
• Custom Loadouts