Firing TLAMs outside of a mission does nothing

[The Bandit]

Originally Posted by XenonSurf

Well, photo recon is rather done by satellites or drones nowadays, or by Seal teams dropped from a sub. In fact I have had a hard time to imagine more realistic missions other than those actually in the game, even pilot rescues are much better done by helo squadrons based on CVs, they are faster and can locate downed pilots much more accurately and are equiped with safety boats to drop etc.

As for TLAM missions, I have made sensible progress to understand how they work in CW by just transforming these campaign missions into single missions by manipulating the game files. The red circles you see in TLAM missions are the activation points where the missile starts to search for its final objective, it's usually placed some miles ahead of the target to give the missile enough time and manoeuvre room. Sponaneous firings (out of a mission) remain fruitless because there's no such 'red circle' for missiles.

My next step is to transform more such missions into single ones to gather exact data about mission coordinates for other locations so I can add them to the Russian Campaigns in the most current mods. Finally, subs like Typhoons or Delta IV or other subs with TLAMs will become useful, I will write missions for them mainly focused on Insertions or Land Strikes. Let's see what comes out...

Yeah, I can't remember if any of the devs explained it in detail but, at least for Tomahawk missions, there are quite a few reasons why they aren't being launched at MAX range. Just a few that I could think of is that the commonly quoted range figure for Tomahawk (1000nm) isn't true for sub-launched missiles. From what I recall, due to weight and balancing issues, fuel load was significantly reduced, something to the tune of 25+% or so which didn't get sorted out until around the early 90s.

Another reason I can think of is minimum flight time. Within reason you want to have the missiles in the air for as short a time as possible to cut down on the reaction time you'd be allowing Soviet air defenses to shoot them down, so lets say the difference between one SAM battery getting lock and firing while the TLAMs are on their terminal approach vs. getting them on radar 600nm out to sea, rolling fighters and then readying SAMs to hit the leakers.