Dead Reckoning Mission
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DEAD RECKONING (or, "It Takes A Village")

The colonel who was lucky enough to be out of town during the "No Brainer" mission is reported to be regrouping with a small command in the remote village of San Luis. (Pick a building. Or all of them!)

MISSION: "Terminate the colonel's command. Terminate, with extreme prejudice." ;)

1. Launch the "Wreckin' Reactor" mission.
2. Set time to the middle of the night.
3. Load up with four Mk82HD (High Drag) bombs. No PAVE or CCIP this time, bubba. (It'd be sweet to be able to laser paint targets of our own choosing, wouldn't it?)
4. Take off from Preston, turn right to 270°. (Or left, if you don't mind dodging enemy air to air)
5. Stay below 200' agl, fly west to the sea [where the rest of Cuba slid into the Caribbean after that huge quake way back when...]
6. Upon reaching the sea, turn left to 180, and GET DOWN to 100'-200' above the water: (Supposedly there are SAMs and AAA on the cliffs. You haven't seen any of course, but better safe than sorry.)
7. When you are due west of the target, climb and turn left to 090, pop over the cliff at 200' agl, maintain this altitude to deliver your parcels to the colonel and his troops, and boogie back to Preston.

Plan this well with regards to your airspeed and wind and you shouldn't miss the turn east by much, if at all. I usually fly this with no wind - when I'm feeling frisky I'll keep the wind and, after a quick circuit to determine wind direction and speed I'll calculate my time to target. (If you use Cuba 1.5 you can set a waypoint on the town of course...but then it wouldn't be dead reckoning!)

Calculating wind is discussed at some length in an accompanying document.

Now, the thing about San Luis is that the buildings are weak, and if you're not careful you could accidentally trash the whole village; The way the towns explode in precise city block increments in this game, this is difficult if not impossible to avoid. I deal with this in two ways:
  A) I only target buildings in the middle of town. (The buildings on the north and south ends seem to like to take the rest of the place with them when they go up.)
  B) I modify my expectations of success: regardless what happens to other structures as a result of my run, if the building I've targeted isn't destroyed on my first pass, I've failed.

A variation on this mission (more "terrain realistic" perhaps) is to hit the same target after launching from NAS. Fly west along and below the coastal cliffs, popping up and turning right to 360° to ingress and hit the target.


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