Adding A Tank Drop

You thought you needed RockPatch for this feature? Well, not exactly. Though it won't be fired as a superweapon, the following instructions will help you create an aircraft that can load vehicles and drop them on parachutes:

First, you make yourself an aircraft. The stats are up to you, but it needs to have:

...
Primary=ParadropWeapon ; or whatever name you want to give to this dummy weapon
Carryall=yes
Ammo=1
...

Now, when targeting, the weapon this aircraft mounts will be considered in the same way a normal weapon would. Meaning that you can (in RA2 and YR in combination with the Fighter flag on the aircraft itself), modify the dropping behaviour, just in the same way as explained in the Adding Paratroopers to TS tutorial. Just to be safe, the weapon should have a non-damaging warhead, though.

Now, to use your tank drop, simply pick up a vehicle with your aircraft, then attack any enemy unit or building, or force-fire on the ground. Instead of firing your weapon, the aircraft will drop the vehicle on a parachute.

This supposedly works in both TS / FS and RA2 / YR, but in RA2 / YR, you might rather use an AircraftType with SizeLimit set large enough to accomodate tanks and in TS / FS, there's a little bug to it. Do you remember how in TS, the parachute is drawn in the center of an infantry selection bracket when dropping infantry, instead of above it? Well, first the good news: when dropping vehicles, the parachute will be drawn correctly above the dropping vehicle. The bad news are that the selection bracket will still focus on the parachute. The voxel of the vehicle in question will partially be drawn underneath the selection bracket, and it will stay that way once the vehicle has landed, meaning the engine will draw the voxel slightly underneath the location where it actually exists (the selection bracket is the object considered to be moving, for example, which will cause the voxel to be drawn inside buildings whne moving next to them, for example. The selection bracket will also be the target for enemy units to fire upon, not the voxel itself...). Picking the vehicle up with a Carryall and setting it down again has been reported to reverse the effect, though.