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Spawned Missiles

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Spawned Missiles are the AircraftTypes spawned by the V3 Launcher, the Dreadnought and the Boomer Submarine. They are technically limbo launching AircraftTypes, flying kamikaze-style into their targets, and detonating the warhead defined by their appropriate tags. Without the RockPatch, there are three types of spawned missile: V3, DMisl and CMisl.

V3 missiles are spawned by the V3 Rocket Launcher and use the following tags located in the General section.

DMisl missiles are launched by the Soviet Dreadnought and use the following tags, also located in the General section:

CMisl missiles are launched by the Yuri Boomer Submarine, and use these tags which are only in the General section of Yuri's Revenge. CMisls are not available in Red Alert 2.

One of these tags determines that, when attacking, the missile should fly towards its facing for some cells, then turn towards its target. This is observable in the Dred and Cruise missiles, but not the V3 rocket. When following a move command, all missiles show this behaviour.

Besides the settings in the General section, the missiles are affected in various ways by several characteristics that can be set on the missiles themselves. While the game is hardcoded to work only with these three missiles as "true" spawned missiles, this allows the re-creation of spawnable AircraftTypes as fake missiles:

  • Locomotor - In the unmodded game, the various missiles use the Ballistic loco. The same locomotor can be used on a buildable AircraftType to turn it into a missile. If one of the true Spawned Missiles (DMISL,CMISL,V3ROCKET) is made buildable, note that the movement behaviour is affected by the tags in the General section.
    • LazyCurve - A missile that has a LazyCurve movement behaviour set to it will move in a V3-like curve, even when buildable and manually commanded to move. The more distant its destination, the higher the zenith of the ballistic arc. This makes it almost impossible to intercept such a missile during flight when attacking very distant targets.
  • Weapons - The behaviour of any missile can be modified in various ways by giving it weapons. Just like normal aircraft, spawned missiles are highly sensitive to the ROF of weapons given to them, and the ROT of the projectiles these weapons use. If a missile is buildable and it is ordered to Move rather than Attack, it will crash into the destination without firing the weapon. This gives the possibility of creating two distinct attack modes.
    • An AircraftType that has a spawned missile locomotor will default to what appears to be the DMisl tags from General. In order to generate more customizable weaponry, one can give the weapon a primary weapon that calls for a suicide animation (In the same way as in the Adding a Kamikaze airstrike to RA2 article), then give the missile a Secondary or DeathWeapon one desires. If the range of the primary weapon is sufficiently small, the missile will impact with the weapon defined as Secondary or DeathWeapon, instead of with default DMisl damage and warhead. The downside of this approach is that the same weapon will be triggered when the weapon is shot down. Therefore, an alternate approach could be considered, in which the Primary is itself the payload weapon, but still self-destructs the missile. However, short-ranged weapons as would suit a missile seem to make it impossible for them to follow Attack orders.
    • Projectile
      • ROT=0 - Giving a missile a weapon with a projectile with a rate of turn of 0 will cause the missile to fire this weapon in the direction of its flight as it descends upon its target. The missile will always fire its weapon at the furthest point allowed by its range, and always in the direction it faced before descent.
    • Warhead
      • Giving a missile a primary weapon will result in the missile hitting the ground as soon as its target comes into range of the weapon, if it can hit that type of target with its weapon (determined by warhead). This makes the missile in effect scatter around the target, where the scattering radius is determind through the range of the primary weapon. This only applies if the missile is built and manually commanded to hit the target. When spawned by a vehicle, the missile type will still hit all targets directly.
  • Spawned - Removing Spawned=yes from the section of a missile will make that missile controllable when built. If a missile is buildable but is Spawned, it cannot be player-controlled and will crash into apparently randomly selected targets near by when ordered to move or attack.
  • MissileSpawn - There are multiple functions rolled into this tag. It has been observed to determine that the spawning object gains experience for the objects destroyed by a spawned object which is MissileSpawn=yes (unlike normal spawned aircraft, which get the experience/promotions themselves). It also determines that the spawning object will only continue spawning missiles as long as it is on its attack mission. If a missile is not MissileSpawn, the spawning object will continue firing it as long as the target is within range (like the Aircraft Carrier) or manually stopped. It could also be that this is not determined by the attack mission, but by the spawning object's facing.

When you install the RockPatch version 1.08 or later, you can make your own spawned missiles which are not limited to one AircraftType per missile type. See this page for details on how to do this.

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