Career Callsigns

[falle96]

This is more a question aimed at the developers - how is the callsign logic passed out? It's leaving me incredibly confused.

 

For example, the Acacia callsign is distributed to both Rzhev and Borki airfields (Battle of Moscow). There is the callsign of Hawk, which is assigned to bombers - but on the two bomber escort missions I have flown for my series, the Peshkas I escorted had different camo schemes on each sortie! But most baffling of all is the Raven callsign, which seems to be passed out to two fighter units. I only realized that there were two flights out using the same handle a few minutes ago, when two different Raven 3s started shouting that they had destroyed a target!

 

So, how does the callsign system work, and is there any way to reverse-engineer by them which squadron/regiment is talking?

[40plus]

Confuses the poop out of me too and I'd love to have it explained.

[Ram399]

I'm most familiar with the Luftwaffe callsigns for the career, and I can tell you that they're generally just as confusing.

However, there is a bit of reason behind them in the sense that certain callsigns generally only apply to particular types of aircraft.

For one thing, in the case of the Luftwaffe the player flight is always Eagle, and any friendly fighter patrols encountered around the map are always called Swift. 
As such there can be more than one Swift flight in an area, and in some cases I've had over 3 or more Swift flights present in particularly hairy engagements over Kuban.
Raven is the Soviet equivalent of Swift effectively, which is why there are so many.

Attack aircraft and bomber flights operate on a similar principle with callsigns based off of their aircraft type.  Since they only spawn when you have to escort them their flight will have a unique callsign which does not change even if a different unit if flying the sortie.  In the case of the Luftwaffe its generally Oriole, and for the Soviets its Hawk.

For ground spotters in the Luftwaffe they either go by Storm, or Volcano as their callsign, not sure about the Soviet equivalent there.
As for ground controllers at airfields, generally your home base will operate off of a consistent callsign, at least for my current Kuban Bf-109 career Anapa tower is always referred to rather basically as "Linden".  If you fly to a different field you might get something else though, it seems random to be honest.

All in all, in any given sortie you only ever really have to keep track of your own callsign, and in the event you're escorting a flight their callsign as well.
Swift/Raven flights are a dime a dozen and generally patrol a singular area, and while it might be good to know if they're engaged or not, they will never be mission critical.
As for airfields, in the case of two airfields having the same callsign, I generally just read the tagline above their message which gives you the field name to go off of.
Hopefully one day we'll get an in depth communications rework.

Edit: If this has to do with getting a coherent callsign system down for the purposes of the Aleksei Kozlov narrative, I'd say your best option would be to either get creative or try to do some research on actual VVS callsign systems.  

I am extremely lacking in my knowledge of actual VVS organization unfortunately, but considering that AAR is set in 1941, it might help to bear in mind that the majority of Soviet aircraft at that time either had extremely unreliable radios or a complete lack of them entirely.

Edited July 29, 2020 by Ram399

[falle96]

Yeah, I was worried it would be that way. I'll have to make some edits for future chapters in order to have a consistent naming system.

 

Regarding radios, I'm okay with the system I have currently, where only flight leaders have radios on their aircraft that allow them to communicate with other elements. It's an abstraction for reality, and maybe when the series is all said and done I could go back and change everything to bring it more in line with history as part of some final release.

 

Appreciated!