Aerial refueling, tanker offsets and contact radius

[Johan G]

I have some questions about aerial refueling and offsets. Hopefully I have just misunderstood this, but as far as I understand from reading through the below sources only the offsets on the receiving end can be defined (though I am not that good at reading code).

Toying around with the /systems/refuel/contact-radius-m property a few days ago while making or trying to make contact it seems that if I would set the contact radius to say 10 meters (about 30 ft) I would have to get up close under the belly of the tanker, rather than getting closer to the boom/drogue. In essence I would have to set it to a larger radius, like 50--70 meters. It might also be related to that I is not that much of a pilot. Looking at the screenshots I sometimes managed to get fuel from a 707-T/T hose while having 5 meter contact radius, which clearly is not in line with the stricken text; I am a bad pilot.

Is this assumption correct, or am I missing something?
So how does one define the tanker contact points?

Threads on the developer mailing list:
Air-to-air refuelling enhancement
Air to air refueling probe/receiver positions
Air-air refueling (This one is opposite to my assumptions.)

Nasal source on Gitorious:
Git blame fgdata/Nasal/tanker.nas (3.0.0 branch)
Git blame fgdata/Aircraft/Generic/aar.nas (3.0.0 branch)

Wiki page:
Howto:Implement aerial refueling capability (diff)

[stuart]

Hi,

You should be able to define the offsets both on the tanker and the receiving aircraft.

I'm not at my computer right now, but have a look at AI/tankers.xml for tanker offset information.

I don't recall if this also works for MP tankers or not.

[Jabberwocky]

I had to do some work on a refuelabel plane because aar.nas didn't recognize MP tankers at all. I use a plane specific copy for now. Still something in progress.