Arma 3 has rather large and round cargo parachutes, which where not animated until recently, big thanks to The Most Venerable Order of Configuration, Lord Pettka. They might look cool for when you want to drop a supply crate or a small vehicle, but main battle tanks looks way too heavy to have just one parachute. I remember when I was a kid I used to watched programs about military exercises. They used to drop tanks on parachutes there while each tank was attached to 3 parachutes. Just before landing the parachutes shot off. So I decided to try to make something along these lines.
First of all, because of how parachute objects operate in Arma 3, I could not have 3 parachute set up without any modding. So I went for 5 parachutes which makes it even more epic :). To make it more believable I added a particle effect simulating a charge going off detaching parachutes with sound. Because particle effects have to be created locally on each client, the script is in 2 parts, the server part that drops the tank and the client part that does particle effect.
As you can see from the video, there is some smoke coming off the tracks. This is actually dust, because for some reason the engine thinks that the tracks are touching the ground. It is a bug with dedicated server and hopefully this will get fixed. I’ve also added a 5 seconds delay to the script after which it tries to delete parachutes that did not fold. This is because of yet another bug, when a parachute would open again if it bounces. Anyway, here is the script, which can be copy pasted in init.sqf for example:
To use the script you need to spawn a tank 150m or more above the ground and pass tank object reference to the script. For example (should be executed on the server side):
