I've got a mission where occasionally at the beginning of the mission helicopters spawn on the ground. When they do spawn they do it on open ground (and trying to take off to head god-knows-where but fail miserably and get destroyed).

Another thing is that after playing the mission long enough I can go and witness 3 to 5 helicopters hovering over a friendly occupied area without doing anything else than that, hovering carelessly.

The thing is that I haven't at any point allowed the AI to spawn helicopters and still those appear out of nowhere.
There's only two occupied objectives for the playable faction at the start of the mission:

• one is a military placement (mil.) module
• the other is a military placement (civ.) module

I've also placed a Military logistics module.

I haven't allowed placing air units on the mil. (mil.) module, you can't even set that on the mil. (civ.) module and I've disallowed requesting helicopters from the military logistics module. Only thing I've thought that could have something to do with anything is that I've set Place ambient vehicles to Low on the mil. (mil.) module. But that can't be the reason..

this is what I witnessed yesterday over a military (civ. objective) area after playing the mission for about an hour or two:

There's three helicopters in the air, one of them is an attack helicopter and two downed on the ground (maybe those two hovered too close to each other or got shot down. At that point I couldn't care less :D )

Anyone got a good guess what this behavior is about?

@HeroesandvillainsOS  You know, I was just about to make a pretty similar post. I saw this yesterday myself. Question: Are you using a custom staticdata.sqf file for military logistics?

Not that I've knowingly taken one in use. Apparently that's a file where you can declare custom blacklists etc.?

@HeroesandvillainsOS I have a feeling, whether or not you are, these are logistics choppers resupplying your virtual AI squads (I may be way off on that though).

I thought of that for a short while but yesterday's test did make it clear to me that these helicopters don't deliver anything. They just appear out of now where and move to hover over an objective.
Ok, testing for three hours straight that same mission one of those idle armed PO-30 Orca's surprised me completely: all of a sudden (apparently having been sent by OPCOM) it started strafing over an objective my faction had lost at some point and giving support by firing at the enemy on the objective. Sure that was cool and all. But I'm more bothered by the fact that these helicopters keep popping out of nowhere when no one has requested them.

@HeroesandvillainsOS  When you say no one has requested them, I'm not sure how you know that. Is there a way to determine that? Radio chatter, maybe?

Heh, well in this case I'm taking it as sort of granted that no one should be able to request them because of how I've setup my mission. But it's true that you can't really affect with the ALiVE modules how the supplies get delivered to the OPCOM.

@HeroesandvillainsOS I'm assuming these are actually choppers which are designed to land and be "unloaded" but again that's just a guess.

I'm 99% certain I saw a discussion/wiki about delivering supplies and that was saying that those are delivered by airdrops because rather like that than them just appearing right next to you out of nowhere. But then again I'm not even close 50% certain that delivering supplies was only by airdrops.

Took a look in the discussion you linked

@HeroesandvillainsOS Regarding custom logistics, here's a link for you: http://alivemod.com/forum/1746-player-resupply-custom-insertion-vehicle

and I'm also starting to think that these helicopters are used for the logistics.

Guess one could just remove the helicopters from this
[ALIVE_factionDefaultAirTransport, "OPF_F", ["O_Heli_Attack_02_F","O_Heli_Light_02_F"]] call ALIVE_fnc_hashSet; to create a workaround for the time being and call it a bug how these helicopters come only to idle.

@SpyderBlack723 Turn helicopter reinforcements off in the Military Logistics module. Deleting them from static data will not work.

Quoting myself from the OP:

@Asmodeus I haven't allowed placing air units on the mil. (mil.) module, you can't even set that on the mil. (civ.) module and I've disallowed requesting helicopters from the military logistics module.

@SpyderBlack723 Try deleting, replacing, and re-syncing the module. Those helicopters are generated as a result of military logistics.

First I did what you suggested: deleted, replaced and re-synced military logistics modules (two, one for both factions) and that did not help. Then in sort of "just to make sure" re-synced all relevant modules (mil. commanders, mil./civ. objectives). That did not help either. Still helicopters are coming to hover over TAOR.

edit: probably many care (heh :) ) but I have to consider shoving ALiVE aside, because of this particular "functionality" not showing any signs of shoving itself aside. Can't stand testing for the mission I was supposed to release at some point so long those random helicopters keep showing up over and again.

and now for the rage part: why the f- the helicopters appear when everything gets delivered with paradrops! (now there's something to think about)

Tested also with A3 1.56.134787, @CBA_A3 2.3.1.160220 and @ALiVE 1.0.2.1603251 with no change compared to the original behaviour.

It can be as bad as having to make 4 subsequent restarts of a mission on dedicated server to get rid of most of the unneededly spawning helicopters as I recorded here on 03/31/2016:

first launch of the mission at 9.09AM (this launch also suffered from 4 times out of 8-9 ALiVE is forgetting that there is force pool):

for bigger resolution: http://i1370.photobucket.com/albums/ag278/testusah123/helics1_zpsxbap7mv7.png

restart at 9.11AM

for bigger resolution: http://i1370.photobucket.com/albums/ag278/testusah123/helics2_zps3ki85s51.png

restart at 9.13AM

for bigger resolution: http://i1370.photobucket.com/albums/ag278/testusah123/helics3_zpszdb2swun.png

restart at 9.13AM finally arrived with the situation that there was _only 2_ unneededly spawned helicopters

for bigger picture: http://i1370.photobucket.com/albums/ag278/testusah123/helics4_zps6kufsu3w.png

With the new version of ALiVE (currently 1.0.2.1603251) I had hopes that this behaviour would have magically disappeared and went on to just in case create my old MP mission from scratch with the newest version but nope, the helicopters still do spawn.

I'm an avid user of the override mechanics in mil. (mil.) & mil. (civ.) module and had hopes that maybe this behaviour would have something to do with those and went on to test with using only the default Force sizes as small as 200 and 100 but nope, still there were occurrences of helicopters spawning.

And only with the latest ALiVE (basically today, 04/02/2016) I am trying to blacklist these helicopters in ALiVE Required module's init field with

ALiVE_PLACEMENT_CUSTOM_UNITBLACKLIST = ["O_Heli_Attack_02_F", "O_Heli_Light_02_unarmed_F"]; ALiVE_PLACEMENT_CUSTOM_VEHICLEBLACKLIST = ["O_Heli_Attack_02_F", "O_Heli_Light_02_unarmed_F"];

which doesn't bring any solution to this behaviour.

Logistic is supposed to come from chopper right ?
I got some similar issue with logistic para-drop from some sort of choppers (MI-8 & MI-24 spawned). Helicopter logistic is turn off, but when it happen chopper just stay static where they spawned, I just believed that it was done on purpose, to simulate some kind of vehicle to drop support.

@SpyderBlack723 They should move away by the next time opcom goes through it's operation cycle (about once every 7-8 minutes).

Oh ok ! I didn't monitor long enough :)

@Blaazouille Oh ok ! I didn't monitor long enough :)

It might be so that you'll have to wait longer than that, please do read: Heli not despawning

I haven't seen once those heli insertion leave/despawn. Usually they get shot down way before or stay there forever, just like Murdock wrote there in the other discussion.