Smoke

Sometimes the fastest way to mark a spot — a landing zone, a pickup point, a target for a wingman — is to put coloured smoke on the ground. If your aircraft is set up for it, CTLD gives you a Smoke submenu to drop grenades right where you are, and an optional auto-resume so a marker keeps burning long after a single grenade would have died out.

Drop Smoke

Utility: Places a coloured smoke grenade on the ground at your current position.

How it works: Pick a colour and CTLD drops that smoke on the ground directly beneath your aircraft. Everyone on your coalition sees a short message confirming the drop (for example, <your unit> dropped RED smoke.). DCS smoke burns for roughly 5 minutes and cannot be extended natively — when it fades, drop another grenade, or use auto-resume below to keep it going.

Activation: F10 → CTLD → Smoke → Drop Red Smoke / Drop Blue Smoke / Drop Orange Smoke / Drop Green Smoke

Smoke Auto-Resume

Utility: Keeps your dropped smokes alive by automatically re-triggering them before they expire, so a marker reads as a continuous signal.

How it works: The toggle is per pilot — you manage your own smokes, and it does not affect anyone else. Every grenade you drop is tracked from the moment it leaves the aircraft, so smokes you dropped before enabling auto-resume are picked up too.

• [activate] → the label switches to [deactivate], and all your tracked smokes are re-triggered on a fixed interval (see mission configuration).
• [deactivate] → the label switches back to [activate], your stored smoke positions are cleared, and any smoke currently burning simply fades out on its own.

A short message confirms the change: Smoke auto-resume ON (270s interval) or Smoke auto-resume OFF.

Activation: F10 → CTLD → Smoke → Smoke Auto-Resume [activate] / Smoke Auto-Resume [deactivate]

Mission configuration

The Smoke submenu only appears on transport aircraft whose mission has enabled the feature, and the auto-resume interval is set by the mission — not by you in the cockpit. Whether smoke is available, and how often auto-resume re-fires, are decisions for the mission maker; see the Mission Maker guide.