Thanks to both of you:
Hi Frank...good to hear from you again; it has been a while since I've posted here. Your idea is a good one, and it's one that I never gave a thought to. But you're right; payload can be set in Aircraft.cfg, then it's a matter of cobbling some means of recalling that aircraft.
Pete: You're right, of course; we can always go into Aircraft/Change Payload and plug a number into any payload station...but I'm trying to engineer something with a little more fun & realism than that. As I said, we're a small, regional bush outfit, and much of what we do is ferry goods to the little settlements in our region (fuel, dry-goods, canned goods, produce, meats, clothing, tools, building materials, and so on). I'm thinking it would be more entertaining to have a "warehouse listing" of all this stuff...the pilot has a manifest in the Flight Briefing (on the Kneeboard), then he "goes into the warehouse" and selects the the items for his load, and the item-weight is added to his aircraft payload stations. We already do TONS of unique stuff with the Kneeboard now (with HTML and Javascript), so maybe it wouldn't be such a far reach to add this level. I dunno, though; I've built a zillion new gauges in XML and I'm fairly okay with it, but I'm certainly not a brainy expert with it. Frank's idea might actually work okay, if I can figure a way to re-fire the bird when the pilot is done loading up. Should prove to be an interesting project, eh?
Thanks for your help, gents, and I'll make an offer in return: If either of you might have a need for some new gauges, feel free to go have a look at our panels (http://www.lewisaire.com/fleet.html)...let me know if something tickles your fancy, and it's yours. Almost everything you'll see there is my own design, in XML (not everything, of course, but most of it)...very easy to modify or fix XML stuff, as opposed to .GAU files.
Regards,
Garry