Stretch

I usually fly with the program "121" but it's sort of arbitrary. I'm wondering if anyone has verified that different flare programs are more or less effective against different threats? I know from my F-16 studies that some advanced threats require specially timed use of ECM and chaff/flare in order to overcome them ... to what degree is this modeled in BS? TLDR: - Are there different programs I should be using for different threats? - Or failing that, is there anything that makes one program more effective than another overall?

I'm guessing jocko417 knows that's a throttle friction lever in the real A-10; however Thrustmaster calls it a trim wheel. And given that they're calling it a trim wheel, I'm guessing it's a mappable axis and has no effect on throttle friction.

1) Not without some third-party mod that I don't know of yet. 2) The autopilot has four modes of operation: off, dampening, stability, and on (hover, route, or descent submodes). When you enable each of the four channel buttons, you are turning on the stability mode for those channels -- the autopilot will let you fly the helicopter but will smooth out your control inputs to keep it stable. When you turn on flight director mode, you are disabling the stability mode and reverting to dampening mode, where the autopilot provides minimal input to dampen adverse oscillations and the like. You also see the typical flight director bars on the HUD that let you know where the helicopter autopilot "wants" you to fly. If you turn the autopilot fully on (by switching it to route, descent, or hover mode), with flight director mode on, the FD bars will point you towards where the autopilot is commanded to fly. With FD mode off, the autopilot will apply up to 20% control inputs to fly the helicopter according to its mode. Stability mode makes your helicopter a stable flying and shooting platform but adds noticeable "sluggishness" to your controls. You may often want to revert to dampening mode for doing extreme maneuvers. Most people do this by holding down the trim button -- while it is depressed, the autopilot reverts to dampening mode. You never want to fly the helicopter with the autopilot completely off; you will find it very difficult to control.

I think the point is that since Microsoft Flight Simulator has unrestricted third-party development with no royalties due whatsoever, it's not really unrealistic. I'm not going to get in a fight about whether ED is right or wrong, I just wanted to help clarify the original point.

Having made the move 4 to 5, I can say the major advantage of the 5 is its field of view. You can crane your neck more and look in more directions before the receiver loses one of the dots and snaps back to center. Helps when looking at the far wall of switches, or leaning around to see switches behind the stick. They're both excellent head trackers though.

I think his point still stands though. Vx is the speed you must go in order to maximize your altitude increase for a given horizontal distance traveled. In other words, you maximize your slope, your rise over run. If the helicopter is at an altitude where a vertical climb is possible, then its slope is effectively infinite (N/0). Any forward speed whatsoever would bring that slope to something less than infinity, and thus wouldn't be Vx. However, the poster below does point out that at some altitudes helicopters cannot maintain a hover: Because of this I would propose Vx for a helicopter depends on altitude in a manner that cannot entirely be expressed by indicated airspeed (whose corresponding groundspeed does change with altitude). I imagine that if you were to graph Vx for a helicopter based on altitude, you would get something like this: | | V | / X | / | / |___/ 0 +-------- Altitude

Man, that ABRIS page is excellent. The V(N) numbers you list can't be the same thing I'm thinking of in a passenger airliner. In other words, V1 = takeoff decision speed, V2 = min safe climb speed. Simply because I don't think the Ka-50 has to be going 160 KPH to climb on one engine. :) Also, what's V4?

Just wondering if anyone has published some V-speeds for the Black Shark. Flying a mission that has multi-hour ingress/egress and I need to know best endurance. Also, wouldn't hurt to know best climb, etc. Thanks!

I've owned the Cougar and the X65F now, and honestly if you had to ask me, I couldn't pick between them. Cougar Pros: Sturdy construction (had it for 3 years and its good as new) excellent ergonomics (all the buttons are right where you need them to be), excellent software (Foxy is the best). Cougar Cons: No force-sensing (flops around on its base), fewer buttons/switches (though that never bothered me), throttle has loud detents and poor friction. X65F Pros: Force-sensing! It's excellent. Dual-axis throttle. Feels sturdy but will it last as long as my Cougar? X65F Cons: Bad programming, no remappable axes, single-stage trigger, bad ergonomics (have to move your hand around a lot -- honestly nothing compares to the F-16 stick for ergonomics). Personally I think the best possible HOTAS is a Cougar + FSSB mod + Throttle friction mod, but that's gonna be really pricey. Between Cougar and X65F, I'd say it's a draw. Go with the pros you need and the cons you don't mind.

I think it's definitely correct that most people won't know or care what they're missing with a good, declassified mode-4 implementation. There's a lot of information about mode-4 in declassified avionics and general flight manuals, and as long as all the switches work and some "fudge factor" of failures and quirks is included, I bet you're hitting pretty close to home without endangering the lives of pilots abroad. The same goes for the anti-jamming modes on radars. I know that modern fighter jets have antijamming radar modes (which no sim models). We'll never know specifically how they work and what they are, but we can make a lot of guesses. For example, it's a fair bet that one of those modes involves the pilot placing the radar cursors over a suspected target return and following that return through successive radar sweeps, manually providing the FCR with velocity vector information that the enemy's jamming is otherwise obscuring. The rest of the anti-jamming modes -- whether they're automatic or manual, how much they help and in what way -- can be fudged.

Yeah that's the thing. The decision to fire on a target is based on a number of factors, some of which can be modeled, some of which can't. To name a few off the top of my head: - AWACS - Visual confirmation - Target position and where the target was coming from - Target aggressiveness (presence of RWR or likelihood of seeing an incoming missile launch are factors here) - Target aspect - IFF and IFF reliability (is the target near other aircraft or ground clutter?) - NCTR if available and given time to process a target - Whether or not your flight lead says he's a bandit - etc etc etc Each of these has different "weights" in a pilot's mind and can be combined together to form a likelihood-of-firing quotient. Some will have to be modeled very crudely to ensure the calculation can be performed optimally for however many AI pilots are in an arena, but it could certainly be done I think.

I purposely limited the discussion to whether there's an issue over possibility, rather than framing it as a "why didn't ED do this?" type whine. Obviously in the world of combat sims, DBS radar modes look great at any angle and low-flying airplanes appear on search radar even if they match the apparent speed of ground clutter, and so forth. I'm not saying "ED should do this"; instead I'm asking if it's even possible, because I think lots of people say it isn't.

Every so often someone brings up the possibility of modeling IFF systems, and the general consensus is that it can't be done in a desktop simulator. (I'm drawing from what I've read on the FF/RV/OF/AF forums). To that I say -- why not? I'm admittedly still new to Black Shark but I've read every page of every F-16 document I as a civilian could find, and there's nothing in there that precludes an exceptional modeling of IFF in a desktop sim. And the F-16's IFF interrogator/transponder is more complex than the Ka-50's transponder, so I say -- why not? I don't have the Ka-50 transponder's details in front of me, but I'm assuming it responds to military and civilian interrogations (to take a NATO example, mode-3 and mode-4). Microsoft Flight Simulator already does a decent job of modeling the civilian side of IFF -- you receive mode-3 codes from your controllers and if you don't enter them into your transponder, they complain occasionally that they can't see you on radar. In real life of course, they would make you try such witch-chants as identing or recycling your transponder power, and failing that they'd kick you out of their airspace if they didn't want to deal with you. All of this can be modeled in a sim. It would be easy to have controllers ask you ident upon first contact, and have them complain when they don't see your mode-3 or mode-3/C. As for military IFF ... again, don't know the details of the Black Shark so let's talk Viper. The mode-4 codes are stored encrypted and loaded into the airplane by machine, rather than entered by hand, something which is typically handled on behalf of the pilot, rather than by the pilot. So no need to model anything there. If you turn off your mode-4 ... well, that's a stickier issue. As a civilian pilot I can't say definitively what would happen but I imagine either a) your flight members/AWACS would notice and warn you over the radio, or b) your chance of getting blue-on-blue'd increases slightly (only slightly I'd say since besides IFF, other pilots rely on many other sources of information to make friendly/bandit decisions). Modeling warnings from AWACS/flight members about an incorrect IFF response is easily done; modeling the blue-on-blue is not, but I imagine there are some simplified ways to do it. Feel free to correct me if I am missing something here. But it seems like IFF is not the insurmountable task people say it is.

It costs around $50 for a printed, bound copy of the manual (B&W) from Kinko's ... and around $280 if it's in color. I checked, then promptly decided to purchase it from The Figher Collection.

Ah, looks like reinstalling the drivers did the trick. Mayhaps the ones on the CD were not x64 compatible? Anyway, drivers are reinstalled, keypresses work now, and there's only one problem left: Getting the keypress delays to work in F4AF so that my speed brakes open and close incrementally instead of all-or-nothing. Still no Foxy, but I'm happier than before.

An update ... resigned to my fate since the X65F does not come with an axis-remapping tool like the Cougar does, I've decided to figure out why the keypresses aren't happening in Win7. I called up the MadCatz support line, and after being on hold for 5 minutes, got redirected to voicemail. (This is during their business hours.) Tried again, same thing. So I thought maybe I downloaded the wrong drivers -- I need Win7 x64 after all, and I think I just installed whatever was on the CD. So I go to the Saitek driver page, which is taking an excruciatingly long time to load. I am sitting here waiting for it to populate a menu of options so that I can FINALLY choose the correct drivers to download. Still no luck accessing the Saitek forums.

Oh, right. That makes sense. Sucks though.

I thought there was some kind of virtual joystick tool that could solve this problem? Basically turn your X65F into two virtual joysticks?

Signed up for an account on the Saitek forums but I've been waiting for admin approval for hours now ... I am understandably pretty eager to get my new purchase working. I hope the forums are filled with answers. :)

Got the X65F set up, and I must say I am very frustrated. In no way does this compare to the Cougar I think. Black Shark on Win7 x64 It doesn't even work. I can map the buttons using DirectX (which I prefer over keyboard mapping), but DirectX doesn't see all the buttons and all the axes. So, the ones that it doesn't see, I figured I'd map them using the SST software, but no matter what the profiles will not load. It says the profile is loaded but when I press buttons no keystrokes are generated, period. Also, I can't map the microstick axes to the Shkval. I can do it using bands but I'd rather that the axes show up in DirectX for finer control. OpenFalcon on WinXP x86 At least the SST actually works; I can map keyboard commands using the software, apply the profile, and when I press buttons key-presses are generated. Here's the problem: if I map a button to a key in SST, but then unmap it, it's gone from DirectX forever. And there's no easy way to unmap DirectX controls in OpenFalcon. So now I have some buttons that do two things (they have a keyboard map and a DirectX map in OpenFalcon), and no easy way to make them do just one thing. I will have to edit the OpenFalcon config files to unmap the DirectX map, and just use the keyboard map, because once you go keyboard, there's no going back to DirectX. Also, as in Win7, I can't map the microstick X and Y axes to DirectX axes; I have to use bands.

Hah, I remember doing that yesterday. It's all about the scan. My scan was simple: radar altimeter -> bank indicator -> heading indicator. Those three instruments are all you need. And since they're all on the HUD, the scan is simple. Just keep looking between those three instruments. Look at one: if it's fine, move on. If it's not fine, make a corrective input to fix it, then move on. Don't fixate on it waiting for your corrective input to take effect; move to the next instrument and you can verify your corrective input when you come back around again. Keep your eyes moving. EDIT: And this should go without saying, make sure you've got the autopilot pitch, yaw, and bank dampeners enabled to ease your workload.

Thanks guys! 1. My wingman keeps running into me! I'm playing Deployment, level 2, and I've told him to stay in Combat Trail ... even despite this huge distance and plain visibility, he's run into me every time I play the mission. Am I supposed to worry about him as well as my mission objectives? 2. So far I've played the first three levels of Deployment and there have been no ramp starts. Is this at the discretion of the mission creator, or is there some setting I can use to enable ramp starts? If it's at the discretion of the mission creator, can I expect to see ramp starts in other campaigns? (EDIT) 2.5. Is there a way I can modify ABRIS/INU waypoints, etc. before hopping into the pit? 3. I have the following campaigns in my list: Deployment, Georgian Oil War, Georgian Oil War Chapters 1/2/3, and Georgia Havoc. Is there a chronological ordering that I'm supposed to play these campaigns in? I just assumed I'd do Deployment first. Also what's the difference between Georgian Oil War and Georgian Oil War Chapters 1/2/3? 4. Is there no way to eject or open the door using the clickable cockpit? 5. Does it matter if I'm on the correct radio frequency and K-081 source setting when I talk to tower or my wingmen? 6. And lastly, what kind of mod support is there? I see a lot of mods that just swap out assets -- better sounds, better skins, etc. Is there any support for scripting? In other words, new avionics or systems like in Microsoft Flight Simulator? I originally bought this game just as a way of saying thanks to ED for working on DCS: Warthog. The A-10 is my one true airplane love and I wanted to do what I can to make sure the project doesn't get canceled. I wasn't even interested in flying the Black Shark. But now that I'm in the game, I'm hooked!