Grievo

Then why would pilots or navigators need to work out headings to achieve a certain track over the ground when there's a crosswind? If they could just fly the track bearing with the ball centred? The balance ball has no idea where it is geographically. It just indicates the aircraft is in coordinated flight.

Dammit Tim, now I have to hit the theory books again to pick up my game! From what remember also, it’s more of a consideration in the hover rather than in forward flight.

Your instinct is correct, regarding the sum of forces and the push of the tail rotor thrust vector, however helicopters are usually designed with a slight tilt to the main rotor mast to offset this phenomenon. It is called "tail rotor drift".

I'm not saying that the ball is modelled correctly. I think it feels a bit off as well. However, it is perfectly normal to crab along a track with the ball centred in a crosswind. The ball just shows the aircraft is flying in balance aerodynamically. It has nothing to do with the track over the ground. In fact, in a crosswind, you would expect the nose of the aircraft (the heading) to be somewhere between where the wind is coming from, and the path over the ground (the track). Don't forget that at 90 knots cruising speed, or thereabouts, a crosswind will have a greater crabbing effect on the aircraft, as there is a smaller forward velocity component. I realise this is a "suck eggs" comment for many of you, but there seemed to be some confusion in some of the posts above.

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Happy Birthday Wags! Many happy returns mate.

Basically you get four French versions. HOT3 missile armed, cannon and rocket armed, mistral (air to air missile) armed and minigun in the door. Unfortunately, the minigun does not have an AI gunner, so that particular variant is kind of useless unless you play in MP with a human gunner. British versions are essentially the same but unarmed. I’ve seen images of British gazelles with a similar sighting system as is modelled with this module. I usually fly the HOT3 missile variant without missiles when I’m playing at being the AAC. I think it works just fine. There is a lot of criticism out there about the flight model, which isn’t entirely unjustified. But if you fly it as you would the real thing, you can have a great experience. I have a commercial helicopter licence in real life and while the FM isn’t quite right, I have spent many hours and gained much enjoyment from this module. Would recommend. Hope this helps.

How dare you sir. If I had a glove I'd slap you with it! Look how good that thing looks in RN colours surrounded by steam. It's the perfect fusion of art and science!

In Australia, whenever infantry called us drop shorts, we’d tell them “We kill grunts, we don’t care whose.”

Oh it absolutely matters… just not to the bloke on the ground or the aircrew flinging it downrange.

Yeah it’s a problem. With such a costly endeavour like getting a CPL the emphasis naturally falls on getting the tick in the box to take the next step, as opposed to learning the art in its purest form. With the quality of navaids available on tablets these days though, and with cost limitations in GA operations, I wonder if steam gauges will be around for a while yet. Why put in thousands of dollars of avionics when you can hire a pilot with an iPad and subscription to an EFB service.

Just on the "place in the DCS universe" point. I think it does. An unarmed scout/light utility has a lot of utility in the DCS timeframe, especially with the release of the falklands map coming up. The Gaz was used as to drop ammunition and supplies, extract wounded etc. I know there's a lot of rotorheads that could get a lot of fun out of the minigun version with the minigun removed, doors left off etc. It's a great little module, unfairly maligned, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of it, and I have a CPL(H), so make of that what you will! Cheers

you mis-spelled “Huey gunship”

Oh glad to hear it. SRS is easier than you think. It should automatically log into the server when you join. From there you just use the radio in the cockpit to tune the relevant frequency which you'll find in the mission brief, down near the bottom. For Blue fighters it's usally 256.00 on the ground and 251.00 once you're airborne. In the F-5 just in front of the stick, you have your radio, just switch it on to main (it's off even after auto start up) and tune the frequency, set your PTT (Push to Talk) in the settings section of the SRS window outside DCS. Once airborne, AWACS and Bogey Dope is usually your best friend for finding the enemy. This also helps with IFF, because you tend to be heading towards a bandit on a certain bearing and height, so you're expecting to see him. Over time though, you'll learn to get a picture of what's going on from other callsigns Bogey Dope calls and the BRA (Bearing Range Altitude) figures AWACS provides them If you ask for a bogey dope and you get a bandit at 350, 30 miles 2000 feet, and then another callsign gets 020 20 miles 200 feet, you can figure that the friendly is off to your 10/11 o'clock about ten miles. I also fly in VR with no zoom, so I feel your pain, but since there are no external views, sneaking up on enemy aircraft and hitting them before they see you is a skill worth acquiring, you also do get better at picking it as you gain experience. The MiG-21's in particular are a nightmare to see out of! The F-5's fox two's are also fairly unreliable unless you're ambushing an unsuspecting target, so you'll find yourself using guns for your kills quite often. I'm no fighter ace, I tend to like rotary wings and hiding in the weeds, but if you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them. Glad to have you on the server!

I wouldn’t worry so much about that. The scenarios may seem complicated at first glance, but the briefing breaks down each aircrafts tasks by type. F-5s main job is to go fight the enemy fighters so the Viggens and the Helicopters can go about their tasks. If anyone is occupying the GCI slot and they want you anywhere in particular, they'll let you know. Most of the time pilots fly single ship. But if you tune into SRS you can chat to other pilots and try and work out some teamwork. The server scenarios reward teamwork, especially because not everyone does it. But it’s very informal. Once you’ve been on a few times you’ll recognise some familiar faces and feel more comfortable. But don’t be shy about jumping in, the sooner you’re in, the sooner you’ll be comfortable and splashing MiGs left right and centre.

Actually, with the Ka-50s gone, it might be better if the Abrams were replaced with M60s in Swedish Delivery? I think the Hinds ATGM struggle to destroy them, but I (Petrovich) could also have just been missing!

I'm sure you're right. I don't look at things like tacview with a stopwatch. I spent a couple of hours on that server this morning all of it on swedish delivery, give or take a bit of time if you want to, I don't mind, it's not going in a logbook. If I had planned the pattern and had a briefing with speedog before we went I'm sure we could bang out 10 units in an hour or less, but that's not how the server works, we were communicating by text chat because I couldn't understand him on SRS. I did eventually get into a rythym, pre-spawning the crates so I didn't have to land and could just hover and go, but initially I was mosying around, trying to see what was already there, what I'd put down already, and since I didn't have the tactical commander map view, trying not to place it all too close together or double up (you can see I placed the vulcans WNW of the farp too close together) and trying to think of what approaches the Hinds would be coming in at, and trying to place AD in a position where they wouldn't be seen until the enemy was in the "no escape zone". I even managed to shoot down a hind that was so tunnel visioned on looking for targets at the Farp he didn't see me hook behind him. I was just hoping you didn't hook around the North and come over the hill behind us. I get it's frustrating. I got sore a couple of posts back about getting whacked by ground units in Hold the Line... turns out I just didn't do a good job of placing defences. Red's issue in this mission wasn't our AD, it was that when I checked occasionally there was only one Hind operating for much of the time and so the sortie rate was super low, I've no idea what the Mi-8 was up to, never saw it. You could have come in high and had a better view and picked off the air defences, but you'd of been at risk from the fighters and that's what we wanted, to keep you out. I don't know what the jets were up to but I didn't see much of them. Anyway. We obviously aren't going to agree, my concessions to your point aren't enough and I'm not going to concede any more than I have to your frustrations. Alpenwolf has a talent for these things and I'm sure he'll make any adjustments he thinks it's necessary. Since it's not like Blue win this scenario time after time, I think it's fine as it is.

Come fly on the Cold War server. F-5’s are the main Blue fighter, so you’re an integral part of achieving any objectives by flying intercepts and caps etc, plenty of slots available, You sound like you wouldn’t be the least experienced pilot that’s flown on the server, and no one will get annoyed if you mess up, but you’ll also be challenged (and helped by) some really good pilots.

like I say, some sympathy with Crazy about the amount of units, but I feel there’s a bit of downplaying how much work went into putting that AD up. We started before he joined the server today and were still going when he left. Obviously it gets progressively harder as we have more time to work. A Huey will only do 90/100 knots, not 250-300kph like a hind/hip so any of those half way units take a bloody long time to put down, and if you don’t fly a direct straight line between one FARP and the other then it’s wasted effort. It was more than 1 hour, that’s for certain. I’ve played this mission as Red plenty of times and managed to get infantry into the Enemy FARP, but it’s hard work killing the AD and dodging the fighters before you can do that. I feel like this complaint is largely based in the fact that two Hueys played a good defence, worked as a team and built out the AD around the enemy’s objective. We did nothing to further the winning of the Blue objective, because Hueys can’t really do that in Swedish Delivery. I get Crazy is irritated that the AD became impenetrable, which it did, after a couple of hours work, but that was our role as Hueys surely? The number he mentioned in game of a 2-3 stinger limit would be ridiculous. There’s one avenger defending that FARP with some AAA, and that’s child’s play for a hind. The only way blue can defend it is for AD to be placed where it “ambushes” attackers. Surely the server isn’t just a playground for Hinds to plink some 2 mile range SAMs with 3 mile range anti-tank missiles, sidestep some modest defence and win the day, Hueys and gazelles have to be able to grind out a win somehow. There’s no way you can defend that FARP out to three miles with 5 stingers.

I have some sympathy for Crazy on this one. I would like to point out though that it took Myself and Speedog about 2 hours with 2 Hueys to build that defence up, it didn't just appear at mission start. A limit would definitely be fair enough if there isn't one already, but as it's the objective of Red to capture the FARP, Blue still needs to be able to mobilise enough air defence to cover the potential ingress points. Maybe an additional equalizer could be to replace stingers for avengers. This would be an easier unit for Hinds to detect and engage while ingressing to the target, but since it still uses the stinger missile it provides essentially the same air defence for Blue.

There seems to be a spate of BMP rampages lately. People driving from objective to objective shooting everything up with a BMP until the game rotates. I know for me, spending an hour trying to frantically set up AA systems to defend a farp from assault only for a lone BMP to drive up, blow everything up and shoot me down too, makes the time spend on there a bit of a waste. I'm not super familiar with the Combined Arms side of things, but is there a way to lock player control from armed vehicles so they can only use it as an AWACS/GCI or actual JTAC(Call in airstrikes and Artillery), and not just drive around winning the war single handed?

Absolutely, a lot of the ww2 aircraft are in MPH.

Hey Willie, Might be a lesson on sucking eggs for you, but I tried a few things from this video today and I've had a noticeable improvement with my CPU performance. The GPU is still a bit of a bottleneck, but that's a global problem at the moment so patience is the key there. But It has gotten noticeably better in multiplayer. I understand this doesn't answer your question, but I hope it helps all the same.

Damned secretive Russians. Don’t they know they’re ruining a potentially great module? Mi-28 would be pretty sweet too… so that’s two great modules all because of their trust issues!!