jubuttib

Gonna have to be tomorrow, still need to edit the recordings etc. But I what I can say is that I started to see very significant drift with Precision alignment, whether done via ground power only or APU, and doing the most basic alignment of just turning the INU on and waiting for the 3 minute alignment (and then doing the manual heading correction on the ground) was working GREAT this time. I have no idea why the results are so different from last time... I made a new test pattern that's not above water (that might interfere with the doppler system), a near square that's almost perfectly North, East, South and West, for 10 nautical miles each, and flew around it 3-4 times per run (comes out to something like an hour or more flying the route). I used barometric altitude hold and desired track autopilot, BUT I only started on the second waypoint, instead of WP1, because WP1 for whatever reason always seems to lead to the helicopter shooting past it and oscillating heavily on the way back, which can cause increased misalignment. So I manually flew to WP1, then around 1-1.5 km before it I selected WP2, put the helicopter on desired heading for the initial turn, and turned route mode on. After the helicopter had more or less turned towards WP2 and settled down, I switched to desired track for the rest of the test. No other inputs were really used, other than by accident, except turning the altitude hold on and off every now and then and adjusting the collective, to keep within the control authority of the alt hold channel. Burning fuel affects how much collective you need after all, and I didn't want to balloon to the sky. Oh, and to repeat the loop, what with the 6 waypoint limit on the Ka-50, I made waypoint 5 the same as WP1, and WP6 the same as WP2. So after the aircraft had settled on its track towards WP6, I switched the target to WP2, which made the loop restart. I'll try to make a more comprehensive post tomorrow, but I'll just post these two images now. The one that gets heavily out of whack is the Precision alignment, done with just ground power, and the other is a quick and dirty 3 minute alignment done with the APU powering things. One difference I did notice between the two was that the error/warning light for "aircraft position is being roughly calculated" didn't come up ever during flight when using Precision alignment, and came up during every single turn when using the 3 minute alignment. nullnull

Interesting, maybe I should record a video showing my exact process and then results. Xmas break going on, so not really much else to do either...

Fair, though I wouldn't expect Petro to ever manage a direct hit on an aircraft. The AA ones seem to work fine.

91 to 23 km?! That's pretty immense. I tested the Precision alignment also with engines turned off while aligning, as per the manual, and got some tens, maybe 100 meters of drift over two laps of a 3 waypoint route, a total flight distance of about 100 km and about half an hour of time. The aircraft does some weird stuff when in "desired track" mode, not really following the track the way I'd expect/remember from BS2, but the routes align decently. Another thing that throws it off is that when heading to WP1 in DT, the helicopter will fly all the way to the waypoint and THEN start turning, whereas for waypoints 2+ the DT mode will start turning before reaching the waypoint, as it should. I'll need to devise a new test around this... I also tested by using the fastest alignment, i.e. just the basic one that happens once you turn on the INU. I did this with the APU running and powering the heli, out of interest. WIth this I got WAY more drift, but even so by the end it was "just" a couple of km off. EDIT: Just to note, I did do the manual heading correction for the fast align.

And I assume you've tried with the air-to-air variant of the missiles, not the anti-tank/personnel ones? I think the only real reason why the Vikhr works as well as it does is because in AA mode it switches to a proximity fuse, which the Hind's ATGMs lack, unless you pick the specific AA ones. Back on the subject of the IGLAs and their effectiveness: I'm not 100% convinced it's just a question of the IGLAs being ineffective, at least when used against other helicopters. I just tested in a mission with a BS3 vs. a Ka-27, and even expanding all of my HE and API rounds into it (hit % about 50-70%, I got REAL CLOSE before opening fire), after slapping two IGLAs on it already, I could not destroy it. I finally destroyed the Ka-27 by taking Vikhrs onboard as well, and after 7 Vikhrs hits and one IGLA (laser burned out so had to swap to IGLAs) I managed to kill the damn thing. Has anyone tested successfully how the IGLAs fare against planes? From experience with the Hind I can say that the R-60s barely seem to scratch the Mi-8s and Ka-27s, but take down planes with ease.

I don't think so, BUT the BS3 version easily turns into the BS2 version. In the mission editor you can select the configuration of the helicopter, selecting the older option makes it identical to the BS2 version. But I guess that doesn't really help you if the campaign or server you want to use it on doesn't support BS3 yet...

Just to clarify, are you talking about shooting aerial targets with the anti-tank missiles, using Petrovich or a human gunner guiding them? On the main subject, I just ranted a bit elsewhere on how effing tough AI helicopters are, and have ranted in the past. I play a lot of Foothold, and you need to be killing helicopters all the damn time there...

True, though the shaped charge also needs to hit something that can be destroyed with a stream of molten metal like that, the cargo space of a Chinook might not be the greatest for that. Also from what I read, terrorists had gotten somewhat good at employing the self-destruct mechanism on the RPG-7 warheads, and making them explode right next to helicopters. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1998/infantry-rpg.htm And they do have plenty of HE warheads available too, AFAIK.

Honestly, it's IMO significantly more stable than the Apache in a hover and at low speeds. Cruising and fast attack runs the Apache takes the cake.

Being built and tested, sure, but AFAIK only adopted at all in block 3?

There's been a fair bit of discussion about how hard it is to kill AI helicopters. Helicopters might be harder to kill than fighter jets, but we know from real life that often a single RPG-7 projectile is enough as well. But be that as it may, the main problem really is that right now the AI helicopters can take a LOT more punishment than player operated ones. I've lost Mi-8s to infantry small arms fire in seconds, while I've also put 8 M151 rockets and a decent burst from the GAU-8 into an AI Mi-8 and it just flew away... In Foothold enemy helicopters are in fact a constant problem, Ka-27s and Mi-8s servicing target areas and enemy helicopters making attack runs, and I've seen situations where a Hind eats multiple Patriot missiles without going down, Mi-8s take 3 Sidewinders and fly away (on fire all the way home, some 200 km away...), and Ka-27s take 3 A-A Vikhr shots and fly away. I've also seen friendly AH-1Zs and Gazelles absolutely shot to shreds with multiple missiles and AAA fire, and they refuse to go down. AI helis, apart from maybe the Huey, can just take an enormous amount of punishment right now. Admittedly you do sometimes get lucky and down them in one hit, but you also see the opposite.

Wrong block, but yeah. Getting the dedicated TGP hardpoint and the HMD would be tastylicious, but probably not in the cards.

Shrug, they were originally supposed to come, until the whole BS3 project was thrown for a loop by Russian regulations changing. I wouldn't bet on anything they dropped from the original plans, even visual stuff, resurfacing anymore. Could be wrong, of course.

Just confirmed that it was broken the same way in another mission with unlimited weapons, and works just fine after you disable it. Looking foward to a fix, not that I use unlimited weapons too often. Good for practice tho.

Hmm, I wonder if this is what was causing this... I was on the Maverick training mission (because I couldn't get the video to show up in my previous tests, now I know why, I guess...) and after firing the first Maverick, I briefly got video on the second one, but it went away momentarily, and I couldn't get it back. The mission has unlimited ammo, so what I'm thinking happened is that the Mavs were pre-aligned at first, then after shooting the first one and cycling the safety I got video from the second Mav, until the first Mav got replenished, but wasn't aligned?

I've always had this issue with BS2 as well, and have had to adjust with pedals, or go manual authorization. I'm surprised to hear some people _haven't_ had this before. =/

One thing to note, is that when you're in "Central Position trim" mode, the stick in the Apache responds much better to inputs, and is very sluggish in "Instant" and "Without Springs" modes. This alone can make central position easier to fly.

To be clear, we're not necessarily asking for INSTANT response, but the response on the Apache in "Instant" and "Without Springs" trim modes is _super_ slow compared to anything else in the game. The "Central position" trim mode makes the stick respond WAY faster, but still isn't quite as fast as the real stick. What I'd want is just that the "Instant Trim" and "Without Springs" modes are as fast as the "Central position" mode, because I want to use my unsprung stick and have it work properly.

Don't thank me, it was actually Ernest who first let me in on it, I just happened to shoot the video and make a post about it first (didn't know Ernest was working on that at the time). Yeah definitely seems like a bug, can you remove the "solved" thingy from this thread, since it seems like it isn't?

Thanks, set to unlisted now! No idea why that happened, the last 100+ videos I've uploaded have been unlisted just like they should... EDIT: Ah, that's probably why it didn't embed either. Now it's working as it should.

I feel like I don't quite buy that as the explanation for this particular case: 1. The movement rate is super slow, but more importantly... 2. It depends on the trimmer mode you've selected. The maximum speed that the in-game cyclic moves is very slow when you have set the trim mode to either "INSTANT TRIM (FFB FRIENDLY)" or "Joystick Without Springs and FFB", but much faster (still not 100% with the controller) when using "Central Position Trimmer Mode". Shot this quick video (refusing embedding for whatever reason):

Heya, I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to find the co-ordinates that the off-axis point is set to from within the plane? Beyond slaving the WMD-7 to it and using the on-screen readouts, I mean. This would be most useful for me when not equipped with the targeting pod at all. It doesn't seem to appear in the DST database, it doesn't change the SPI co-ordinates that are in DST 40 while active, you can't create a markpoint based on it (or at least I wasn't able to, I activated the OAP, saw it change on the HSD, then saved a designate markpoint, but it was the same as the original SPI)... Can't really think of anything that could do it beyond like trying to use the A-G radar cursor or something... For an example of a use case, I could for example use the radar to scan for ships out at sea, see how they're moving, then set up an OAP that's 20 km behind them, and copy those co-ordinates to a turn point (DST 30-35) and have my C-802AKs come in from behind them.

On the whole I agree, but I was actually surprised at about 3:35 during the first major turn how tiny the cyclic input was for such a large amount of roll, and how the pilot then puts the stick back to center and even left a bit to arrest the roll to the right. But that is of course just one turn on a long flight.

FWIW it _is_ possible to remove those kinds of deadzones, but you have to do it in a slightly funky way. Basically what you do is you enable user curves for the axis, then bump up the values near the center until they start triggering properly, and then you tune the rest of the curves to be as linear as possible (or whatever you want them to be). I've had to do this to MANY different TGPs and seeker heads on many different planes and helicopters, for example the Ka-50s Shkval is really hard to use without heavily edited user curves.

FWIW I'm fairly certain that the top picture at least has been tweaked significantly. Checking levels in photoshop you can see that there's a lot of data in all of the color channels that's pegged at 255, i.e. completely saturated. Definitely suggests that the color saturation has been significantly bumped up at some point. The bottom picture has pretty much no signs of that, and looks pretty natural.