jubuttib

FWIW, the 30x165mm round used the by the Russians on the Mi-24P, Ka-50, Su-25T, Mi-28 etc. is ballistically closer to the 30x173mm GAU-8 round than to the 30x113mm M230 round on the Apache. Projectile masses are very close to equal (about 390-400 grams for both) and muzzle velocities are about 1 010 m/s for the GAU-8 and 980 m/s for the 2A42 on the Black Shark. The Russian rounds though as far as I know don't feature depleted uranium penetrators, so aren't quite as effective, and I don't know what specific round is modeled for the Ka-50 AP round. The figures I've seen for PGU-14/B (GAU-8), M789 (M230) and two Russian AP rounds, 3UBR6 and 3UBR8, were as follows: PGU-14/B (depleted uranium penetrator): ~58 mm RHA 60° 1000 meters (not exact because I was looking at a graph, which also showed close to 71mm at 500 meters) M789 (shaped charge + shrapnel): 25.4 mm RHA 50˚NATO 500 Meters (theoretically, since it's a shaped charge, distance shouldn't affect the penetration that much) 3UBR6 (35KhGS structural steel penetrator): 18 mm RHA 60° 1000 meters (22mm at 500 meters) 3UBR8 (tungsten alloy penetrator): 35 mm RHA 60° 1000 meters (not sure how much at 500 meters, but should be several mm more) EDIT: But yeah, just because the diameter of a round is 30 mm doesn't mean they're comparable. The .22 rimfire and 5.56x45mm NATO rounds both have a 5.7mm diameter bullet (the 5.56 refers to the land diameter in the rifling), but one of them has more than 10x the muzzle energy and over twice the muzzle velocity... EDIT2: Size comparison of the rounds in question (slight editing artifacts, because I removed a bunch of rounds not relevant, scale is correct):

Just out of interest I went through your posts, and probably missed something (in which case I'd be very grateful if you could point the posts out for me!), but I only saw evidence for a one-off test of NVGs in a Russian exercise, and some Hungarian footage, done relatively recently. Was there any additional evidence? Personally I'd put the limit of inclusion a bit higher than "it was tested a couple of times on this variant". That said I do understand where you're coming from. On the controversial BS3 issue I'm of the opinion that "it's kinda OK". The specific reasons why I think that: 1. Like the A-10C II/2.0 update, it's not expected to be replacing the existing BS2 Ka-50, but adding another version. This makes it supremely easy to not include on a server, should you wish to not have it, much easier than going through adding a heli and configuring its settings to reflect the specific variant you're after. Under this clause, I'd be kinda fine with it if they ever released a Mi-24P Hind 2.0, which added all kinds of rare and experimental stuff, like a generic consumer GPS unit for navigation. The base Mi-24P I'd like to stay true to the common version of the variant, with not many exotic tweaks or late in life experimental additions. 2. Specifically to the BS3, they wanted to make it properly, but were basically prohibited from doing that by the government. Lots of work that had already done would be wasted, which is never fun, and even the fantasy addons they are planning feature realistic capabilities of the helicopter variant they wanted to make, even if they're not realistic implementations. The version they wanted to make was to have Iglas, MWS, RWR and potentially IR jamming of some kind (don't quote me on the last one), they're adding Iglas and MWS which are realistic capabilities, but doing them in a not fully realistic way due to being prohibited from doing it properly. Under this clause, if for example NVGs on the Mi-24P was a commonly utilized thing, but the government prohibited them from doing a specific simulation of the real life NVG goggles, I'd be more likely to accept it if they did a more generic NVG implementation. This is all different from e.g. the HARMgate for the F-16C, where the issue was that the US specifically chose to take out the necessary wiring for HARMs on two of the pylons, but it was a configuration that was extensively tested, validated, included in manuals, and used by other customer countries. Just not the US. In a similar vein to that, the GPU-5 pod (basically a 4-barrel GAU-8 in pod form) was only ever used in action by the US for one day during the 1st Gulf War (so before our Block 50), after which it was heaved out of the system, but apparently Thai F-5Es use them. So, not a fitting addition to the F-16C we have, but an addition for the F-5E, assuming that in real life it didn't require much in the way of rewiring (the system purportedly fits into standard mounts and the F-16Cs during GW didn't even have it hooked up to the sights, so seems pretty easy to plonk on there and have it work)? Yes please. I'd love to see many other alternative weapons used by the air forces of countries other than the US and Russia, if they are fitted on the same variant of the plane without also needing massive changes to the systems onboard. I like the idea of simulating foreign customer models overall. But often those use significantly different systems overall, making them different variants themselves, so it wouldn't really be appropriate to do that. You could probably approximate this in DCS by assigning AI wingmen using the AI only Mi-24? Looking at it in-game it doesn't specify the model, but the things at the ends of the wings look very much like what's seen on the Macedonian Mi-24V and the Polish Mi-24W (which supposedly is just their designation for the V), so is probably at least a close approximation? Fly the P yourself (you'd be the leader anyway, so that fits), and have the AI back you up. Would of course be fantastic to get the V variant too, even if it has a wimpy gun.

I would argue it matters at least a bit. With the nubmers Sobakopes listed, putting them in a chart and finding a best fit polynomial curve for them I'd guesstimate the 20x20m box at 1000 meters have about ~17% hit rate. So you shoot enough dakka, you will hit something in there, but if the hit rate is around lets says 15-20% at 1000 meters, I wouldn't even call the gun "accurate" for hitting a 20x20m box at 1000 meters, much less "accurate within a 20x20m box out to 1.5-2 km". I guess my definition of accuracy could well just be a bit different, I'd at least want over half of my rounds impacting the area I'm targeting to call the weapon "accurate" at those specs. This of course doesn't mean that it's USELESS at that distance, that would be a totally different thing.

That'd be proving a negative, which isn't usually the best way to go about these things. You could potentially find any number of original documents that don't mention NVGs because they weren't used and as such weren't an issue, but since nothing in there says "they were not used", is it "proof against NVGs"? Note that I'm not really on either side of the discussion, I'm more interested in the discussion itself, the reasoning used, the claims made, the evidence provided.

That wiki article is in real bad need of citations.

Based on the document from 1995 on the first page, wasn't it more like 75% hitting in a 50x50m box at 1 000 meters, based on real life testing?

I have been interested in and pretty dubious about the accuracy of the Mi-28 implementation to be honest. The gun at high rate of fire has the equivalent of somewhere around 1 000 lbs of thrust, and it's mounted fully below the helicopter on a turret (which does look pretty hefty at least). I'd imagine it wouldn't be that horrible shooting straight ahead, but slew it sideways at all and you'd probably be dealing with a lot of movement in the heli. EDIT: Are you talking about the one titled "Mi-28 helicopter attacks ISIS / Daesh terrorists"? At some points in the video the dispersion looks pretty tight actually (the lines they're "drawing" are neat, rounds hitting at steady intervals and not veering off of the line), but they're slewing the damn thing all over the shop. =/

To be fair to Polychop, as I understand it the exact reason it's such a mess is that they got fed up with ED faffing around with different multicrew solutions and having to do hacky stuff to get it to work at all, so they decided to wait until ED establishes a proper method of doing multicrew. Which they have been doing recently, with the Hind etc. Then of course they got busy with the Kiowa. The current hope seems to be that once the Kiowa is out they're gonna start working on the Gazelle too (lack of manpower to work on both at the same time, and switching between projects constantly isn't easy, so focusing on one at a time), and with ED's new multicrew system in place we might finally get functional multicrew on the Gazelle as well. That's the hopeful way of looking at the situation, at any rate.

The Gazelle is a bit of a special case anyway. I tried multicrewing the Gazelle with a friend recently, and while we did in fact both get in the choppah, none of the button mappings for the second seat did anything. IIRC I could click on the cockpit buttons, but none of the bindings actually did anything. Couldn't slew the camera, nothing. Weirdly some multicrew aircraft have separate control profiles for the different seats (like the Mi-24 and the F-14) while others don't (Gazelle and Huey). At first I thought the Gazelle didn't work exactly because all the controls are lumped under the same profile, but then remembered the Huey does it as well. It seems like going forward ED is going to be favoring the "separate control profiles for each station" method, based on the Hind at least. Should probably try with using like Parsec or something. Even when I was sitting at the co-pilot seat in the Gazelle, HIS slew controls etc. were working just fine. So I guess if I wanted to play the co-pilot, we could try the following: 1. Map an Xbox gamepad to the second seat controls on his (the pilot's) end 2. Connect via Parsec or Steam "remote play together", but don't watch the actual video stream, just send over the button presses and stick movements 3. Launch DCS on both our ends, get into a chopper together 4. Use my Xbox gamepad here to send inputs to his game there, and watch the results in my DCS As far as DCS is concerned only the pilot's computer is sending control inputs, but I can sit in the other seat. Sounds like exactly the kind of kludge that I find amusing, I must try this out soon.

Very much so: The 30x165mm round it shoots is ballistically very similar to the 30x173mm round used by the GAU-8 on the A-10C. Same projectile mass, about 3% lower muzzle velocity. Rate of fire is obviously lower, but it's still a hefty push, roughly equivalent to about 800-1 200 pounds of thrust (depending on the firing rate, don't know where the Ka-50 falls on the 2A42's quoted 550 to 800 rounds/min "high" rate range).

Irrelevant to the discussion (sorry), but I'd wish electric primers would make their way into normal guns too. They won't suit the "apocalypse is coming, I need to be able to scrounge up supplies and load my own ammo" thing that for some reason people stick to, but it WOULD work great for 99% of shooting range and hunting purposes, and could make for absolutely stellar and well adjustable triggers...

Aye, I just haven't ever heard that. The differences aren't always that big (US M830A1 and Korean K280 HEAT-MP-Ts are around 1400 m/s vs. some variants of the M829 family penetrators being around 1600 m/s), and my understanding was that the time it takes for a explosively formed penetrator to form is in the range of hundreds of microseconds, which doesn't sound insurmountable to account for. The muzzle velocities are certainly different, I just always thought that it was mostly because the penetrators tend to be like half the weight of the HEAT rounds, hence easier to accelerate. Clearly more studying is necessary, thanks for your insights! The numbers I've seen quoted have been 4km maximum range (FWIW in-game I never really try to hit anything beyond 3 km in the Ka-50), with about 1.5km effective range for the M230 a bit more for the 2A42. The testing results from the first page though would definitely suggest the M230 is less accurate, if at 2000 meters 9 rounds out of 50 will hit within a 50x50m box. Lower accuracy at range isn't surprising, considering the less substantial mounting and significantly slower projectile velocity on the M230. To my (very limited) understanding the intended purposes of the guns are different as well, with the 2A42 being specifically designed as an anti-armor (if maybe not strictly anti-tank) weapon, and the M230 as a more of an area of effect weapon, so the quoted "effective ranges" could also be for different purposes. As in a heavy machine gun could well claim to have an effective range of 1 km, as could a sniper rifle, but one is "effective for suppression" and the other is "effective for hitting a target". I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for the M230 and the 2A42, just a possibility. Regardless, I'm very much looking forward to the seeing how the gun works in-game. Oh, and you can continuously aim and fire the 2A42 in the Ka-50 by looking too, just not very accurately, hehe.

Hmm interesting. I need to read more about this subject, I've never before heard shaped charge projectiles working worse when at high velocities. At least some modern MBTs (Abrams, Leopard) tend to have really quite high muzzle velocities even for their HEAT rounds.

Very good point. Though you can't really fit much of a shaped charge style projectile into a 30mm gun. One of the reasons why rifle grenades still exist when there are so many great 40mm grenade launchers (both standalone and ones that attach to another gun) is that you just can't make a very effective shaped charge round with a space that small. From what I could quickly gather online, looks like the standard M789 round is rated for about 25.4mm RHA penetration at 50° and 500 meters. The more modern 30x165mm penetrator rounds should be able to match and even beat that at twice the distance and 60° angles. That said all this discussion has kind of made me even more interested in how to effectively employ the M230 in-game. I originally thought it was more of a surgical tool for close up light and unarmored targets, but now that I know it's more of an area effect weapon it piques my interest in a different way.

It's the 30x165mm on that as well, yes. So the same caliber cartridge as the Hind, Su-25T, Havoc, etc. employ (specific round types might vary), ballistically comparable to the 30x173mm used by the GAU-8/A-10. Yeah, the Ka-50's cannon is definitely very useful, able to shred the more lightly armored stuff with ease and even destroy MBTs if you can get close enough to land good shots on the rear deck (IIRC). But based on the accuracy specs quoted above and the significantly weaker cartridge it employs, I wouldn't expect the M230 to be quite as effective. From what data I could find on the 30x113mm and 30x165mm cartridges online, the range on the Apache should be way shorter, the armor penetration much weaker, and the accuracy significantly lower as well. This is of course for armored targets, with how weirdly splash damage works at times in DCS I can't begin to guess how it'll be against infantry etc. Should chow down trucks all day long.

Welp, thanks for the feedback and checks everyone, much appreciated. I'm still hoping it'll eventually be an allowed loadout, it's a really fun layout, but if our model never supported it then that's fine too. EDIT: The fact that the Syria mission has that loadout makes me think I'm not 100% crazy for thinking it used to be an allowed loadout at some point (maybe right after early access started, before any updates?)

If I have, I have no recollection of it, I know you're not supposed to touch them. I'm also pretty sure this at least used to be a loadout earlier in the early access, and I even remember it working properly. Is there a way I can remove edited loadouts, and restore original ones? Also there is at least one easy to find picture of a Hind with this gunpod loadout online:

When you click on the autopilot speed stabilization/speed hold On and Off buttons in the cockpit, they go in and come out when you let go of the button. If you map them to joystick buttons, they get stuck in until you click on them again. YouTube video included to showcase the issue:

When using the preset loadout that includes 4xATGM, 2x grenade launcher gunpods and 2x 12.7mm+7.62mm gunpods, the grenade launchers always fire together with the 12.7mm guns. This happens when the weapon selector is set to grenade launcher only (GM-30 I believe), 12.7+7.62, or 12.7 only. Only the 7.62 can be fired separately. Youtube video included:

With my limited experience of trying to target things with just my head (rather than my eyes), I suspected that, and yet they keep banging on about it...

Learning this really surprised me. Considering how many times I'd heard them go on about how good they can aim it just by looking at a target, I assumed it was going to be a much more precision weapon. But in another thread here it said that the design specs were "1 round out of 50 should hit a 3x3 meter target 84% of the time from 1000 meters away", and "75% of rounds should hit a 50x50 meter target area 75% of the time. Really wasn't expecting 25% of my rounds not hitting within a 50x50 area from 1000 meters away...

That's... That's a lot more spray and pray than I was expecting. =/ Though checking for the muzzle velocity it does start to make sense, it's only a bit higher than on an AK-47 (with of course a longer, heavier, likely ballistically better projectile), combine that with a turret mount and a hovering platform, and it makes sense. GAU-8 is fixed and has about 25% higher muzzle velocity, so it's no wonder that it could be specced to "80% of rounds fired at 4,000 feet (1,200 m) range hit within a 40-foot (12 m) diameter circle"

It is 30mm diameter, yes, but the shell is MUCH shorter, and isn't necked down. I.e. the powder load is very different. The Apache uses the 30x113mm cartridge, where the Hind uses the 30x165mm (same cartridge as used by the Su-25T), which is more comparable to the 30x173mm round used by the GAU-8 in the A-10 in terms of energy. Not sure if effectiveness is as good, since there's more to these kinds of rounds than just bullet size and powder load, materials etc. also play a big part. Some comparison images: Apache, Hind and A-10 cartridges labeled in the image. Some of them look a bit off (might not be milspec), but this gives you an idea. The following pics don't have all three, but are probably more like the actual rounds used by the aircrafts in question: GAU-8 uses #1, Apache uses #3. You can clearly see how big the difference in powder load is going to be. If you'll allow me to exaggerate slightly, it's a bit like comparing a .30 caliber pistol round with a .30 caliber rifle round. EDIT: Btw, some people were clamoring after the turreted version of the Hind, I think that peashooter would have used the #10 12.7x108mm rounds. Comparing #10 to #1 (which is close to the 30x165mm in the Hind), I'm happy we didn't go that way. GAU-8 cartridge on the left, GSh-30-2 cartridge on the right. Those two are much more comparable than the cartridge used by the M230 on the Apache.

I was personally really hoping for the D model, since for me the main thing I like to fiddle with in DCS are the avionics (I'm the kinda guy who'd rather ride backseat in the F-14), and felt that if we were to get a less "advanced", lighter and nimble version of the Apache, I'd honestly rather have a HueyCobra to go all out on the small and light side.

Have now had a chance to fly a bit with this thing, and boy howdy, it really makes a big difference to using a throttle (TWCS in my case, no stiction issues). So much more natural to pull up when cushioning in for a landing, the long smooth range of motion improves accuracy of inputs massively, it's just a lovely feeling. And indeed the device feels solid as heck. There's no slack anywhere that I can feel, any movement that's not pure axis movement feels like I'm bending the metal supports, or rather that my mounting system isn't 100% solid. The 3D printed components really surprised me, very well made. You can of course see the surface finish, and if you run your fingernail across them there's the telltale scratchy noise, but they feel dang solid, I have no worries about their durability. Especially the throttle handle feels really nice and grippy with the texture. If anyone is on the fence about this thing, you enjoy helicopters in sims but are using a throttle, your finances allow it, and you don't want to invest about double the money on a Virpil system or much much more on a Komodo or something, I can heartily recommend this collective. It's a really well built, solid and great feeling device, and K-51 was very clear with his communications and instructions on how to operate it. Really happy with the experience!