jubuttib

100%, it should fly like the real thing, whatever the real thing is like at the end. And this isn't necessarily to be taken as me wanting the helicopter to change either, this is more a commentary on how I'm finding it compared to the other helicopters, and how those differences pertain to my likes and dislikes. But the module isn't, and shouldn't made to suit my likes and dislikes instead of realism, and it certainly has its own character. And yeah, I do expect to be busy in a helicopter, and I am fairly busy in all of them, except the Ka-50 with its really strong autopilot capabilities and inherently more stable coaxial layout, but I did not expect the Apache to be quite so unstable. I do still like it a whole lot, and continue to keep getting better at flying it. EDIT: Oh, and the "and if the controls were equally fast in unsprung stick trim mode as they are in center position trim mode" is just plainly a bug, the trimming mode selected shouldn't affect the control movement speed. Either the Instant and Unsprung stick trim modes are too slow, or the center position trim mode is too fast. I _really_ hope that instant and unsprung are too slow, because the helicopter is way easier to fly with the fast inputs of center position trim mode. Just to note, it's the same for the Hind and Ka-50 as well, the trim button also interacts with the autopilot/stability augmentation systems on those as well. Interestingly it doesn't on the Hip, the reason being AFAIK that it has a 3rd person in the cockpit whose job it is to tune the autopilot channels manually.

Dang, wonder when that was. The stabilization and damping on the Hind is (for me) absolute miles beyond what the Apache can do for me, and the mass also makes it slow to get moving out of a hover. And this is with an unsprung stick, not even using the "easy mode" 4-way trim hat that will make you the second most stable helicopter in the world (after the Ka-50). I wanna preface the following with making it clear that I don't consider the Apache "impossible" to fly or anything like that, and I have gotten used to it enough to hover it decently, and get it into hover hold. Turning off IHADSS and using the trim properly all help. And the stability has improved when holding in force trim button, i.e. with the SCAS mostly off. This is just comparative talk, it is significantly harder in ever way at low speeds for me than any other helicopter (including the Huey, Hind, Hip, Black Shark, Gazelle, Blackhawk mod and Little Bird mod). The Apache's main issue for me, beyond just it requiring constant little inputs (which is fine, the Huey requires that too and it doesn't bother me none) is that whenever the Apache twitches a bit, it accelerates off to the side _so much faster_ than anything else in DCS, for me at least. Hind or Hip gets nudged a bit off kilter? It'll eventually start to drift that way, but it takes a while, and the stability augmentation are already reduces these random little twitches a lot. Huey is a bit faster, and there's no stability augmentation, so you need to work with it more. But the Apache, it has the double whammy of not wanting to sit stably holding its position via stability augmentation, and needing constant nudging like the Huey, it also gets out of sorts faster than the others, so you need to be really quick about it too. The most annoying part about that is that if you fly with "Center position trim" option enabled, you can move you stick MUCH faster than in instant or unsprung trim modes, which makes it a LOT easier to control the helicopter in a hover. With center position trim I feel like I can keep up with the helicopter to hold it in a hover, it's just some work to do it, while the unsprung trim mode (my preferred one) makes me lag behind it badly. I'd honestly rate the Apache's stability a lot higher if I could move the stick in unsprung as I can in center position trim. The other issue I've had is with the stability augmentation itself. When reviewing footage I've seen instances where a disturbance happens, and instead of trying to correct/compensate for it, it ends up making the helicopter lean into it harder, with no or even opposite stick input. It also seems to oscillate back and forth weirdly at times. This is something I've basically never felt in the Mi-24, Mi-8 and Ka-50 helicopters. The most noticeable example for me is when turning on the hover hold (i.e. very low speed attitude hold). My speed can be 0, my ball on the IHADSS centered (and yes I am aware that chasing the ball in IHADSS is usually bad, and I do get better results ignoring it entirely), but when I turn on the supposed hover hold mode, the helicopter starts accelerating in a random direction. You not only have to get the speed to be basically 0, and the acceleration to be basically 0, you also need to nail a specific attitude on the helicopter before turning the mode on will actually capture and hold the hover. It's very binary, either it captures the hover hold perfectly with no issues, or it doesn't get even remotely close to it. I can't remember if they announced a specific change to this aspect, but in the manual it still says that when your speeds is below 5 knots, the Attitude Hold switch is supposed to turn on the hover/position hold mode, but it absolutely can not even remotely achieve this currently if you're moving a more than like 1 knot. At least on my system. =/ Now I can do this after some practice, but comparing it to the 3 other helicopters with hover holds, all of them are SO much better at this. The Ka-50 just wants you to get to like below 10 km/h and with the trim set so that the autopilot has most of its channel authority left, and it'll capture and hold your hover very easily. Even if your trim wasn't perfect, and the autopilot runs out of authority, it'll still _try_ to maintain the hover as best it can, drifting to the side a tiny bit, which you can correct for by retrimming. The Apache in a similar situation will just yeet off to a random direction at high speeds, rather than try to get as close to a hover as it can. The Mi-24P isn't as good at capturing the hover, but it will try its best, and turn off the hold mode if it can't do it. The Gazelle (such as it is until the new update comes) is very touchy unless you severely drop down your saturations, but it's not very hard to get to a hover, and the hover hold grabs and holds it aggressively. If the Apache could actually engage position hold that manages to grab the helicopter and keep it steady when engaged at between 2-5 knots, and if the controls were equally fast in unsprung stick trim mode as they are in center position trim mode, I'd have very little to complain about really, even with the current stability augmentation not really keeping it "stable" in the same manner as the Hind, Hip and Shark do.

Sure, and that's entirely fair, I just personally wasn't expecting it to be _the toughest_ helicopter to fly.

@Raptor9 Any thoughts on how different trim modes have different maximum speeds for the stick movement? When you're in Center Trim mode you can move the stick around pretty fast, but when you're in unsprung stick trim mode the responses are way slower. I don't know which mode is supposed to be the proper one, but if at all possible I'd love to be able to test the center trim mode's stick movement speed with the unsprung stick trim mode, even if it breaks IC. I use an unsprung stick, so centering the stick isn't really a good idea for me (it's immensely hard to find the center), but even then hovering the Apache is way easier in center trim mode because the input response is so much better. I just can't really use it for flying around because I can't ever trim in this mode. =( Is there a way to adjust this in the files for the helicopter somehow for local testing? Could you guys in a future update make it so that the center trim mode's faster input speed is used for all trim modes? It really makes a big difference for me with the Apache, I go from feeling like I'm constantly chasing it to being in control.

Entirely fair. I work with racing sims, and sometimes weird things just frigging happen. You don't touch something but it suddenly breaks, an sometimes even inconsistently between different computers...

You can, if you're close enough. I didn't get any big boxes when shooting at targets about 5-6 km away, but I did when shooting at ones about 1-2 km away.

It's been quite interesting for me recently. When the first iteration of MT came in a patch, I found the Apache suddenly really nice and stable in a hover, and overall much nicer to fly, and very easy to get into a hover hold. Then with some of the later updates that went away, it becoming super twitchy again (this despite having my saturations dropped to 70%). With yesterday's patch I didn't really see much change in the stability, still being insanely squirrely and hard to hold in a hover vs. any other helicopter in the game, getting the hover hold to actually engage a hover instead of veering hard to a random direction seemed to be down to pure luck (even with the speed line ultra short and the acceleration ball centered), but I did notice the SCAS channels behaving themselves better, especially collective. All of the above (including all my previous tests with older versions) were done with IHADSS visible, in the mode usually used for takeoffs. For some reason I decided to then test flying the Apache without the IHADSS, and after a little bit I found it a lot easier to hover, even if I hadn't been consciously looking at the IHADSS symbology. With the IHADSS visible, there's a HUGE tendency for me to end up in situations where even though I'm making tiny stick movements, the helicopter will just end up banking hard and wandering all over the place. With the IHADSS disabled, this didn't really happen anymore, and I got the helicopter to activate hover hold much more consistently too. Shrug, worth a try for some peeps, I guess. FWIW I still think it's weirdly unstable compared to any other helicopter in the game, or any other helicopter I've flown in other (civilian) sims for that matter. A Huey also requires constant small inputs to hover, but it's so much more calm than the Apache.

Testing last night from a hover with George, I could easily have 2, sometimes 3 missiles in the air at the same time heading towards different targets. That plus the ability to just bob down after a launch definitely gives the Limas a lot of versatility vs. the Kilos. But I also ran into some issues where I couldn't hit the exact target I was aiming for when multiple targets were close together, so there's still definitely a place for laser guidance. EDIT: And doing the lasing myself, I could ripple off about 5 missiles before the first one landed, too. This is definitely a capability that can be useful.

On 3), I found that the procedure seems to go something like this: Slave George to target -> George lases target -> Once the "Target Data?" prompt goes away George stops lasing -> You can tell him to fire. I found it helpful to turn on the video feed from the TADS, so that I could see when the "Target Data?" prompt disappeared. On 4), the missiles are supposed to veer to the side (it gives the missile a chance to use doppler beam sharpening techniques to improve the radar imaging, which doesn't work well when you're just flying straight at the target). For missing, the only thing that comes to mind is are you shooting from a hover? I noticed that the missiles tend to miss more if you don't shoot quite soon after the designation, or move around, especially sideways.

Oh yeah, agreed 100%, but in the end I'm playing DCS so I'm somewhat forced to think in terms of what works in DCS. It would be awesome to actually have to use these big badabooms to achieve things, as well as being able to cause damage on near misses.

FWIW in the video Wags stopped firing the laser, waited about 5 seconds (while talking), and only then fired the missile. So clearly the laser didn't need to be kept steadily on anything after initial designation (i.e. until the "TARGET DATA?" text disappeared), but I don't know if there would be any limitations to the helicopter drifting around between that and the launch. The helicopter in the video was drifting a tiny bit sideways, but not much.

That are better against armor than the cluster JSOWs in-game... In terms of DCS at least, I prefer quantity over size for bombs. It's very rare that I need a big bomb, but pretty often I need a lot of hits.

Nope. F-16C and even the Hornet are still in early access officially.

I mean I still have a crapton of fun with helicopters, even with the issues.

"Aaah! You smell that? Smells like..." *HURK* *DEAD*

I don't even mind that guy so much. What I mind a lot more is the goddamn RPG-7 hero who nails me in the ear from what seems to be beyond the max range of the launcher, while I'm flying perpendicular to him at 100+ knots in a helicopter, not doing a particularly good job of maintaining my altitude either. Yes, I know RPGs have killed a <profanity>ton of helis in the middle east, but usually slow flying and stationary ones, or ones at specific distances where the self-destruction mechanism causes an airburst. I haven't heard many stories of them hitting a helicopter flying left-to-right at full speed pretty far away, and nailing the cockpit exactly...

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this behavior so far. I'm on the MT client, haven't started trying to replicate this consistently yet so no tracks yet, an early inquiry basically. Sometimes during a mission I just randomly seem to lose my ability to contact anyone via the radio menu system, including ground crew. Even if initially I am able to contact the ATC for startup, I might not be able to ask them for taxi or takeoff after I finish the startup. And by "not able to contact" I don't mean like I have the wrong frequency or the cockpit is closed for the ground crew, I mean that selecting the options in the menu doesn't do anything, not even trigger my pilot's line. Today for example I landed after exhausting all my munitions, taxi'd to parking, opened my cockpit and asked the ground crew to refuel and rearm me. Usually I'd hear the "requesting refueling" and "requesting rearming" lines, which the ground crew either copies or says they're "unable to comply", but I don't get anything, just silence. Same when trying to contact ATC or AWACS, my pilot stays silent and there's no response either. This doesn't happen always, and never at mission start (I have so far always been able to at least contact the ground crew enough to rearm and take off the wheel chocks), but sometimes between a few minutes or even an hour I just lose the ability to communicate. Anyone else run into similar issues?

And before the 20th century too, they were the first to design a rifle that used smokeless powder in the ammunition in the late 1800s, with the Mle 1886 Lebel rifle. This improved accuracy, range and rate of fire massively. Granted, they also slightly cocked that one up, by rushing the design of the cartridge and the gun to get the rifles into the hands of soldiers. The double taper on the cartridge made magazine designs for later rifles a lot more difficult (anyone who has seen the magazine on the Chauchat knows why this is an issue when trying to stack rounds, though the holes don't help on that), and the round nosed bullet wasn't very good aerodynamically. Both worked fine on the Lebel, because it had a tube magazine though, and the bullet was later changed to a Spitzer boat tail style, but the cartridge design hanging around until after WW1 certainly made subsequent firearms designs harder.

Really wouldn't mind NS430 integration, like in the Hip!

Noticed this while trying to get a hang of the gain and contrast controls on the Harrier. When you zoom your view (not the sensor, just your cockpit view) all the way in towards the MFD showing the FLIR sensor, the hot spot detection results change. Images taken in active pause, only thing that changes between them is how zoomed in my view is: First image is zoomed out slightly, two groups of units are consistently being detected by the FLIR, and marked. The markers flicker around a bit, but they stay perfectly on the groups. Second image is zoomed all the way in. The groups are no longer being detected by the hot spot detection, instead it's just kinda randomly sprinkling the markers around every now and then. A lot of the time it's not detecting anything.

Not sure if related/the same thing, but at least one video (from RedKite, I think?) mentioned off-axis aimpoints being used IRL with targeting pods because often the target you might want to hit isn't high contrast enough for a solid, reliable lock, so you'd lock up something nearby that is higher contrast, and then offset from that to the actual target. Hence them not being that useful in DCS, since we kinda either don't have that problem, or can't use that as a workaround. Can anyone shed some light on whether this is true or not?

Really hoping that one day this will be true in DCS... I'm interested in learning to be a good dumb bomber, but requiring direct hits on armor is making it real tough to care. When showing off the ARBS/DMT system Hughes showed several near misses in their promotional footage, none of which would have achieved anything in DCS...

Reject USAF, embrace PAF. GB-6 SFW is de way. Oh, and the new LS-6 100s, too, since we're in the SDB thread. I kinda know what you mean, but also seeing how crap damage modeling on armor is on anything except a direct hit...

Thanks, marked as solved.

Yeah, that was my main thought as well, channels being weapon pylons would get seriously cramped in MP.