JetCat

As an absolute movie-fan I would love to see a modder (or better, the core-team) creating horse-sized tarantulas as placeable units on the map. To create a scenario where spiders overrun Area51 to send in the attack helicopters. I see no problem implementing some fun with legendary Hollywood elements into a superb ultrarealistic flight simulator! (Because why not - as long as the flight sim itself and it´s cockpit and radar systems and cockpit computers and targeting systems and everything else stays ultra-realistic it does not matter if the targets are legendary blockbuster-movie-related vehicles / creatures / or iconic movie enemy fractions...)

I stumbled upon this video today and it is a very interesting simulation about the inner workings of the Apache:

These awesome and for true aviators and true airplane/helicopter enthusiasts very important and fascinating details are getting implemented more and more also in Flight Simulator 2020 and are for immersion, and bringing the jet or helicopter to maximum realism.

Best helicopter sim I ever had! As soon as some electronics sales money from various stuff I placed on the internet starts to roll in I buy the Hind too.

Good morning pilots The Apache looks absolute gorgeous and gets better with every patch (especially with the oncoming new exciting maintenance hatch feature). The cockpit, the animations, everything is absolute top notch and next level - except one part of the Apache... when looking up to the Longbow radar through the cockpit glass roof the middle radar parts are full of graphics glitches, triangular-shaped holes everywhere because of missing polygons and vertexes on that small device. I think this important part deserves the same great visual quality the rest of our beloved Apache has, and all these missing vertexes and polygon holes in it´s 3D-structure fixed: Thank you very much in advance for fixing this, and have a great wonderful weekend

Ah planned to be implemented into the next patch. Thank you very much for the answer, I am really looking forward to this awesome absolute great looking feature. The Apache surely will have a bright future as one of the most polished patched and well-maintained helicopter simulators that ever existed with extreme attention to detail.

Ahaaaa! Now I know hot this works... Here we have all screens switched off in the front cockpit. But after at least switching once into the gunner pit of George... Voilá everything is switched on now and I can see the front cockpit displays while flying from an elevated seat position. Very good! So this is how it works. Awesome. It is so immersive seeing the screens switched on in the front cockpit too.

Hi pilots, after having seen this I have now bought the Apache: ...just look at this awesome avionics and turbines! But unfortunately the magic open sesame code LCTRL + W that opens up the maintenance latches of the Black Shark does not function with the Apache. What is the secret key combination to open her up like in the video?

I have watched a bit of this Hind documentary one hour ago and this is called tail rotor loss of authority, and happens in certain cross wind situations. In some wind situations the helicopter tail wants to do whatever it wants and sometimes the helicopter even begins to spin. I haven´t had a good helicopter simulator before until finding DCS therefore I have never spend time learning and understanding helicopter flight dynamics but was flying the Fenix Airbus (and a few jets) only before, so learning all this new helicopter stuff is really exciting! Not only in certain wind conditions but also when the AOA of the main rotor is steep and therefore it´s air resistance and the torque going to the mainframe get´s too high, the tail rotors counteracting force also can become to weak to counteract the main rotor. This happens in a fully loaded Hind sometimes. Love how these physically accurate details are all modeled and simulated in their fully glory and complexity in this sim!

So DCS will run on Steam Proton? I had very limited success with Steam Proton, which means none of my games and sims worked with Steam Proton back in 2020 - but this was during a rather complicated time while no graphics card was in my computer but a Ryzen 5 2400G with a Vega 11 onboard graphics chip (called APU, I like that, APU, like auxiliary power unit in planes...) APUs are not really supported by Proton. Hm this is a strange bug. What happens when the colour depth output for the whole system is lowered from 10 bit to 8 bit, I can do that in my Radeon settings. How can an RGB value be higher than 255, this is the maximum limit of every colour channel. Maybe that´s a Targa file specific thing I rarely if ever use tga "As far as I can tell, this is due to the .TGA files of the MFD containing RGB values greater than 255." Try to convert it to Intel Texture Works .dds Colour mode RGB colour 8 bits per channel that limits every colour to 255, with no Alpha channel (but if the file comes with no Alpha channel it of course must be saved with Alpha Channel because the Alpha Channel is crucial for the night lighting and therefore must be left untouched), compression none 32bpp lossless to prevent any ugly JPEG-like compression artifacts and quality loss over time when modifying a file more often, and save it as .dds instead of .tga. Maybe this will work.

To be honest I don´t know. It says cockpit CPG and PLT (both cockpits are separated by a glass in the middle) and ECS EFAB aft and forward temp, no further description available when just looking at the temp screen: In this Apache manual it says "cockpit temperature target setting" which means it´s a cockpit temperature sensor, not an air conditioning outlet air temp sensor By the way this manual has more pages than my Falcon 4.0 book back in the early 2000! Flight simulation is getting better and better, soon it will become so realistic that pilots will refuse flying real planes and helis because they are not as good and realistic as the simulated one in VR.

It was such a great overview about different radar models, wave lenghts, mentioning that visible light the human eye can see is also just electromagnetic waves in a certain frequency spectrum, how the radar of the Tesla works that can see people at night and scan the street, and many other details. And especially how the Apache radar works and how it "sees" targets, because it´s still the only radar able to identify what it actually sees. In one YouTube video a few months ago someone explained that the F-15 can identify a bunch of planes based on how many turbine blades the N1 has, and some Suchhoi has 35 blades and some Mig has 31 or so and because of that the radar can identify a plane. That seems to be a very unrealiable method of identifying an object by counting turbine blades turning with 7000rpm only visible from a tiny very specific sensor angle. The Apache radar is way more smart than that - it actually scans the full geometry of objects, not only one specific detail. I wonder if this smart radar technology got improved over time with more powerful processors available, really scanning an ultra high definition 3D model of tanks and vehicles and guiding the rockets to it´s weak spots which is most often the rear end where the engine and the fuel tanks sits.

Hmmmm .... night operations with the Hind hmmmmmmm...... better not. The night illumination of the Hind is absolute gorgeous and it also has wingtip illumination which is the coolest light effect I have ever seen in a simulator! For some fun flying and enjoying the most awesome cockpit that was ever developed it´s great. But doing missions, well as soon as I see that small night vision goggle green ring with no other better night vision options available I abandon every night mission, in the F-14 too. Of all planes and helis ony the Apache is the unrivaled night hunter.

You mean the Hind is THAT AWESOME realistic that in events of failures real procedures described by maintenance engineers or museum manuals can be used - and it works? DCS is clearly the best and most realistic flight simulator I ever had!

To be honest I have never really googled what exactly this pod is, I thought there is just some random machine gun inside and that´s it... but 3 Gatling guns in every pod? What kind of awesome crazy weapon system is that? So there are 12 Gatlings firing when using all four pods, with 1400kg recoil per Gatling? That recoil explains why no portable Gatling was ever made, unlike the movie Predator wants us to believe.

FCR Zoom and C-Scope and...? Did someone spot the most important and fascinating detail?

Maybe this wish is not that exciting because it has nothing to do with ultra-high-tech stuff and offers no thrilling new systems and features, but it´s just for immersion. Please make the cockpit or gunner front cockpit temperature on the air conditioning page get the same temps as the outside temperature while someone has it´s cockpit side window open. Small detail but adds so much to the realism when starting in cold scenarios and seeing the cockpit temps go down again (or heat up, for example in Nevada) when that cockpit side window is opened.

I really appreciate every word of this extremely detailed description!

It is only days before the Black Square Duke releases. The Black Square Duke has the same priority as the other exciting new modules Apache, the Phantom, Hind and A-10. Flying was never before more great than now, with a wide variety of very different planes and helicopters from all eras. Unfortunately the Duke is in that other simulator, the one that takes at least 5 and up to 20 minutes of loading time to finally reach the main menu *gg so launching that other simulator is often needed too. The F-15E on the other hand seems to be dead now and forever. With the two engineers developing the radar having left the team, everything is lost now for this plane. Luckily the future-proof Apache with it´s awesome night flying infrared vision and night vision capabilities has replaced the F-15E in the meantime, and flying this secretive elusive night hunter is even more challenging and interesting than getting another jet with very similar systems like my other three. 11.) Thou shalt buy every brandnew DCS module and praise it´s photorealistic visuals and awesome system realism, especially after sunset.

Awesome, thank you very much for the detailed explanation, unfortunately I haven´t had time to learn the fire control radar too because the trial demo is over since weekend and I only learned to fly and to use laser-Mavericks (because there was the A-10 too that took some serious time to learn). That´s why I have only watched YouTube tutorial videos about the newly implemented radar, and that radar was a very interesting and unique on, the only radar of all planes and helicopters capable of showing me details about the target: If it´s a crawler-type vehicle, or a vehicle with wheels and other details. That´s why I wondered if that Longbow radar can do this also while at the same time showing me some terrain details, for example to see if such an uncovered vehicles is hiding behind house. As soon as this RMAP feature is implemented the Apache truly is the most exciting ultimative hunting machine of them all! And cats have a very strong natural hunting instinct they cannot resist...

In this video I have seen that the gunner cockpit displays are on. In my Apache the front cockpit was always fully cold and dark and completely switched off while flying (except the gunner cockpit radio panel, that was the only thing that was switched on) which was so immersion breaking! Before I buy the Apache I please need to know if there are options somewhere in the main menu or a mod to also have the gunner cockpit displays fully switched on while flying:

It may me not planned now, but after enough time has passed by the developers probably want some fresh new exciting missile missions - so maybe some day in the future the "flying Katana" will be implemented. The elusive flying Ginsu the anvil, the Ninja Missile fits perfectly into the oncoming Afghanistan map to do some special covert ops missions. (It´s a modified laser guided Hellfire-K, but more precise.)

Cool. I have never-ever in my whole life seen an Apache without these IR-diffusors. Must be this special custom exhaust, hand-crafted from your local Apache tuner http://aceclearwater.com/product/case-study-apache-primaries/#tab3

Unsatisfied with the visuals of your Hornet? Wanting an overall awesomification for your Hornet? Depressed and sad because your A-10 demo trial phase is over but being a bit short on money so the Hornet is currently everything you have for Mavericks? In this case it is probably time for a personal texture-set I made for myself last week, I call it "Hornethog" to honour the Warthog. It consists of a few parts from various mods I liked very much for example that awesome new canopy frame and sidepanels of cosmetic pack 3.0, the nice and clean knobs and switches from the Cleanpit mod, the seat came with some mod I have forgotten which one it was but it looks so awesome, and a lot of stuff I made with Photoshop from my Gun Metal Grey Cockpit. Glorious gun metal grey, the sidepanels came from a mod I think called "Cosmetic pack 3". It was a bit difficult to match the matte black colour gradient of the rear cockpit canopy frame and the front windshield fixed canopy frame, also these bolts had to be made a bit lighter in colour to match. The only problem I encountered in the new cockpit... But remember this is only a set of textures and therefore kinda limited and not an overhaul or remake of the cockpit. I would welcome and pay for a new Hornet V 2.0 upgrade to get the same absolute awesome photorealistic cockpit visuals and awesome animations (like wobbling flashlight cables etc.) all the brandnew modules like the Apache Hind and A-10 have, with a smile right on release day!! I hope the Hornet will get the same visual treatment as the A-10 got in her V2.0 upgrade.