Reticuli

The vortex in VRS are not the micro-vortexes of each individual blade (picturing science shows and micro vortexes of beating wings and dolphin tails amplifying lift), but rather the larger vortex complex that is created like a doughnut rotating airflow outward and then directly back into the center. So it self-sustains itself in a feedback and increasingly the more energy you put into it, the more it just grows, eating up area of the rotor disc, rather than that air pushing against the surrounding air medium...so you suddenly start losing lift. And increasing collective makes it worse. You have to lower collective and build up some kind of lateral (non-vertical) speed to interrupt it and start producing good lift again. It reminds me in old Sunday school of that idiotic admonition against becoming a "law unto yourself". Sinner air, sinner air!

I'd recommend when people are going into a hover to sometimes turn altitude hold off until they can help stabilize the hover, especially over uneven terrain. Otherwise the two will be fighting over who gets all that conservative cross-axis 20% authority. That hesitation or rubberbanding is the 20% authority of the FCS attempting to assert the Attitude Hold function (or wings leveling, in civilian aircraft...though "level" is relative to where it's been set). It does not magically switch off, as some have suggested, when you apply input. My newest GlovePIE solution for Blackshark is evidence of this. The different settings in the script between the Standard Dynamic Trim and Flight Director Dynamic Trim are incontrovertible evidence of this. You can't argue with the numbers. You can certainly fly with Attitude Hold/Wings-Leveling on, with manual trim, automatic Trim Update, or neither. It's especially useful when landing. And while my Standard Dynamic Trim mode is the best method when often going in and out of hover or altitude hold, using the Flight Director (preferably with my Flight Director Dynamic Trim mode) will by far give you the most behaved and least conflicted flying experience short of using forcefeedback; the reason being you can keep all the hold channels on, but Attitude Hold is off. Instead, you get only rate-dampening...including on Head Hold. Each will attempt to get you down to zero movement in that axis when there is no input, within the 20% authority limit per axis. The reason without the GlovePIE script running that you have to "hold" bank or pitch even in FD is because, 1) most helicopters have some pitch up to level in forward flight above a certain very steep down angle, 2) the Ka-50 here has an instability in pitch at ground trim causing a very strong pitch up past level, and 3) the Ka-50 here also as a slight rolling tendency to the right. That last one, the rolling to the right with Attitude Hold off (what you get in FD mode) is enough to keep you from needing to apply bank continuously to the right in a turn. If you manually trim a left bank that otherwise won’t hole in FD mode, though, you've trimmed out the right bank ability. So even in FD with the three channels on OR with all the channels turned off, you still have to trim in the bank, as well as the pitch. And of course this causes issues with accidentally trimming the yaw. The optimum way is NOT to turn off the three channels, but rather running that script. Keep them all on. When NOT in Flight Director, you can choose between Manual Trim or Standard Dynamic Trim with liberal use of resetting the heading diamond (off/on Head Hold or trim) or Auto Turn to Target...especially when hovering. If you don't need any of the automated autopilot modes except the simple channel dampening, then switch your helo to Flight Director and double-click the pinkie (or whatever button you change in the script) to Flight Director Dynamic Trim. Now you get just a touch of auto-trimming in the bank, and slightly less auto-trimming in the pitch from the Standard mode. It's not totally Care-Free Maneuvering, so to speak, but it is truly a joy to fly. Strafing, climbing, and yawing around to head back down as you approach zero-speed at the top has never been so natural. Not to mention Nap of the Earth and recovering from near-crashes are a snap, too. Butterfly-inducing stuff, without the Gs.

Who's that directed to?

I have the first trigger for main weapons, the second for the gun. The Pickle is for switching to and from the gun. You can only use one of those at a time and each needs its own button, and of course that's as close to what Kamov did as I could get.

I agree, ObvilionLost. There are ways around it without needing ED to change anything, though. There is a new version of my dynamic trim/trim update GlovePIE script up on the AVsim link below. There are three different modes. One for manual trimming. One for normal use. And one for when in flight director. The script is pretty long, now, so I won't post it here. A slightly revised verson (by two spoken words only) will be up by morning inside a V11 super package with everything you need inside it...hopefully. Everything else on that page should be removed.

Vortex is not complaining about the helo almost tipping over on the ground, I think. Hell, we all love that! Rather that he turned the wind up so high that's what was happening. Right? I think he's just illustrating the point of how high the wind was during one of the tests. And yet VRS still occured in the air...and not just because he was flying downwind at wind speed, either.

In normal use, Pitch and Bank Hold are actually Attitude Hold. They are not just dampening or artificially stabilizing. The only time you get just pitch, bank, and yaw dampening is when in Flight Director when those three buttons are on. In my opinion, there should be separate Pitch, Bank, and Yaw dampening switches, apart from these Hold buttons that should really only be to engage the AH functions. Yaw trim really should also be separate. Unfortunately, in both cases I guess Kamov didn't do that. I'm not sure you mentioned this, but it's also important to point out that the selected Heading Hold setting is always running (limited to 20% authority, of course) when Head Hold is On, Route is Off, and you are not in Flight Director. The only time you can actually see its setting in the heading tape in the HUD (the diamond) and the physical HSI ball (both markers), though, is when the DH/DT is in the middle position. It is reset by either turning Head Hold off/on again or retrimming, though your retrimming obviously will trim the yaw adversely, as well, unless you're careful.

That's an interesting theory that it's accidentally tied to ground speed instead of airspeed right now. I also find the VRS happening with too much non-vertical motion present and that's not even including any wind...not to mention what I said previously about there seeming to be too much cyclic authority when it does hit. The latter is really hard to "know" for sure, afterall it's a relative thing as to how sufficiently unresponsive a control is becoming using a joystick. The speed thing seems pretty obvious, though. Often when I'm rapidly decelerating by pulling up and dropping collective VRS will hit, even though I haven't even come anywhere close to a stop. So I pretty much just forgo the attempt to keep my altitude level and just accept an increase just to be safe. So much for rapid landings, right?

Or a little escape and evasion tactics for the ejected pilot. Handheld radio. Sidearm. Little first person shooting action. You survive to get picked up and you get to keep your Pilot Log.

Ah...my mistake. I kept reading over that going "whah? of course". Flu haze. Yeah, you're just talking about the wings-leveling/attitude-hold. Even with the FD or holding trim, though, you're still dealing with needing to manually trim, at the very least to remove the helo's own tendency to pitch up and bank right. 20% authority is not much of a "fight" the AP is putting up. I agree. It just requires slightly more input to get the same response, is all.

Well Route's on. Yeah, of course. When both Route and FD are off, you're in a head hold/pitch/wings-leveling state (the orientation set by trim). Head Hold is following the middle postion of the DH/DT switch's heading tape diamond, whether you've selected it or not. When Route's on but FD is off, AP is following the nav system's course...assuming the DH/DT switch is on the right setting. When FD is on, regardless of anything else, you're in a purely axis rate dampening state, but with the weak 20% authority on each channel (that can't cross-assist) unable to stabilize the helicopter's inherent tendency to pitch up and bank right. A little raw trim will fix this, but... I've got a better solution I came up with last night for FD mode that does very slight auto-trimming of bank and a good amount of auto-loading of the pitch so you don't have to trim for speed or hold forward. Just trying to tweak it some more. I haven't been using FD long. It's interesting how with hover & nav modes off, the FD symbology is a harmless little arbitrary pitch/bank marker that can be reset even with the trim reset/clear button. For those doing manual trim, that might be a useful thing if control panel isn't up. I've just been putting it at the level horizon & zero pitch. Oh, and turning the 3 channel hold buttons off of course is completely undampened and no AP orientation hold or route following. We all pick up on that pretty quickly. Gives your wrist a work out.

HAH! I did a load of testing and tweaking with GlovePIE. Finally was able to show that in Flight Director Head Hold goes from following the bug, to instead just yaw dampening. Very hard to see, but it's there if you tweak out the shark's instability first. If you turn Head Hold off completely in Flight Director mode, you lose yaw dampening, too. Flight Director does indeed turn off the reorienting/wings-leveling feature of the autopilot. The problem is you also need to trim it slightly to get rid of the pre-existing instability that the 20% authority available to each dampening channel (that can't help each other out) will still push past. Got a solution with GlovePIE, but not sure if I want to include a manual mode, too. Thank goodness it wasn't some forcefeedback issue that was preventing me from seeing the benefit of flight director.

Now I understand.

Now I'm getting you. The problem I was having was the constant right bank, which I was confusing for AP wings-leveling. I found a way to get rid of that, but also see what it's like with just damping. Geez, what a pain it's been to actually see evidence of it. All that native instability getting in the way taking on the guise of the AP reorienting. Flight Director is indeed wings leveling-free, but with a weak non-coordinating damping running independently on each axis...i.e. pitch won't help heading, heading won't help pitch, bank won't help...well, you get it. That constant pitch up and bank right is still there, but with a little tweaking the Shark's own instability out with GlovePIE the pure dampening effect is finally seen. And yaw damping IS on! Wow. It's just so weak that it was impossible to see without canceling out the instability first. With Heading Hold on AND Flight Director BUT NOT Route Flying AND GlovePIE to slightly autotrim, you finally can see the yaw damp feature working. Turn Head Hold off, and it goes away. Turn Flight Director off BUT Head Hold on, and you end up with 20% authority slowly chasing the Head Hold diamond, visible or not. Good lord, a complicated bunch of settings to choose the combination of. Now the question is, do I ever want manual trimming or not...heh heh.

That's only if you don't want the collective increase to assist the turn in a conventional western helicopter. Otherwise, it's helping coordinate it. The biggest weirdness in all this for most people I think is usually the thing you mention about not pulling back on the cyclic, unless you just want a very small, decelerating turn...or that pushing the cyclic allows you to increase speed in a turn, though it widens it. Very counterintuitive. Some weird, wild stuff.

I don't get why you've got FD on if you're flying just for fun. Why don't you just keep route following autopilot AND flight director both Off? What's fun about having all this HUD cueing telling you exactly what to do with the aircraft? I still get the sense my sim is not doing something your sims are doing, like it's a forcefeedback thing that's causing some significant difference in experience. You guys are just hitting FD to turn off the autopilot flying your route without having to touch the route switch and also give you manual route-flying information in the HUD, right?

What are the precurser signs in DCS? It's not like you have your inner ear or your body's ability to feel a change in vibration to help you. I can't even hear much of a change in rotor rpm when I get a low rpm stall going, though maybe I need to turn the sound up.

Worked fine. Thanks!

O.k. so that's a quirk of coaxials. Try and laterally get out of it too quickly without lowering collective and you bump the rotors and crash. O.k., though I don't think I've noticed bumping coming out of VRS, yet. My FAA and other manuals say you also get difficiencies of cyclic authority until you lower collective in VRS. At least that's how non-coaxials are said to behave. And normally any non-vertical motion will assist in getting you out of it, though obviously if you have limited cyclic authority you have to lower the collective anyway to regain it and if that presents other problems (like bumping) you might not want to do initial lateral motion even if you could. I'm just saying, according to the manuals I have, there seems to be too much cyclic authority. Right now, I get out of it just by nosing down, given a high starting altitude, without even needing to lower collective, while everything I've read says that ought not to be sufficient since you wouldn't be able to nose down in the first place. Lowering collective definitely helps right now in the sim, but doesn't seem absolutely necessary...assuming one is careful enough to avoid bumping. Do the dual main rotors give you more cyclic control to move the helo when in VRS even when you don't lower collective? And I seem to be able to get into them even when I'm not in a hover and already have significant, if not high, speed. Maybe I should try increasing the collective when VRS hits and see if I lose cyclic. Maybe the fact I already know not to do that is preventing me from experiencing what is in so many manuals and might already be in Blackshark...

If Head Hold is on, it's doing it all the time...that's my point. It's also the reason people are constantly trying to trim out some damn yaw component they constantly can't get rid off, even though Head Hold is on. This is because it's always running in the background when the autopilot-proper, Route Flying, is off. Head Hold is Kamov's solution to not having true yaw damping. That's all the yaw channel does here, in fact, on this model of the Ka-50 (and I assume the real deal): hold a heading. It does not dampen rate, Heading Hold simply attempts to realign to the heading hold diamond, but has available to it only 20% authority at any moment. Route Following so much more quickly changes heading, of course, because it also has the pitch and bank channels available to it, by the way. If you switch the DH/DT switch to Desired Track, it will change the heading tape diamond, but it's still only using the original Heading Hold setting that is now invisible if Route Flying is Off. If you put it on the up position, you get in the HUD either the manual HSI heading bug or (and this is a guess) what seems to be the waypoint directly, and not the strict course track. I need to check on that, though. The only time the AP will follow anything OTHER than the middle position's diamond's setting, as far as I can tell, is when Route Following switch (the autopilot-proper) is set to On...located on the collective. The Head Hold diamond itself (whether you see it or not) is constantly reset whenever you hit trim or whenever you turn On (or off/on) Head Hold. Problem is, most people don't have things set up so they know what the current Head Hold setting is, so they can't see it's not what they want. Instead, they're just blindly trimming the yaw all the time even though they've got Head Hold On already. Since they usually are tapping trim when they are applying yaw, the pedals get trimmed AND a new Head Hold spot has just been selected. Then they start a cycle of successive (and seemingly unending) trimming again to stop the bad yaw. There are three solutions: 1) turn off Head Hold (momentarily or for an extended period), 2) apply counter pedals/twist to center the yaw trim in the control display and tap trim again to make a new heading hold spot after doing a major trim change, or 3) find a way to remove the primary trim function from acting on the yaw. I originally used the second, but since creating my GlovePIE script, I use the first and third, now. Or more precisely, I always have yaw trim totally separate, but from time to time I also turn off Head Hold when I don't need it...my manual yaw trim still available, by the way. Regardless, there's no reason to have main trim acting on the yaw all the time (I disagree with that decision by Kamov) and manual trim is ALWAYS nice to have for minor adjustments. Even the Head Hold function is often short or over by a degree, and in a long weapons shot that may be enough to prevent a launch authorization. And I think we all know how imperfect the hover hold + auto turn to target modes are in concert. Sometimes you're drifting over different terrain and the altitude hold feature is giving you grief as it and hover hold battle to keep you steady with only a 20 degree authority, which shutting it off or resetting altitude hold can certainly help. But often some very slight & continuous yaw tweak is necessary in these situations. And your wrist/feet will thank you. As for the rest of you, I often feel like you're flying a different sim. All this talk about how great it is to fly in Flight Director mode and how peachy it performs has got me confused again. Are all of you using force feedback sticks? Does trim and FD mode work THAT differently with an FFB stick? Does the tension dynamically shift as you work a FFB stick in FD mode without even hitting trim, or something? Otherwise, it almost sounds like you guys are flying with the course/track Route Following mode of the autopilot On and are trimming against it most of the time, suddenly thrilled that Flight Director has magically freed you of some monkey off your back. That monkey is the autopilot-proper. Just turn off Route Following on the collective. Right? I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone, here, though if FD suddenly turned out to give you dynamic trim updating-like results without needing GlovePIE, then hell, sign me up! Is there some tutorial you guys originally followed that had you turning Route Following On and you just never learned how to shut it off, or is there something about FFB and FD in combination I haven’t been exposed to?

Damn, you are handy!

Right, you hold CWS on the yoke so you can take control momentarily without the system fighting you. When you release it, the AP takes over again. I see from some of the other posts, though, that there are airliners using Flight Director pretty much like the Kamov...allowing the cueing symbology to be used with the AP-proper turned off. I can definitely see where that would come in handy with civilian air transportation. You want the flight to be as error free, smooth, and predictable as possible. Just for curiosity's sake, do these airliners name the primary, automated nav computer "Flight Director", like a lot of light aircraft do? Is that what it's called on the Nav source switch, or is FD the mode you go into to send the selected nav source to the AP? Is there an FD button that disengages the autopilot course flying, or do you instead have to directly (no pun intended) turn off the autopilot but keep in FD mode?

AAAHHHH...o.k. That's what I've been wondering. Why are people using FD all the time in DCS:BS. O.k. So most of you are using it just to turn the autopilot-proper (course flying, not the FCS) off with a single button, so you don't have to worry about that 3-way switch on the collective? That makes sense, but it's a lot of clutter in the HUD for my taste. I don't need anything telling me how to maneuver the aircraft to get the diamond on the heading tape into the right spot...assuming the heading switch isn't in the middle.

Once you hit combat you flip on the flight director switch? From what, having the aircraft fly itself? What's the point of flying a "flight sim" if you're not actually flying the aircraft? I can understand if you're doing some things in the cockpit and turning the autopilot-proper (i.e. the aircraft completely flying itself to a destination) on for safety, but otherwise it seems to defeat the whole point. And why would you want all that FD symbology in the HUD when you're in combat? The function of the FCS does not change when FD is on compared to any other state when autopilot-proper is off. Are you just always keeping the autopilot-proper on in course-track or heading-destination modes and your means of turning it off to take control is simply the FD button? I'm confused. I still don't see why holding trim makes any difference at all (not talking about my script, by the way). Maybe it changes the tension when using forcefeedback so you can more easily move it? My x52 is not capable of FFB, so I have no idea what the benefits of holding trim might be. With a normal stick it makes zero difference, that I can tell, as it does not create a new virtual stick center until you release the button and the delay passes. What kind of different results are you getting by holding rather than just tapping? Do you use forcefeedback? *** I should also add with the glovePIE stuff, when you do the Windows callibrations the stick needs to be centered completely when you hit a button to record the center. So with the current script, make sure you've held the assigned clear trim/trim preset button (6/pinkie for me) when doing that. Otherwise your centers are all screwed up. I should really include a script that is just for calibration purposes that you can switch from after you've done it, one with every axis and no dynamic trim updating of anything. Sorry. Also, from time to time the virtual analog PPJoy controller might not be recognized by your system even after it's been set up when you first boot up. Simpling going into PPJoy, selecting that virtual controller, hitting Mapping, and then Next repeatedly until you can Finish will reinitialize the whole thing. Very easy fix. Since installing Blackshark, my eMagin native headtracker doesn't work even with just PPJoy, Flaming Cliffs won't start, and PPJoy is often not initializing on its own. Probably a Starforce thing. So this will solve one of the three, if you experience it.

Iraq was a generation behind Russia and woefully under-equipped with what they had. Since the Apache's beginning there have been provisions for putting stingers on (just two little boxes/modules and the missiles) and if they actually were operating in a battlespace where enemy helos had Vikhrs (cudely capable of AA hits) and the US did not have air superiority, I don't think anyone on this forum, actual Army aviator or not, can say they wouldn't be equiped with them. If you want to get really geeky and technical about all this stuff, there's just about zero chance Russian aviation would still be in the air even after a day with the enormous edge the US has in targeting sensors, automation, and early warning systems. But if you want to get as strict as you're all trying to be, then a big chunk of Flaming Cliffs never should have been allowed. You see, you're always making some kind of choices with this stuff.