Mirabilis

Has DCS account database been hacked? Hi, It look as if there have been a lot of password attacks on the DCS website. While so far no one posting on the forums has lost their account to these attacks, it does suggest the DCS account database has been hacked. You can't try to change an account's password if you don't have the details for that account to begin with. They must at least know your username, and for that they would need access to the entire user database as it seems everyone has been hacked, not just a handful. By law, if DCS has been hacked they absolutely must declare it immediately. As such, I'm expecting to see an announcement any minute now.

Now that DCS is on Steam, I'm guessing its only a matter of time before people start creating stuff for it in the Steam workshop. It would be a great way to port over the mods that have been made for it already so they can be accessed easily from the Steam Workshop without having to go via the DCS website. It would also potentially do away with the need for mod managing software. No doubt Steam will open up the DCS community and with it bring it a proliferation of new maps, mods etc. Have the developers started looking into this possibility? Also, if Steam Workshop does integrate with DCS World, what about the people like myself who bought DCS before it found its way onto Steam? Without accessing it on Steam we'd have no way of using the Steam Workshop mods (if they materialise.) With Steam being able to introduce mods via its Workshop system it would make sense to consolidate all versions of DCS onto Steam. At least, I think so. Any thoughts on this?

Coaxial helicopters do exist - in massive numbers (they're just tiny) Coaxial helicopters do exist in massive quantities - but they're just tiny little things. What am I talking about? Well, I fly RC helicopters ... and in the world of RC helis you can't get away from coaxial stuff right now. If you have an interest in flight and in particular helicopters you absolutely should go out and bag yourself a cheap coaxial helicopter and start getting away from 'virtual' and into real flight. This is a big topic and a fascinating one as far as I'm concerned. RC manufacturers are not bothered with the politics of Kamov vs. Mil vs. Sikorsky - they just want to build something that can be mass-produced cheaply and people can fly well. As such a large number of them have settled on coaxial machines as entry-level helicopters for RC control. You see, the conventional approach to helicopter design (tail rotor, main rotor) is a pretty Heath Robinson way to solve the problem of torque induced by the main rotor. The tail rotor doesn't just counter the torque, it adds a vector in the direction the tail rotor is pulling or pushing. This tends to push the helicopter to one side, which in turn must be countered by tilt against the tail rotor by the pilot - hence conventional machines tend to move forward and hover with a sideways tilt. It's a poor solution but one that has gained acceptance. The coaxial design is smarter - torque vs. torque, no sideways vectors. If nothing else, it's a mathematically elegant solution to a real-world problem. If you counter torque with torque you should produce the perfect flying rotorcraft, or so the theory goes. But in the real world things are never this simple. For one thing its massively more complex than the already complex CCPM design. You need more spare parts, and more complexity means more things to go wrong and more elements be maintained. There's also the problem of vibration - something that never gets mentioned in military aviation sites because most people on aviation sites don't really understand the engineering of a helicopter, only its applications. From an engineering perspective vibration plagues all rotor-based designs. Vibration in a helicopter is a massive issue even when its well-tuned, and two counter-rotating main disks are going to cause nightmares for designers. The vibration of a main rotor turning at low to mid RPMs can rip a machine apart if they're unbalanced. Fortunately RC machines don't suffer from political machinations but real-world helicopters do. Kamov make excellent coaxial machines - arguably they've cornered the market. But they spent much of their time considered politically second-best to Mil, so the Russians didn't bother with Kamov aircraft. It offered little advantage to work with Kamov as they were less well connected politically. There are no Western manufacturers working with coaxial designs so its withered on the vine as a concept. Does this mean that coaxial designs are the way ahead? Probably not. Coaxial designed machines are very stable, but stability is not always desirable. RC manufacturers market coaxial designs as 'beginner' or 'entry level' machines because there stability makes them slow and lacking in agility. They potter around nicely and are wonderfully stable to hang a remote camera from, but you can't stunt them and their lack of performance compared to the tail rotor design makes them feel a little tame. Tail rotor machines can have fly-by-wire added to them to make them more stable and yet retain their inherent agility. By contrast, you can't make a stable coaxial design more agile easily. Tail rotor designs are more promising in terms of development in the same way that an unstable fighter is more promising when you add a fly-by-wire element to it. But don't take my word for it. You can pick up a 'toy' coaxial machine for next to nothing these days. Get yourself one and see for yourself the advantages and disadvantages of coaxial vs. tail rotor design.

Thanks for the response. Yes, I had read the whole thread, and understand the bug is acknowledged. I'm just trying to help find the source of the bug. I was simply wondering if, when programming the code, the team knew that an issue existed with MS FF2 joysticks. It's the kind of thing you might not know if you don't own an example of this particular stick. Sometimes programmers need that kind of feedback to narrow in on a particular issue. In this case it seems unlikely because there was no problem with BS1, but you never know. The information about putting a piece of tape on the hole was useful. I'll give that a try. The other information was good, too. I'll give that all a go. If the MS FF2 is the best Force Feedback stick for this simulation then thats pretty disappointing. The whole configuration of the stick to my mind is awkward. While I could perhaps hone my technique a little better, the overly springy yaw motion lacks precision for me. But if you like it, fine.

Forcefeedback - MS FF2 stick issue? Hi, This may not be relevant given that the force feedback issue does not occur in Black Shark 1, but it might help explain problems people are having with the Microsoft Force Feedback 2 stick. The Microsoft Force Feeback 2 stick I'm using has exactly the same problem as mentioned by others. It's alleviated a little, but not fixed, by turning off force feedback in the options. Also, there is an option to tweak force feedback settings in the control options and it might help to turn down force feedback trim a little there. Here is where I think part of the problem may lie: the stick is designed not to apply any forces until it is held. If you let go of the stick (for example to push some buttons with your mouse) the stick ceases to centre itself and can roll out of its original position. Bizarrely, this is considered a 'feature' of the stick. So for example, if I hold the stick in position while hovering then apply the auto hover mode it should hold the hover. However, if I let go of the stick to start looking for targets with the keyboard the stick ceases to hold position as soon as I let go of it and physically starts to move out of position. It only returns to its central position if I hold it again. As it goes out of position it will still apply a force, so if it tips forward it will push the helo forward etc. As the autopilot only has 20% authority a lolling stick is a real problem. This does not explain the radical uncommanded input seen in the game when hitting trim in forward flight. But it might explain some problems people are experiencing with force feedback using the Microsoft FF2 stick. It might be worth investigating. To be honest, the best stick to use for this particular game is a dedicated non-force feedback aircraft stick. I don't have one of those so I'm stuck with the Microsoft jobby. Its making auto hover a nightmare. It might even be affecting the trim. If anyone else uses this stick have they had the same sort of trouble in autohover? Could this be what's affecting the trim? By the way, when pressing CTRL+enter I notice my stick is not perfectly centred. Its central position is slightly low on the Y axis. I have calibrated it in Windows 7. Is there a way to calibrate it in the game itself?