Fishbreath

I saw a lot of people talking about trouble landing the F-15, so I thought I'd share what works for me.

Notice that the 'default' S-8 rocket (the S-8KOM) throws a HEAT warhead, which has a limited effect on softer targets. The S-8OFP2 seems much more effective against soft targets to me.

There are four principles I try to follow, in order of importance: 1) Put the most commonly used functions on the easiest buttons to hit. 2) Put related controls together. 3) Make control layouts for similar simulated aircraft similar. 4) Follow the control layout of the actual aircraft. For instance, I put the trimmer on the pinky button on my joystick, because it's easy to hit and very frequently used. My Shkval slew is on one of my joystick hats, and my other Shkval controls are on another hat on the throttle.

The link to the Steam guide in my signature has a list of functions I use most commonly, which is a good start for keybinding.

Put the runway threshold at three degrees down on the pitch ladder, put the FPM on the threshold, and keep the AoA indicator on the HUD at 10 degrees. Voila—an approach that won't break the Eagle's gear. Flare gently to finish it off. It's worked for me every time.

Using route mode autopilot to line up for the CCRP run. (My favorite way to do it, if I have the time.)

If you chop the collective to nil, you can nose up about 20 degrees at 250+ kph without gaining altitude. (Feed the collective back in as your speed drops.) That'll slow you down fast. It's important to remember the helicopter pilot's mantra: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Only nosing up 20 degrees feels like you're not slowing down all that fast, but you have a lot of energy to shed from 250kph to 0. There are also some tricks with using turns to buy you steeper deceleration, but I'm not qualified to describe those.

Well, about half the time I die and read the briefing more carefully. :P

These days, I exclusively fly the style you listed as #1. It took a lot of hours, but I'm plenty comfortable these days using it even in relatively tight spots. If I really need to fly precisely, I'll go flight director mode, but it's not often that I find it's called for. (I'll happily trim for a turn through a valley, or for a turn away from the target area after I've made a rocket pass, and let the autopilot fly it for me.)

The inner/outer hardpoint selector (U and I) is what you want to pick them. If the loadout is asymmetric, they're fired from left to right. Additionally, on the back wall panel, there's a knob for ballistics mode settings, and you have to change that by hand when changing unguided weapons types. The manual lists which setting corresponds to which weapon.

Are you going to release this delectable-sounding piece of mission goodness? :P

Descending below 3m (I think) with hover mode activated will turn off all autopilot channels, however.

There are times when it gets confused and it (probably) shouldn't—it's locked onto a target, the helo is moving, and suddenly the range changes by 10-20%. I usually just throw my hands up and say, "Eh, Russian hardware," though.

I'm traveling from this weekend until Monday the 17th, but outside of that, I'm usually game to fly Ka-50s if I have a few days of advance notice.

Man, if I was going to be around this Sunday, I would absolutely have volunteered.

Route mode on+DH/DT middle position is functionally equivalent to route mode on+no waypoint or other POI selected on PVI-800.

My Steam guide has a list of functions I have on my HOTAS: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=216920028 It also has some information on trimmer and autopilot use, which may or may not help you for trimmer use. It's distilled from all of the trimmer threads here—there's a ton of information in all those threads, but I figured it was high time someone gathered them into one spot. I'm going to be expanding it into avionics and weapons system employment before long. As for the cockpit arrangements not making a lot of sense, I hear you; the Ka-50 is a little cramped, and I guess they just packed in everything wherever they could.

There are tons of videos of the A-10C on Youtube, but relatively few of the Ka-50, so here's part of my effort to fix that. 55 minutes of Ka-50 time, representing one flight from cold start to shutdown on my respawnable shooting range mission. It includes commentary in the Youtube annotations. There's some flight planning at the beginning, 20 minutes of searching for targets and engaging them, and a good bit of avionics use throughout. Recorded and posted at 1920x1200.

No, I agree that it ought to be north-up when in ERBL mode, but going from ERBL back to NAV mode behaves oddly—it respects your setting for helo position (so it snaps back to 20% up from the bottom, by default), but it doesn't respect your setting for map orientation (so north stays up, and the map isn't all that useful if you're flying south). It's not that much of a hassle, but I'm not sure it's supposed to work that way.

Tweaking it to make the second Eagle flyable, I flew this with a friend of mine last night. Neither of us are especially practiced at flying as a team, or indeed at flying fighters, but we had a good time with it. The picture got confused pretty quickly, which is fun.

I have a CH Products setup—Fighterstick and Pro Pedals, and Frankenpotato CH Throttle, with extra rotaries and six up/down switches on the front.

The one video everyone always bandies about shows the Russian pilots clicking the trimmer several times per second while maneuvering. It's pretty much impossible to do that without a force feedback stick. The oversteering effect happens because the autopilot tries to correct pilot inputs back to the commanded attitude. The autopilot's inputs are proportional to the amount of deviation from the commanded attitude. If you're trimming fast enough, I imagine you wouldn't see the oversteer effect, or rather that it would be small enough so that you can work with it. Edit: I don't have any inside source which can tell me whether it's modeled completely correctly, but I do know that it's modeled consistently and fully explained by the fact that the Ka-50's pilot controls and autopilot don't share information beyond the autopilot disconnect/disable on the trimmer. I'm no ED cheerleader, but they have high standards when it comes to this sort of thing, and I wouldn't expect that the ultimate answer is outside of these two possibilities: 1) it's modeled correctly or 2) the Russian military wanted it modeled incorrectly in this way for public release.

The real benefit to FD mode is that you can explain to someone the very basics of helicopter physics, and when they get into the Ka-50, it'll behave in a way that makes sense based on that explanation. The autopilot makes flying the Ka-50 as a weapon system much easier, and the more time I spend with it, the more often I have all four channels on. FD mode is useful in a few places, like delivering rocket attacks when you don't have time to find the target with the Shkval and make a good run at it, but it takes attention off of using the avionics. I see that last point as the biggest argument in favor of autopilot almost all the time.

It does—it's just that real Ka-50 pilots (as you can see in that one Ka-50 HUD over Moscow video) use the trimmer lots, as in multiple times per second. There's no time for enough deviation to cause noticeable oversteering to build up if you're doing it that way. You're right, though. It is a problem, even if it's one which only arises because it's next to impossible to trim that rapidly without a FFB stick.

The bouncing behavior is an artifact of lack of force feedback. If you don't have a stick which stays where you leave it, you can't do the frequent trimmer tapping the real pilots do. (Or at least, not easily—having to recenter the stick every time is highly inconvenient.) The reason it's so hard to wrap your head around is because the trimmer button does two independent things when the autopilot is on/FD is disabled. It's both a standard trimmer and the button to command a new set attitude. The autopilot in the real helicopter has no information on controls position or controls deviation, so there's always going to be some conflict between the two. If you have a stick and pedals which don't need to be recentered, you can fly like the real pilots do. If you have a standard spring-loaded stick like most people, you can't—it's a limitation of the hardware. You can't tap the trimmer as often as you need to to fly like the real Ka-50 pilots if you have to recenter the stick every time you do.