Fishbreath

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.

I've noticed this a few times: when you select the ERBL submode off of the map, the ABRIS changes its display so that north is up (rather than the default, which is aircraft heading). When you leave ERBL mode, the map remains oriented so that north is up until you cycle ABRIS modes back around to map, at which point it goes back to aircraft heading. Is this intended?

That's not a bad idea—JTAC would be cool to have, for sure. It would be a little tedious switching the radio items to blue, but I might be able to do that with search and replace in the raw mission file. (I'll have to do that anyway, if I'm switching USA's coalition.)

v2.1: tanker spawns available.

I'll be uploading another release tonight that adds flyable A-10As, and has a spawn option for friendly tankers under the BVR range menu. I see that there's a new version of MIST due to be released soon, too, which should fix the weirdness with the dynamic spawning functions. (As I recall, they work poorly if you use them, and then new people join the mission.) Once that's out, I'll put up a copy that uses it.

Re: fighters, we'll probably leave them in next time. The beginners have been learning navigation and positioning, and when we can tell them to fall back to the friendly air defenses, it'll be easier. (Alternately, I might bite the bullet and try Combined Arms.) We definitely intend to give it another go once we're more up to speed as a group. It's a solid early-intermediate mission—enough going on so that it's exciting, and well-defined air defenses so that it isn't frustrating.

(Bump) Second version released.

Where is waypoint 1 in relation to the target? Have you considered moving WP1 well before the target, so that it hits the waypoint, then has time to line up on target before dropping?

Yes, it still applies, but I've only burned out the laser twice. Once, I fired a full load of Vikhrs, then returned to a nearby FARP and fired about half of another load ten minutes later. The other time, I accidentally bound the laser to my push-to-talk key. It's not something you have to worry about generally.

DCS: Flaming Cliffs <number or airplane name> is simplified modeling. DCS: <airplane name> is full cockpit systems modeling. That's the pattern so far, anyway.

1. FC3 is Flaming Cliffs 3, a many-times-updated version of Lock On: Modern Air Combat. It used to require an installation of LOMAC, because of license agreements with Ubisoft, the original publisher, but now ED can sell it themselves. 2. Yes--FC3 is just another DCS World module. 3. No--they're about as complex as the free Su-25T. 4. FC3 buys you the A-10A, which is a natural complement to the C model, the basic Su-25, and variants of three fighters (the F-15, the Su-27/33, and the MiG-29A/G/S). They're all a complete blast, and I really like them for the same reason you might--as a complement to the heavier-weight planes.

There are 'squelch' switches on both radio panels (see pages 6-73 and 6-99 in the manual). Sounds like one of those is getting flipped to the wrong position?

You won't use any internal fuel until the external tanks are empty. The main gauge doesn't show them, IIRC.

Bump: Cool to see there's a new version out. Three of my friends will be running this, so we'll have a full flight of Su-25Ts up. I want to record the whole thing, and I'll hopefully get a TacView track too. Edit: I didn't get TacView set up right, and I didn't verify, but I think I forgot to record comms, so neither the track nor the video will work. The mission went well, although the one nugget didn't do so hot (the Kub got him twice). The other killed some stuff, then had a landing accident about halfway through. I and my other friend got the mission nearly to the end (our tanks were in Mirnyy) before the mission crashed. One of the newbies streamed it, along with some of the guided weapons practice we did first.

Route mode with a Shkval lock. It's not perfect, but with a long run in on target, it's usually pretty accurate.