Fishbreath

Is there one I can look at to see which state the gun is in? I don't see anything move on the weapons control panel when I toggle it.

My missiles were hitting short last night, but I only got the Su-25 as part of FC3 at the end of September. Gun pods seem to hit below the sighting mark, too—I put the center dot of the reticle on a vehicle and pull the trigger, and the guns depress to keep firing at the same spot, but all the rounds land short of the vehicle. If I aim a little bit long, I hit with all of them. Rockets and the internal gun seem to be closer to correct. I guess it could be recoil for the gun pods, pushing the nose down a little as the internal cannon does before the pods start to depress?

Cluster bombs aren't a bad option (PTAB submunitions are anti-armor). You can also try S-25L rockets for a guided option.

Tandem rotor is the Chinook style, not the Ka-50 style.

Here's a mission and a track (the end of the track is me messing around with the Su-27; the interesting stuff is in the first few minutes). Russian Datalink Testing.miz no-radar-contacts.trk

Sure, I'll grab a track and upload the mission file tomorrow. Who knows—maybe the last patch will have fixed it for me.

This isn't related to this problem, but it actually shows threats not hidden in the mission editor and alive when the ABRIS boots. Kind of a pain, honestly, because there isn't a way to set up a threat circle without having a living unit backing it.

Weird—I couldn't get it to show anything with multiple tries. I don't see any RWR noise on your screenshot, either, and I feel like that's probably an oversight?

Here's the first post I wrote about it in the FC3 forum. I didn't get any answers there, though.

The Su-27 and the MiG-29s come in Ukrainian flavors, but AFAIK, the Su-33, Kuznetsov, and the Il-78M are only Russian. Which is kind of baffling—it would make more sense to me to have all of the flyables and all of the support aircraft for those flyables available on both sides. If we're going to accept a Russian A-10, I don't see why we can't have a Ukrainian naval Flanker and Kuznetsov.

It's working for me again after 1.2.6u1 with the public interface selected.

I've been looking forward to this one.

I haven't been able to make that work in the mission editor since I bought FC3 (on September 20th). The ground-based radars neither light up my RWR nor put contacts on the HDD.

Three Su-33 questions: 1. In refueling mode, the Su-33 HUD shows my speed in IAS and the target speed (i.e. tanker speed) in TAS. Is this intentional? 2. In a multiplayer mission, I have two client Su-33s set to takeoff from runway on Kuznetsov. They either spawn on top of each other (when I shut my engines down, and therefore left 'launch position'), or won't spawn at the same time (if I'm in 'launch position'). Is there any way to start two client aircraft on the carrier at the same time? 3. When landing and taking off again, is it necessary to press 'U' to get into launch position/raise the jet blast deflector?

More collective/pitch authority would make it easier to use the radar altimeter altitude hold as poor man's terrain following, at least.

It surprised me so much the first time I saw it I thought I'd been hit. :P

Multiplayer missions have aircraft slots—you select it and start on the ramp, on the runway, or in the air, however the mission designer set it up. Whenever someone gets shot down or leaves from a slot, the slot goes back to its original location. Multiplayer's definitely a riot, especially if you have a friend or two to fly your wing.

The sales on the ED website seem to be based on Moscow time: this one started at 4:00pm Eastern on September 19th (i.e. 00:01 Moscow).

I'm perhaps slightly leaning toward 'bug'. I have a shooting range mission I play around with, with targets to the west of Mozdok. The ground there is very flat, and the elevation is only 200m or so. Sometimes, after taking a laser range, panning the Shkval nearer to my helicopter will cause the range to increase at the same rate as panning it away. I can't really think of a sane range estimation algorithm which would do that.

In my effort to get to know the Su-33 fully, I tried a nighttime stormy landing. Highlights: Kuznetsov's ATC tells me to go to my alternate. Highlight not shown: me smacking into the back of the carrier on my first try. :P WQWQrS3spK0

I don't think that the fast movers have ripple interval/quantity modeled.

Without center trimmer mode on, you have about a second (?) to re-center your physical controls before they're unlocked. I prefer that in the Huey, but I use center trimmer mode for the Shark.

...the Su-33 is the first airplane I've ever successfully hit a tanker with, so I just have to share a picture.

I'll try one more time before I give up, just in case I still haven't made myself understood (and it's probably my fault :P). First, read this, which is a handy explanation of three components in typical autopilots. A proportional correction algorithm is, it seems to me, the primary mechanism in the Ka-50's autopilot: in hold mode, the amount of control input the autopilot uses is directly proportional to the amount of error from the reference attitude. The error from the reference attitude does not increase when you're holding a fixed attitude offset from the reference attitude, and so the maximum permitted autopilot inputs also do not increase. (It may ramp up to the maximum permitted autopilot inputs for a given error, but I haven't had much Ka-50 stick time in the last few weeks.) The autopilot only has 20% input, and the pilot has 100% input. It's probably a design feature, not a bug, that the pilot has enough input to override the hold autopilot, both so that the pilot can offset around a trimmed setting (for landing or slight turns for weapons employment) and for safety reasons as Flagrum suggested. The autopilot is still responding proportionally in route or hover mode, but the error is different. When you hold a fixed attitude away from the attitude the autopilot chooses, the error increases, because the reference position is a speed and heading. As you hold the nose down, the speed increases and the offset from the reference position increases. As such, the autopilot's proportional response grows larger. It appears that the autopilot is responding with an integral correction, because you're holding a constant control input and the autopilot control input is increasing, but this is only an illusion. The autopilot is responding to the error, which is the integral of the attitude error your control inputs are producing. Saying 'it's bugged' or 'it's wrong' is getting into saying how the autopilot should be, and that's not productive. I seriously doubt this is a DCS bug, and I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that my explanation for the autopilot is incorrect, whether or not you like it. :P The Ka-50 isn't fly-by-wire—the flight controls are attached directly to the rotor control servos, and the autopilot is also attached directly to the rotor control servos with authority to move them up to 20%. Actually, come to think of it, that's probably the answer to basically all of your concerns, and the reason why there's no auto-trim mode: the pilot's controls and the autopilot both go directly to the rotors without talking to each other, so the autopilot has no way of distinguishing pilot control inputs from other errors. You can do it with the Warthog software because you're (presumably?) using it to operate the trimmer, which serves to pause the autopilot so it isn't trying to correct pilot errors. Edit: for what it's worth, this has been a useful conversation for me, too. I had an instinctual mental model of the Ka-50's autopilot, but after this I have a formal model I can use to explain it to my Shark-flying friends.

No, but the definition of error does. In hold autopilot mode, the autopilot is holding a pitch, bank, and heading in relation to a horizon an infinite distance away. 'Error' is the difference between the current angles and the set angles. Since 3-5% control input only yields a very small error, the autopilot only makes a very small correction—less than the 3-5% you're inputting. In hover mode, the autopilot isn't holding angles as a primary consequence: it's holding a heading, a speed (zero), and a concrete position over the earth gleaned from the navigational systems. 'Error' means offsets from those things. If you're holding a five-degree bank against the hold autopilot, you're adding a fixed error. Your control input will only cause five degrees of bank. If you're holding a five-degree bank against the hover autopilot, you're adding a constantly-increasing error: every second you move a few meters further away from autopilot's set position. Because the error increases—not the angles, as in hold mode, but the distance from the hover position—the amount of control input the autopilot is programmed to use increases. As I touched on, that would have been a lot more expensive and a lot more complicated, and any flight control system that can fly a helicopter is already expensive and complicated. :P That said, it's definitely a great system when it can be done—the F-16's flight control system works a lot like that. When you stop making control inputs, it stabilizes there. It really takes a lot of the work out of flying. It makes me wonder whether the state of the art in helicopters has moved that direction—it would make the single-seat attack helicopter idea more viable. Edit: I want to further emphasize that I could be entirely wrong about everything I've said on the autopilot making proportional responses, and I wouldn't even be particularly surprised, given how complicated the Ka-50's flight control systems are (or perhaps 'must be'). The manner of operation I've described, however, does seem to me to be consistent with the way our Ka-50 works, so it's at least a useful approximation for someone. :P