Fishbreath

Be comfortable with sideslipping. Learning to shoot off-axis on the move might be handy—I did that in one of my more recent missions. A BTR-80 was shooting at an allied Hind, so I trimmed for offset flight, cued the Shkval with the HMS, and Vikhred him from six kilometers while pointing twenty degrees off-track.

The SPU-9 is the transmit-selector panel, so it makes sense that no-assists mode uses that PTT button instead of the easy 'open comms menu' key. As for its position in the cockpit, they may have misplaced it in the control binding menu, and it could be one of those things they decided not to make clickable in the cockpit (e.g. Shkval slew).

If it's working for you, cool. I shot at the house, and the Su-34 didn't drop a flare but did blow up the car for me. :P

Huh. I didn't get an illumination flare when the Su-34 was supposed to have dropped one.

n.b. the next mission needs a fix too—the illumination flare doesn't fire.

Manual entry doesn't have a way to enter elevation, as far as I know. Altitude can be inferred with laser ranging or flyover: helo position/altitude plus a slant range equals a point in three-space which doesn't depend on any separate elevation data. Edit: there must be some way of putting elevation in, or else, as you said, preplanned target points wouldn't be of much use, but it may be a ground-only operation. For manual entry, the target point and the Shkval point will show up on the ABRIS, so you can slew up/down to manually correct as required to get onto target. I'm not sure if this is real-life limitation, or if it's a shortcoming in the modeling, but you can work around it, at least. If it is a shortcoming in the modeling, I'd love to see a way to input elevation.

Turn the HUD mode switch from NORM to NIGHT and crank the brightness knob all the way down.

Funnily enough, I've taken damage severe enough to knock out the laser on one occasion and the HUD on another*, but I haven't had a Shkval failure in a long time. It's not nearly as bad as the A-10's gun. * I was still able to deliver rockets accurately enough.

An RWR is an information tool—less useful because helicopters aren't often targeted by radar SAMs (although modern systems certainly could), but more useful because it's a way to indicate when you may have been detected. Heaters I could go for, too, but I don't frequently run into cases where I'd need them, personally.

Yeah, the ABRIS-PVI linkage could use some work, and I'd welcome it if it was done. At the same time, my friend and I tried to stick to honest capability enhancements rather than quality-of-life stuff, as nice as it would be to tighten up the navigation system a little (it already, IMO, has a bit of an edge over the A-10).

That's the procedure, really. The HUD doesn't have any bombing modes, and although it will show the CCIP pipper, helicopers don't really fly in such a way as to make that useful (it's almost always going to be below the HUD, or you're going to be in the blast radius).

A friend and I had some conversations about this while I was teaching him the Ka-50—it's a solid helicopter, but in some ways, it shows its age, and if we had a few billion rubles to sink into it, there are definitely some things we would tweak. After discarding pie-in-the-sky stuff like a millimeter-wave radar and a full glass cockpit, we eventually narrowed it down to four features which wouldn't be too hard to fit to existing airframes. Our hypothetical Ka-50 малая модернизация has two absolute requirements: 1. A dual-mode IR/video targeting system to replace the Shkval sensor. 2. Vikhr support on all four hardpoints. And two upgrades we would want to do if we had the budget: 1. A radar warning receiver/missile launch warning system to replace the laser warning system. 2. A stores management system which allows for selection of individual pylons (maybe use the ABRIS screen to do it digitally, or just add a push button to the current weapons control panel to cycle pylons individually). After that, we'd be happy with our Ka-50MM (radar and glass cockpit being a feature for the BM); it would have significantly fewer limitations than our current Ka-50, being all-weather and capable of operating with greater safety in high-threat environments. What would you do? Edit: I wonder if this is something that would eventually be moddable—nothing in the MM package would really involve designing new systems, just borrowing from elsewhere (e.g. the current FLIR-like LLTV pod from the Su-25T, or re-defining the inner hardpoints as able to load Vikhrs). How much can be done with tweaking the LUA in the Ka-50 directory?

Is it just the autopilot that has roll/pitch limits, or will the Shkval lose tracking, too, if it's above 30 degrees of pitch/60 degrees of bank?

If you're flying both Su-25s and the Ka-50, you can't be that bad a guy. :P

If he's not, I would take it. :P

I wish it were that simple! I'm no Ka-50 expert, but I have plenty of hours in it, and the few hours I've put into the Huey so far have not made me look very good. :P It's the whole anti-torque/collective thing I still haven't quite gotten used to.

Flying the convoy escort mission in the Ka-50 Deployment campaign for the first time, I ended up almost directly over the ambush, and lost my HUD entirely. Even without any aiming cues, I was able to put some rockets on target by firing one pair, then correcting.

I'm not sure I follow—do you mean that wingman, target type, send is for sending a target that hasn't been saved ahead of time? If so, that's handy enough that I should probably put it on the sheet too.

Really? Huh. I could've sworn I didn't get the launch authorization last time I tried it without the switch. I'll have to test it one of these days. I tested the second way (as listed on the sheet) a few nights ago, which worked correctly. It may work the other way too? Something else to check out next time I play.

I did up a little set of checklists and such for a Steam guide, so I figured I'd reproduce it here. This is handwritten on the reverse of my HOTAS cheat sheet, so it features into a lot of my Ka-50 play time. I hope some other people find it useful. ka-50-guide.pdf

This is an adage that holds for basically any precision pursuit from, say, fencing to simulated flying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Speaking as a recent learner myself, I have to say that the gun is a delightful place to start. Lining up on a target and letting loose with a hundred-round burst while PAC keeps you in line is a great feeling. Guided bombs (JDAMs especially) aren't too hard either, and they teach you a good deal about data management, Sensor of Interest vs. Sensor Point of Interest, and HOTAS controls relating to those.

FWIW, I prefer the Ka-50-style rudder trim, as it makes all of my primary controls behave the same with respect to the trimmer.

I know, right? I fired it up last night while my friend was breaking the sound barrier in a Su-25 vertical dive, and had a great time just zipping around the airfield. Forgot how much I like it.